In The Mood For Love - Production

Production

In the Mood for Love went through a long gestation period. In the 1990s Wong Kar-wai found some commercial success, much critical acclaim, and wide influence on other filmmakers throughout Asia and the world with films such as Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, both set in present day Hong Kong. His 1997 film Happy Together was also successful internationally, winning him Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival, and surprising many, it was even popular with mainstream audiences in Hong Kong, despite its then-unusual focus on a gay love story and its having been largely improvised in Argentina, a landscape unfamiliar to Wong. By the end of the decade, with sovereignty of Hong Kong transferred from Britain to the People's Republic of China, Wong was eager to work once more in the mainland, where he had been born. He had been dissatisfied with the final result of his 1994 wuxia epic Ashes of Time, which was set in ancient times and filmed in remote desert regions, and decided to deal with a more 20th century, urban setting.

By 1998, Wong had developed a concept for his next film, to be entitled Summer in Beijing, and although no script was finalized, he and cameraman Christopher Doyle had already been to Tiananmen Square and other areas of the city to do a small amount of unauthorized shooting. Wong told journalists the film was to be a musical and a love story. Wong secured the participation of Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Maggie Cheung to star, and with his background in graphic design, had even made posters for the film. He had also begun work on script treatments, which since Days of Being Wild he tended to treat as only a very loose basis for his work in order to secure financing, preferring to leave things open to change during the shoot.

During this time it transpired there would be difficulties in securing the necessary permission to shoot in Beijing with Wong's spontaneous methods of working and potential political sensitivities in setting his film in mid-20th century China. Wong had come to think of Summer in Beijing as a triptych of stories, much like his original concept of Chungking Express (in which the third story had been spun off into the film Fallen Angels). Quickly, Wong decided to jettison this structure, saving only one of the three planned stories, which had been titled provisionally, A Story of Food, and dealt with a woman and a man who shared noodles and secrets. As he reunited with his actors and production team, most of whom had collaborated several times before, Wong decided A Story of Food would be the heart of his next film. The story would slowly evolve into In the Mood for Love, after transposing its setting away from mainland China, and back to 1960s Hong Kong.

Wong had already set his breakthrough film, Days of Being Wild, in that time in Hong Kong, when mainland-born Chinese and their memories, including those of Wong, then a young child, had a strong presence in the territory. Still saturated with the sounds of 1930s and 1940s Shanghai singing stars and the ideals they represented, the time also reminded him of the wide array of vibrant dance music floating in over the Pacific from the Philippines, Hawaii, Latin America and the United States, which Wong had used as a backdrop in Days of Being Wild. Wong had regarded Days of Being Wild upon its release in 1990, as an artistic success, and had already planned a sequel to it at the time. However, his producers had been disappointed by its box office returns, particularly given that its shoot had been prolonged and expensive, with Wong, who had come out of the Hong Kong industry, first attempting to work more independently, including collaborating for the first time with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who favored jazz-like spontaneity in his shooting methods. Despite involving many of Hong Kong's top stars, the film's profits had been modest, so Wong was not given the opportunity to follow it up, yet as he moved onto other films, he had always retained the dream of doing so. With the impossibility of the original idea of Summer in Beijing, he was now able to pursue it.

The cast of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in A Story of Food, soon to become In the Mood for Love, provided an opportunity to pick up a loose thread of Days of Being Wild, as both actors had appeared in that film, although never together, and Leung's few scenes had been left incomplete, awaiting Wong's planned sequel that was never made. 2046, a sequel in its plot to In the Mood for Love, would later serve for Wong as a sequel in spirit to Days of Being Wild, connecting the story of Leung's character in Days and In the Mood, but the writing of 2046 essentially began at the same time as that of In the Mood for Love. Because neither film had its plot, structure, or even all its characters, scripted in advance, Wong began working on the ideas that eventually made it into 2046 during the shoot of In the Mood for Love. As he and his collaborators made the film in a variety of settings, its story took shape, and eventually, these constantly developing ideas, taken from merely one of the remnants of Summer in Beijing, were developed too much to fit into one film, and Wong would discard most of the footage and story before arriving at In the Mood, later reshooting and reimagining the rest as 2046.

Wong's plan to make a film set primarily in Hong Kong did not simplify matters when it came to the shoot, because the city's appearance was much changed since the 1960s, and Wong's personal nostalgia for the time added to his desire for historical accuracy. Wong had little taste for working in studio settings, let alone using special effects to imitate the look of past times. Christopher Doyle later discussed the necessity of filming somewhere in which the streets and the buildings and even the sight of clothes hanging on the lines, as in 1960s Hong Kong, could give a more real energy to the actors and the story, whose outlines were constantly open to revision as shooting progressed. While set in Hong Kong, a portion of the filming (like outdoor and hotel scenes) was shot in less modernized neighborhoods of Bangkok, Thailand. Further, a brief portion later in the film is set in Singapore (one of Wong's initial inspirations on the story of the film had been a short story set in Singapore, Intersection, by the Hong Kong writer Liu Yichang). In its final sequences, the film also incorporates footage of Angkor Wat, Cambodia, where Leung's character is working as a journalist.

