Rising from the Ashes

As his 1994 martial arts epic Ashes of Time gets a new lease of life with a Redux version, Wong Kar-wai talks to Edmund Lee about how the new version differs

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 wuxia pian that’s loosely based on The Eagle-Shooting Hero, the classic wuxia novel by Jin Yong (aka Louis Cha, godfather of the Chinese martial arts tome).

Hong Kong's iconic director Wong Kar-wai (below) hopes his stylised wuxia story will be a hit second time around

With the introspective Ashes of Time (slated for release as a re-edited Redux version by the end of the year), Wong says he intended to ‘come up with something different from the typical world in wuxia films’. 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. It 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 to make a big-budget martial arts epic. I jumped on this, worried there wouldn’t be a second chance,’ Wong says. ‘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,’ he enthuses.

Acknowledging Apocalypse Now Redux as the first film to use the R-word, and citing Francis Ford Coppola’s idea to ‘reassess, redefine, and reconsider’ it, 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 Jet Tone, Wong’s production house that was founded in 1992]. By the time we finished our shoot in the desert, we knew the meaning of independence. Those were 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 we’ve done this film is to rescue it,’ he says. ‘The [film] laboratory which stored the original negative suddenly closed during the 1998 economic crisis, and when we went to get the materials, they were left scattered on the rooftop and in terrible condition. If we didn’t make this version, the film would only exist on video in the future. After gathering the materials from overseas distributors and Chinatown cinemas, we found it impossible to assemble the film into its original form. [What we ended up with] is not a remastered edition, but something more.’

With the new version running slightly shorter than the original – and its colours sharpened and music rearranged – looking at Ashes of Time Redux 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. ‘I remember that the film was a controversial one [in Hong Kong] at the time,’ he recalls. ‘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 struggled to comprehend Ashes of Time too. Recalling the Venice Film Festival in 1994, Wong says ‘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.’

But 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,’ he says. ‘Technology helps much of the time, but not always. The hardest part was 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 is due out in Singapore before the end of the 2008.