THE RODDICK INTERVIEW

Wong Kar-wai

It took till Day Ten but I think I've finally nailed it. Thanks to Wong Kar-wai. Wong is Hong Kong's coolest cult director and has more or less reinvented the soon-to-be-former-colony's cinema since the turn of the decade. A kind of Godard for the MTV generation, he has pulled off the seemingly impossible trick of turning a frenzied, colour-drenched all-through-the-night shooting style into something that has real meaning and content.

What makes this particularly impressive is that it is in such marked contrast to his western MTV-generation contemporaries, for whom camera style has become the visual equivalent of all the cream and gooey crap you get on frozen supermarket gateaux: it hides the ordinariness of what is underneath.

For Wong, there is no 'underneath'. The movement - of the people, by the camera - is what the film is about. "I like to keep the actors moving, because that to me is the story, more than the words and the times when the actors talk about what they've done," he says.

"In Happy Together [his Cannes Competition film, which screens tomorrow], the first two thirds of the movie is entirely actions. I'm very interested in that sort of body language. Whenever I travel, I like to walk around and watch the way people move, how they sit, how they stand when they're talking to one another."

Involuntarily, I look at how Wong is sitting. Last time we met, he was much more intense, leaning forward on a sofa, repeatedly using both hands to turn an ashtray on the table through a quarter-circle. This time, though, he is sitting back, legs crossed. There is a champagne bottle in a silver bucket on the table, but I think that comes with the room. Anyway, Wong ignores it.

In Cannes, Wong's jacket is still black, the sunglasses are still there but more restrained and don't come off, even when Simon the photographer asks him. But apart from that, he's wearing a pair of sensible, unfaded Levis and a white shirt. He looks like he could soon be going on a yacht.

"Happy Together has a very different look to Fallen Angels or Chungking Express," says Wong, as though this explained the new duds, too. "Much more basic." But there are still a couple of cigarettes on the go and the same wry grin punctuates the conversation. Which is where Wong nails Cannes.

This is how the conversation goes.

"You've been here before, haven't you?"

"Yes, eight years ago, with my first film [As Tears Go By]."

"So what do you think of it?"

"Cannes?"

"Yes."

"Just like Hong Kong."

"You mean the crowds?"

"No. People walking around too fast and talking too loud."

"Why are they talking too loud? Because there's so much traffic?"

"No. Mobile phones. Everyone's shouting into mobile phones all the time." He puts a cigarette packet to his ear, waves the other hand about and shouts: "Hello! Yes? Hello! What...?"

Nobody reacts because, in the course of the last two exchanges, at leasthree mobile phones have gone off within 20 metres. Wong and I are the only two people in the room actually talking to someone we can see.

"Do you have a mobile phone?" he asks.

"Not here," I reply.

"Good," he says.

Happy Together is set in Argentina, which is Hong Kong's antipodes. Wong confesses to having been drawn there both by that fact and by a love of Latin American literature, Manuel Puig in particular. "I thought I knew Buenos Aires well from Puig's books," says Wong, "but it was totally different. I expected it to be very exotic, hot, lots of sunshine."

Unfortunately, Wong chose to go to Argentina in the middle of winter, taking a 30-strong crew with him. The weather wasn't the only problem: he had to deal with equipment houses who had hiked their prices in reaction to Evita and Seven Years in Tibet, and to persuade local crews to go from their usual nine-hour day, five-day weeks to Wong's usual frenzied 18-hour days and seven-day weeks. They were happy to do so, he says, but then directors always say that.

Happy Together is the story of two lovers who go to BA to start a new life but fall out almost immediately. The two are both men, but Wong brushes aside this fact - "I only ever thought of it as a love story between two persons," he says - and returns to what is becoming a favourite theme.

"At first," he says, "we went looking for local colour, tango bars, things like that. But then, gradually, I realised the story was taking place in the same small rooms, kitchens, back alleys, as my other films. In fact, I realised the film is really about Hong Kong after all."

And the more basic style?

"The people at Samsung invited me up to their office yesterday to show me a film," he says, "and it was like a remake of Chungking Express meets Fallen Angels. You know, there are now Korean Wong Kar-wais and Japanese Wong Kar-wais and Taiwanese Wong Kar-wais. It's time to move on, I think."

And so, dear reader, do I. A la prochaine.