Sight & Sound interviews director Wong Kar-Wai on the 25th anniversary of In The Mood For Love (Hong Kong, 2000). “The film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 25 years ago, on 20 May 2000, was not the one that Wong Kar Wai had envisaged when he set out on the project sometime around 1997. Far from it. In the Mood for Love emerged from a succession of rapidly evolving projects. One was called Summer in Beijing–it was a comedy. And there was a triptych movie about food. Wong particularly wanted to make a segment about the 1960s Hong Kong of his parents’ generation, something centred around the rice cooker and the liberating impact it had on domestic women. But there was also a novel by Liu Yichang that fascinated him. It had the theme of adultery, but he knew he didn’t want to make a typical adultery movie – too boring, too done. There was also something in Vertigo (1958) that intrigued him–a darkness in male desire–and perhaps the film could also reunite characters from his 1990 film Days of Being Wild?”

Read more here. (Thanks, Mark!)