Wong Kar Wai parla di The Grandmaster

In una lunga intervista a The Playlist di Indiewire, Wong Kar Wai parla del suo ultimo The Grandmaster, che sta per uscire negli Stati Uniti ed anche da noi a settembre.

Innanzitutto per gli Stati Uniti ha approntato una nuova versione del film, diversa da quella cinese, che era stata vista al Festival di Berlino lo scorso febbraio. La nuova versione è di 108 minuti, l’originale di 133, ma non si è solo trattato di tagli, ma di un vero e proprio nuovo montaggio:  “We had an obligation to release the film within two hours for the United States. But, I didn’t want to do it just by cutting the film shorter or do a shorter version by trimming and cutting out scenes because the structure of the original version is actually very precise…I just wanted to tell the story in a different way. So now the American version is 108 minutes, and we have 15 minutes of new scenes, and the story is more linear. So instead of a shorter version, to me it’s a new version.”

Wong ha anche chiarito perchè il film ha avuto una lavorazione così lunga: “It’s a huge project, first of all. I didn’t know anything about martial arts, I’m a big fan but I never practiced martial arts. And the second thing is just time, because we divided the film into three chapters. It begins in 1936 and ends in Hong Kong in 1956, and also we had to shoot in the north and the south… we shot for twenty-two months over three years.”

Il regista ha parlato anche di Megan Ellison, la sua produttrice americana: “She’s the most hardworking producer I have ever seen… She’s great, also she’s very young, but she’s very committed to the film.”