Chungking Express - Production

Production

Wong Kar-wai made the film during a two month break from the editing of his wuxia film Ashes of Time. He has said, "While I had nothing to do, I decided to make Chungking Express following my instincts.", and that "After the very heavy stuff, heavily emphasized in Ashes of Time, I wanted to make a very light, contemporary movie, but where the characters had the same problems." Originally, Wong envisioned the two stories as similar but with contrasting settings: "One would be located in Hong Kong and the other in Kowloon; the action of the first would happen in daylight, the other at night. And despite the difference, they are the same stories."

On the screenplay, Wong has said

"When I started to film, I didn't have it written completely. I filmed in chronological order. The first part happened during the night. I wrote the sequel of the story in one day! Thanks to a brief interruption for the New Year festivities, I had some more time to finish the rest of the script."

He kept on writing and developed a third story. However, after filming the first two, he found that the film was getting too long so he relocated the third segment, about a love-sick hitman, to an entirely different film titled Fallen Angels (1995).

Wong had specific locations in mind where he wanted to set the action of the film. In an interview, he has said: "One: Tsim Sha Tsui. I grew up in that area and I have a lot of feelings about it. It's an area where the Chinese literally brush shoulders with westerners, and is uniquely Hong Kong. Inside Chungking Mansion you can run into people of all races and nationalities: Chinese, white people, black people, Indian." This is the setting for much of the first story. As Wong explains, Chungking Mansion is famous for

"its 200 lodgings, it is a mix of different cultures...it is a legendary place where the relations between the people are very complicated. It has always fascinated and intrigued me. It is also a permanent hotspot for the cops in HK because of the illegal traffic that takes place there. That mass-populated and hyperactive place is a great metaphor for the town herself."

The second half was shot in Central, including Lan Kwai Fong, near a popular fast food shop called Midnight Express (which was later turned into a 7–11). "In this area, there are a lot of bars, a lot of foreign executives would hang out there after work," Wong remembers. The fast food shop is forever immortalized as the spot where Tony Leung and Faye Wong's characters met and became attracted to one another. Wong was also drawn to "the escalator from Central to the mid-levels. That interests me because no one has made a movie there. When we were scouting for locations we found the light there entirely appropriate." The apartment of Tony Leung's character was cinematographer's Christopher Doyle's apartment at the time of filming.