It is two in the morning on a hot April night in 1995, in a grimy beauty salon one floor above a street in Tsim Sha Tsui, with what Tony Rayns, who was there for Sight and Sound, called "lurid green walls and coloured light bulbs." Wong Kar-wai and his designer William Chang chose the room for a killing. Leon Lai's hitman is about to come through the door, and Wong, asked what he's shooting tonight, grins: "Tonight, I'm doing John Woo."
The color of Fallen Angels, and of Chungking Express, the film it grew out of, was mostly found in rooms like that one. Christopher Doyle, who shot both, once asked a hall full of young filmmakers "What is the colour of night?" and called it one of the questions with no answer. In Hong Kong in the middle of the nineties the city answered it with whatever it already had switched on: neon, lit shop fronts and fluorescent tubes that turn green on film. Doyle caught it with a handheld camera and an ultra-wide lens, step printing smeared it, and when a batch of stock failed, black and white broke in.
Chungking Express color: the bright half of Hong Kong
Wong has talked about the two films as one. "To me Chungking Express and Fallen Angels are one film that should be three hours long," he said in 1998, and the real lead was "the city itself, the night and day of Hong Kong. Chungking Express and Fallen Angels together are the bright and dark of Hong Kong." Even the lenses split along that line: "in Chungking we were shooting from a very long distance with long lenses, but the characters seem close to us."
Chungking Express (1994) was shot in 23 days during a break from Ashes of Time. Wong started with Andrew Lau Wai-keung on camera, and when Lau had to leave for a project of his own, Doyle took over and reshot some of what was already done, partly, Wong said, "to unify the film's 'look'." "We filmed like madmen!" Wong remembered. "I told him, we didn't need to pay much attention on lighting (except in the apartment)." He wanted it "filmed like a documentary, camera in hands."
So the color in Chungking Express is mostly the color of its places. The first story lives in Tsim Sha Tsui, in and around Chungking Mansions. Wong shot there and in Mirador Mansions next door, and he wanted the place exactly as it was: "With the heat, the smells, the noise, the whole experience was hellish. That's what I wanted to capture." The second story crosses the harbour to Central, to the Midnight Express snack counter in Lan Kwai Fong and to an apartment that belonged to Doyle, which Wong liked for its curtain and because the Mid-Levels escalator runs right past the window. Of the escalator he said, "When we were scouting for locations we found the light there entirely appropriate."
Wong Kar-wai neon: light the city already had
People say "Wong Kar-wai neon" as if it was a house style from day one. In 1995 Wong told Rayns that Days of Being Wild "was a reaction against my first film As Tears Go By, which was full of harsh light and neon. I told Chris I wanted to do a 'monochrome' film, almost drained of colour." The neon came back with Chungking Express and stayed for Fallen Angels, which Wong described on set the same year: "We're again not using many lights, and there are constant problems, with face-shadows."
Doyle's own rule for it is short. "Take what you have and make it what you need. The city of Hong Kong also taught me that," he told Reverse Shot, because there "the space is so limited and people move so fast." At the Berlinale in 2005 he put it another way: "We find the film rather than create the film. We shoot against the wall instead of taking the wall away." Shoot like that and the color of a scene is whatever is hanging across the street.
And what hung across the street in 1995 was neon. A neon tube's color comes from the gas inside it: neon itself glows reddish orange, and most of the other colors come from argon and mercury vapor lighting up a phosphor coat on the glass. Wu Chi-kai, one of the few neon masters left in the city, called the 1980s and early 1990s the "golden era for the neon sign industry," and remembers where it turned: "Around 1997, LEDs came out." Fallen Angels was shot right at the end of that era, and a critic who hated its 2020 restoration still called the original "a grainy pre-handover time capsule," full of "neon-lit billboards and Kai Tak Airport."
The green comes from the same places. Writing in Aspect, Campbell Mah describes Fallen Angels as "infused with a general atmosphere of haziness, with deep greens and reds that emanate from city street lights and fluorescent signage," and the salon Rayns walked into had green walls before anybody pointed a camera at them. The rest comes from the tubes: fluorescent light that looks white to the eye records green on color film unless a magenta gel or filter takes it out, and on a film shot with so few lamps of its own, the tubes already in the room carry much of the picture. The essay on Paris, Texas takes that physics apart.
The Fallen Angels lens: ultra-wide, pressed to the face
Fallen Angels (1995) took the dark half of the city and turned the lenses around. "We're shooting it almost entirely with wide-angle lens, with the actors very close to camera," Wong told Rayns on set. Doyle shot it on an ultra-wide lens that takes in the whole room, walls, ceiling and tubes. The first shot on the first day was a close-up of the lead actress, and when she turned toward the lens it pulled her face at the camera so hard that Doyle suggested putting the monitor outside, where she wouldn't see the shot.
