Ka-Fai Wai was born on January 1, 1962 in Hong Kong. He is a writer and producer, known for Mad Detective (2007), Running on Karma (2003) and Fulltime Killer (2001).
Frequently collaborates with presenter/producer Charles Heung
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Frequently colaborates with Johnnie To, another TV crew-member turned film director.
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Quite often, whether Johnnie [To] or I actually come up with an idea, he has a lot of faith in me. So I'll run off with the idea and build a script from it. Sometimes, the creative process of scriptwriting takes place quite close to the actual film production time. Johnnie is in the front lines making the movie, and I'm still writing the script. But we're so in tune with each other that whatever I give Johnnie will work, even while he's shooting the film.
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I really have full confidence in Johnnie's execution. But I think that, personality-wise, a loose analogy of the way we work is something like yin and yang. When Johnnie's being aggressive, I'll say "take things slowly", because if we're both very aggressive, then things could go wrong. So we complement each other very well, in the good times and the bad times.
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What you call genre movies we call "audience movies". There are elements in these movies that you know the audience and the market will appreciate. So, we are very clear on the distinction between our commercial genre movies and our personal movies. Every time we plan a movie, we define it very clearly. We know that there are certain genre rules that you definitely can't violate. But of course we'll try to add something new, something that will still adhere to the rules without changing the genre. When we make personal movies, then basically the entire world is ours: we can do whatever we want.
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What I liked in the original novel [Fulltime Killer] was that it was told from various points of view: it had multiple narrators. So when I was adapting it, I had the idea: what if the whole thing was just a fiction? And I took off on that idea. So, the switch of the narrator - suddenly having Simon Yam taking over - suggests that, in a way, what we've been seeing the whole time had just been a fiction written by this mad man. We don't even understand what the "real" story is. I just expand on the idea of fiction: everybody in the movie is just telling fictions to each other. ...Based on this notion of fiction, what the audience takes away is still up in the air. I think that the author of the original novel was influenced by movies and books about hitmen. So you see a lot of that in the original novel. When I was adapting it, I thought about using this and create something new, which is this whole notion of fictionality. You can see, for example, many scenes in Fulltime Killer that remind you of other movies, and that's intentional: it just emphasizes this fictionality.
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We want to continue collaborating, and continue to foster the next generation of filmmakers in Hong Kong. [about the partnership between Johnnie To and himself]
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Fact
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A film consultant for Charles Heung's China Star Entertainment Group, since 2000.
$20 Million
