The Auteur and The Filmmaker

Wong Kar-Wai is a true auteur. He makes his movies, completely on his terms. His films are deeply poetic and visually stunning. Larry Gross of Sight & Sound magazine says: "The first time you see Wong Kar-Wai’s movies, you feel you are watching the work of a delicious visual mannerist indifferent to narrative structure....The sheer hedonistic absorption in architectural surfaces, in light sources, in decor of every possible fabric and material, and the absence of overtly literary seriousness in the plots, make you feel trapped in the world of a super-talented hack. Then you go back and take another look, and the movies change, more drastically than any I know of. They seem richer, more intricately organized, more serious...”

Much like Leonard Cohen’s work I first experience Wong Kar-Wai in my mid-teens when I first decided to go into filmmaking. In my time at CUTV, working on my first ever production, a puppet show known as Paradites, I had met a man by the name of King, he was of Hong Kong origin, he was quite knowledge about cinema and he is the one who first introduced me to Hong Kong cinema. This was in the early and mid-1990s before the names John Woo, Jackie Chan and Jet Li were household names in the white people world. I was ravaged through all the HK films he lent me, often watching three or four films in a row. I went to film school with movies like John Woo’s The Killer and Hard Boiled burnt into my brain, highly stylized yet melodramatic at the same time. Nothing in American “action” movies had come close to these masterworks. Around that same time, the Fantasia Film Festival was launched in Montreal. The festival would feature predominantly Asian action films and Japanese anime. Finally I could prove to my chums in film school that I was not crazy, that these films belong on their own plateau. I attended many films that first festival year with King. One day he brought me a VHS copy of Chungking Express. I was expecting another action movie, however what I got was a super stylized melodrama. It blew my mind. It was incredible. It was like nothing else I’d ever seen. I re-watched the movie two more times in a row. To me, it was an almost perfect poem on screen. The camera work and aesthetics of the film were the true work of a master, I had no seen color used like that since Hitchcock or Kubrick. The truth is, in film school you learn (at least when I was there) that a good film never lets the audience be aware of the
camera, which is a theory that is thrown out the window with a lot of work from Hong Kong. John Woo stylized action cinema, Wong Kar-Wai re-stylized cinema. Wong Kar-Wai humbly describes his style: “People are always very curious about the visual effects in my works. The not so romantic truth is that lots of those effects are in reality the results of circumstantial consideration: if there is not enough space for camera maneuvering, replace the regular lens with a wide-angle lens; when candid camera shooting in the streets does not allow lighting, adjust the speed of the camera according to the amount of light available; if the continuity of different shots does not link up right for a sequence, try jump cuts; to solve the problem of color incontinuity, cover it up by developing the film in B/W… Tricks like that go on forever.” Even his use of voiceover, which had been portrayed as the anchor of a weak story, is used in such a way that it adds to the grace and beauty of his films. They lend to the story as well as the music. His work is stylized, but not empty.

The way Wong Kar-Wai tackles romance and love on screen is much like Cohen tackles it in his work. In Wong’s work, the possibility of love is as beautiful as it is problematic. Its almost like his characters want to be in love, they just happen to fall in love at an inconvenient time. He explores themes that state that people, even though in very close physical proximity, can be so far apart. His ability to isolate his characters and present them as social outsiders. His imagery of large urban centers as alienating, lonely places are really what attract me to his work. Ashita is a film about people in city. Lonely, depressed, desperate people. Can I paint the picture like Wong the auteur. Probably not. But I can hope to.

Thank you Mr. Wong.

The Poet and The Filmmaker

Every artist has an influence or a number of influences. I’ve always felt that I have a poetic spirit—maybe its my romantic Italian roots, but with experience I see my art going in the direction of the understanding of the soul and the meaning of humanity. So its no surprise that two artists I greatly admire are Leonard Cohen and Wong Kar-Wai.

I will write two entries one dedicated to the world’s best known poet, Leonard Cohen and one dedicated to cinema’s best know poet Wong Kar-Wai.

