As his 1994 martial arts film Ashes of Time gets a new lease of life with a ‘Redux’ version, Wong Kar-wai talks to Edmund Lee  about the rationale of the new film, the making of the original, and the mixed reception in between.

If Wong Kar-wai’s films appear to be laden with recycled themes and circular patterns, it’s probably not a coincidence. Ten years before Tony Leung Chiu-wai starred in 2046 as a martial arts novelist yearning for a past lover, the Wong regular played a lovelorn martial artist in Ashes of Time, the 1994 film loosely based on classic wuxia novel The Eagle-Shooting Hero by Jin Yong (aka Louis Cha, the godfather of the Chinese martial arts tome).

Ahead of the premiere of Ashes of Time Redux (a newly re-edited version of the film) at this year's HKIFF, we sat down with the auteur to try to make sense of his introspective wuxia pian classic. Surprisingly, Wong's take on the film's origin is rather modest: "I [only] intended to come up with something different from the typical world in wuxia films”, he says. In this he has certainly succeeded, as Wong’s postmodern take on the genre – which traditionally concerns the characters’ heroic ideals instead of their sentimental longings – is pretty offbeat for a martial arts epic, and is populated by the auteur’s usual heartbroken characters, only this time dressed in period costumes.

“It is not very often that a director is offered the chance to make a big budget martial arts epic,” says Wong. “I jumped on this worried there wouldn’t be a second chance. To separate ourselves from the previous adaptations, we simply put the original novel aside and went ahead to invent our own vision.” In doing so, Wong has created in Ashes the early lives of the novel’s two major characters, Ouyang Feng ‘the Malicious Lord of the West’ (the late Leslie Cheung) and Huang Yaoshi ‘the Malignant Lord of the East’ (Tony Leung Ka-fai). “It’s more than a standard martial arts film; it’s Shakespeare meets Sergio Leone in Chinese language,” enthuses Wong.

Acknowledging Apocalypse Now Redux as the first film to use the R-word and citing Francis Ford Coppola’s definition of it as “reassess, redefine, and reconsider”, Wong is quick to point out that his Ashes of Time Redux “has nothing to do with reconsideration. I wanted to keep the spirit of the film as it was at that particular moment in time. Ashes of Time means a lot to us because it was the first film we produced by ourselves [through Wong’s production house, Jet Tone, founded in 1992]. By the time we finished our shoot in the desert, we knew the meaning of independence. It was our days of being wild. If there wasn’t Ashes, there wouldn’t be Chungking Express and the subsequent films.”

As important a place as Ashes of Time clearly holds in Wong’s oeuvre, the director’s primary motivation for the new version wasn’t to enhance the original. “The main reason that we’ve done this film is to rescue it,” says Wong. “The [film] laboratory which stored the original negative was suddenly closed down during the 1998 economic crisis, and when we went to take the materials, they were left scattered on the rooftop in terrible conditions. If we didn’t make this version, the film would only exist on video in the future. After gathering the materials from some overseas distributors and Chinatown cinemas, we found that it was impossible to assemble the film into its original form. [What we ended up with] is thus not a remastered edition, but something more.”

With the new version running slightly shorter than the original – but having its colours sharpened and music rearranged – whether Ashes of Time Redux stands as something “more” is perhaps up for debate. In any case, Wong will be hoping Redux receives a warmer reception from audiences than the original’s initial release. Speaking of the film’s mixed local reception, Wong says, “I remember that the film was a controversial one [in Hong Kong] at the time. Many people liked it, and many people disliked it. Somebody told me recently, ‘I’ve finally understood what the film means: it's more an erotica than a martial arts film!’”

International audiences too struggled to comprehend Ashes of Time. Recalling the Venice Film Festival in 1994, Wong says that “the [international] audience back then was not used to wuxia pian, and [some of them] couldn’t even tell Leslie Cheung from Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, or Brigitte Lin from Maggie Cheung. They were really confused.”

Among other unconventional elements in the film, Ashes’ decidedly fragmented structure represents one of its most intriguing (and bewildering) characteristics. Says Wong: “This film is not about the general concept of ‘time’ as many people have commented; I have specifically structured the story with [the concepts of] the Chinese almanac.” To emphasize this theme, captions taken from the Chinese almanac have been added to punctuate Redux. “The structure of the film is based on the changing of seasons described in the Chinese almanac,” explains the director. “It is not about the passage of time, but about a cyclical repetition which shows change through the unchanged. Maybe the Redux is the best demonstration of this theme.”

So how does the director feel his new film compares with the original? “To revisit a dream which is more than 15 years old is complicated,” says Wong. “Technology helps much of the time, but not always. The hardest part is to restrain myself from looking at it with the experiences and changes that I went through in the years since; I just wanted to make sure [the film] was what it was supposed to be back then.”

Ashes of Time Redux opens on May 28.

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Read our other HKIFF features:
Leader of the pack: Daniel Wu
Time regained: Wong Kar Wai
Presidential assassination: Oliver Stone
Van Dammage: JCVD

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