The film took 15 months to shoot. The actors found the process inspiring but demanding. They also required a lot of work to understand the times, being slightly younger than Wong and having grown up in a rapidly changing Hong Kong, or in Maggie Cheung's case, partly in the United Kingdom. Cheung portrayed 1930s Chinese screen icon Ruan Lingyu in Stanley Kwan's 1992 film Center Stage, for which she wore qipao, the elegant, tight-fitting, dresses worn by stylish Chinese women throughout much of the first half of the 20th century. It had been Cheung's most recognized performance to date, but also her hardest, partly due to the clothing, which restricted her freedom of movement more than the more modern dress she was accustomed to. For Wong's film, Cheung, playing a married woman in her thirties who had carried over the elegance of her younger years in the pre-revolutionary mainland, would again wear qipao, known in Cantonese as cheongsam, and spoke of it as the way of understanding her character Su Li-zhen, whose quiet strength Cheung felt was unlike her own more spontaneous spirit.

The cinematographer Christopher Doyle, for whom the film was the sixth collaboration with Wong Kar-wai, had to leave the film when production went over schedule and was replaced by Mark Lee Ping Bin, renowned for his work with Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien. Both DPs are credited equally for the final film, and some scenes in the final cut are thought to have been shot by each, with some critics noting differences between Doyle's more kinetic style as seen in earlier Wong movies, and the more subtle long shots of Lee framing key parts of In the Mood for Love. The critic Tony Rayns, on the other hand, noted in a commentary on another Wong film that the differing styles of the two cinematographers were blended seamlessly by Wong's own fluid aesthetic. Like all of Wong's previous work, this one was shot on film, not digitally.

Doyle's departure did not result from major artistic arguments with Wong. However, despite his agreement with Wong's spontaneous approach to scripting, he found it frustrating to reshoot many of the film's key moments over and over in different environments throughout Southeast Asia until they felt right to the director, and having to turn down many other projects due to the total commitment, without a clear time limit, required by Wong. Several years later Doyle initially signed on to work on the sequel 2046, but he also abandoned that project halfway through for similar reasons (being replaced in that case by a range of different DPs) and has not worked with Wong since. Tony Leung, on the other hand, returned to work on 2046, in which he starred without Maggie Cheung, who made only a brief appearance in already shot footage from In the Mood for Love. Leung also stars in Wong's film currently in progress as of 2012, The Grandmasters. Cheung felt In the Mood for Love was the high point of her career, and she has worked much more infrequently since, starring in several films soon after but within four years, all but retired from acting, despite winning a Best Actress Award at Cannes for 2004's Clean.

The final months of production and post-production on In the Mood for Love, itself a submission to the Cannes Film Festival in May 2000, were notorious for their confusion. The film was barely finished in time for the festival, as would occur again four years later when Wong submitted 2046. Wong continued shooting more and more of In the Mood for Love with the cast and crew as he worked furiously to edit the massive amounts of footage he had already shot over the past year, eventually removing large chunks of the story to strip it down to its most basic element, the relationship between these characters in the '60s, with brief allusions to earlier and later times. In the meantime, Wong screened brief segments of the film before the festival for journalists and distributors. Despite the general lack of commercial interest in Chinese cinema at the time by North American media corporations, Wong was given a distribution deal for a limited theatrical release in North America on USA Films, based only on a few minutes of his footage.

By early 2000, with the deadline for Cannes approaching, Wong was contacted by the director of Cannes, who encouraged him to quickly complete a final cut, and offered a constructive criticism about the title. Although the title in Cantonese and Mandarin is based on a Zhou Xuan song whose English title is translated "Age of Bloom," the international title proved more complex. After discarding Summer in Beijing and A Story of Food, Wong had provisionally settled on Secrets, but Cannes felt this title was not as distinctive as the film Wong was preparing, having been used for many other films, and suggested he should change it.

Finally having completed the cut, but at a loss for titles, Wong was listening to a then-recent album by Bryan Ferry and noticed a resonance in the song "I'm In the Mood for Love," which shared its title with a popular jazz standard of the mid 20th century. Many of Wong's previous English language titles had come from pop songs, so he found this title particularly appropriate. Three years later, Sofia Coppola credited In the Mood for Love as her largest inspiration on her Oscar-nominated film Lost in Translation, which itself ended with secrets being shared, and made important use of another song by Bryan Ferry.

Wong states he was very influenced by Hitchcock's Vertigo while making this film, and compares Tony Leung's film character to James Stewart's:

"the role of Tony in the film reminds me of Jimmy Stewart's in Vertigo. There is a dark side to this character. I think it's very interesting that most of the audience prefers to think that this is a very innocent relationship. These are the good guys, because their spouses are the first ones to be unfaithful and they refuse to be. Nobody sees any darkness in these characters – and yet they are meeting in secret to act out fictitious scenarios of confronting their spouses and of having an affair. I think this happens because the face of Tony Leung is so sympathetic. Just imagine if it was John Malkovich playing this role. You would think, 'This guy is really weird.' It's the same in Vertigo. Everybody thinks James Stewart is a nice guy, so nobody thinks that his character is actually very sick."