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I used to have a friend who liked Wong Kar Wai. She's dead now. She got shot and killed. Her name was Halyna Hutchins.
We met when I was looking for a cinematographer to work with me on a movie. I read a magazine article about the ten rising stars of cinematography and Halyna was one of them. She mentioned in the interview how she thought highly of Christopher Doyle's work and she was hoping to find her own Wong Kar Wai to collaborate with. I liked that, so I reached out and told her about my movie and we got together and talked and she said okay let's do it.
About six months later we boarded a plane to Ireland. This was back near the start of the pandemic when everyone was stuck inside and almost nobody was making movies, and the few who did went on to score big profiles in Variety explaining how they were able to pull off such a feat. But we didn't tell anyone we were making a movie, we just went and did it.
Coming into Ireland, Halyna and I had to quarantine for fourteen days before stepping foot outside. So we stayed holed up in our little Dublin Airbnb talking about all sorts of things and watching all sorts of things. She showed me scenes from Chungking Express from a pirated Russian dub she found online. It didn't matter much that Tony Leung and the gang were all speaking Russian and their lips didn't match up because with Wong it's mostly about the feeling and that feeling was coming through loud and clear.
Anyway, Halyna was hoping maybe Wong's visual style could inspire us on our own movie. That was okay with me because I'd always liked Wong's movies pretty well myself, but the Ireland part of our picture was supposed to be a bit more formal and classical than Chungking Express. I told her we can get...