Maybe I feel a special connection to Leonard Cohen because he is a fellow Montreal native. Maybe its because, deep down, his words, both in songs and on paper, bring such vivid imagery to mind. I first discovered Leonard Cohen in my mid-teens just as he was releasing his album The Future. I has known of Cohen, but never experienced his work first hand until I bought the album. I was blown away by every aspect of The Future. When I entered college, there was a plaque commemorating Cohen. I had a number of professors who had known Cohen—at the time they had lost touch with him because he had gone into seclusion to become a Zen Buddhist monk.

Cohen’s work is marked by themes of love, sex, religion, psychological depression. Most music, of course, is about these things. But the way Cohen writes and presents them is much deeper and more complex. He is a story teller as much as a poet. He, like all writers, writes about what he knows and what he has experienced. He knows heartbreak, from his many relationships and affairs—including one with Janice Joplin. He knows about depression—true psychological and unsentimental depression. He suffers from chronic depression, though less so in his old age. His early work is marred with references to suicide and loneliness—his later work is less depressed, however has many references to social justice to the chaos that fills life of most American and North American cities.

I can relate to a lot of his references, almost six years ago while in post production of my second film Truant Café I suffered through a depression. While recovering, I was commissioned to produce a TV pilot for LIFE Network. While making the pilot, I almost slipped back into my depression because I was under an enormous amount of pressure and severely tight deadline. Humanity was slipping away and I did not like the person I had become. Worst of all, I was no longer having fun with my productions—I think the fun stopped when I was working on Truant Café, I was obsessed with success. Like Leonard Cohen said: “Life got a whole lot easier when I no longer expected to win.” His comment, full of joy and lamentation, which can only come from him, can best describe where I am now in my life. I want to explore the human soul. I want to explore the things that made me depressed and the things that remove joy from people’s lives. I want to explore the dark places people hide their worst thoughts. Why do people hurt each other when they know what pain does? Why do people lie when they know it is futile? Are humans foolish or innocent? Why are we frightened to admit we’re lost? My hope, is that Ashita explores some these questions and provides its own unique perspective on them.

Thank you Mr. Cohen.

The Big CITY

My movie Ashita is about loneliness, its also about life in the city. Living in a big city breaks you more often than it makes you. I’ve been living in Canada’s biggest city for just over 6 years and it gets shockingly more disturbing every day. I can’t read the paper or look at the news without seeing a random act of insanity—I know what you’re thinking, bad news sells. This may be true on some morbid level, however there’s bad news and then there’s sheer madness. I can accept that in any given city there is crime and violence. But what shocks me is the volume of random violence, teenagers killing the school mates for fun or a man who beats a stranger he’s never met to death with a brick. Teenaged parents leaving their unwanted newborn baby in shopping mall parking lot in the dead of winter. These are signs of an ill city. Signs of, maybe, what the city does to people. Maybe deep down, I am fed up with the city, fed up with the constant feeling of depravity and frustration. Maybe I want out.

The way I create a project is through observation. And in a city like Toronto, there is a lot of observation to be done. I look at people and try to guess what’s in their mind and in their life and from there, the story grows. Sometimes I get depressed doing this, so many sad faces in the crowd, so many complex souls. The question that still drives my creative juices is: Why? Why, with all the opportunities, with all the advantages, with all the culture, with all the options available in big cities do people remain frustrated, stoic and frightened? Do the lies, corruption and general nihilistic sense outweigh the good of the city. Maybe it’s the uncertainty of the city that bites at people. Maybe it’s the sheer size of the unknown in the city’s façade that causes undue rest.

I’ve never pictured myself living anywhere but a big city, stating that the quiet of rural suburbia frightened me. That’s beginning to change, maybe its age, maybe it’s the fact that I am now a father or maybe its both. I often toy with the idea of living somewhere quiet and exploring my secret passion—cooking. I doubt I will ever stop creating, maybe I will make more films, maybe I will write a novel or write poetry. All I know is that not only did I make a movie about what the big can do to people, maybe I am beginning to understand living in a big city. Maybe understanding the city means its time to leave the city.