They shot the whole film that way except one shot, on an 18mm. "Which most people would regard as a wide-angle lens, but to us it was like a telephoto lens," Doyle said. "I really feel ashamed of that shot."
What that does to feeling is the strange part, and Wong said it himself: "The reason for using short focal length lenses is that you get a feeling of seeing the characters from a distance even though you're very close to them." You are near enough to touch these people, and the room they're standing in has fallen away behind them.
The shoot was not smooth. In April 1995 Doyle had to leave for Shanghai to go back to work on Chen Kaige's film, Wong wasn't happy with most of what the fill-in cameramen shot, and when Doyle came back they redid scenes, in the small hours, in a run-down apartment block in Wan Chai. The film won him the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Cinematography.
Step printing under neon
The smear is the other half of the look. Step printing means shooting at a low frame rate, then printing every picture several times so the action plays back at normal speed, in jumps. Under neon the slow shutter is the part that matters, because it turns every light into a line. At 24 frames a second with a 180-degree shutter, each picture is exposed for 1/48 of a second. At 6 frames it is 1/12, four times as long, and a sign that slides across the frame while the camera moves draws a streak four times as long.
Doyle also described a version you can do in the camera, which he used again on 2046: "You just get the actor to move slowly and the people behind to run faster." He says they started it on Chungking Express, and that within about six months "everybody in Asia was copying our style," so on Happy Together they swore off it. He was clear about what it is for, too: "she is lonely, she is waiting for somebody, so it is the idea of time going by."
Fallen Angels color grading: black and white, then the 2020 regrade
The black and white in Fallen Angels began as an accident. Doyle told Reverse Shot the stock "was old. We couldn't re-shoot," it came back foggy in color, and so they made the most important parts of each scene black and white: "that was a solution to the problem, not an original concept." In 2021 he told it in more detail. Something went wrong with the emulsion on a scene with two actors hired for a single day, the image came back "with low exposure and a lot of grain," and they moved those scenes to high-exposure black and white film. One black and white scene on its own wouldn't hold, so "we decided that every time something went wrong in the relationship between the leads, that situation would be seen in black and white." What people call their style, he said, "usually came out of a mistake."
Then the film changed again. For the 2020 restorations Wong reframed Fallen Angels from 1.85:1 to 2.39:1, CinemaScope, and explained why in a note to audiences: "When we were cutting the film, we accidentally turned the Steenbeck on anamorphic instead of standard. I felt that the film looked much more interesting because it enhanced the distance of the characters on top of the extreme wide angle that we shot on." Back then, he wrote, "it was impossible to shoot a film in standard and release it in anamorphic." Chungking Express went the other way, back to the 1.66:1 it was shot and released in.
Cinema Escapist, which wrote against the new version, says every frame went through "cropping, squishing, and distortion," and listed the rest: "The entire film has been color-graded again, with shots now color-inaccurate or drenched in previously absent tints," some color shots were "re-timed to black-and-white," parts of some black and white shots were colorized, and in one of the film's most memorable shots "the new crop cuts away a clock." So Fallen Angels color grading now means two films under one title, 1995 and 2020, and every palette online was pulled from one or the other. Doyle, who said he hadn't watched the new version, shrugged: "I think that we should not be so sensitive with our works."
The color of loneliness
Take the plots out of both films and you are left with people on their own in a crowd at night. Rayns, interviewing Wong in 1995, summed up all of his characters as "afflicted by the same problems of loneliness, insecurity and inability to commit." Wong's own version is kinder: "I think a lot of city people have a lot of emotions but sometimes they can't find the people to express them to. That's something the characters in the film share. Tony talks to a bar of soap; Faye steals into Tony's home and gets satisfaction from arranging other people's stuff; and Takeshi has his pineapples."
The print that belongs beside these two films is ARRIVAL - The Visitor. A haloed figure in a long dark robe walks through the frame as a solid silhouette, and the wings behind him are nothing but smeared red and blue light, the way a sign streaks across a step-printed frame while the figure under the tube stays sharp. The film is called Fallen Angels, and this is an angel lit the way Doyle lit the city: one dark, sharp body, and all the color moving behind it.
Frequently asked questions
What lens was Fallen Angels shot on?
An ultra-wide lens for nearly the whole film, with one shot on an 18mm that Christopher Doyle says felt "like a telephoto lens" by comparison. Wong wanted the actors very close to the camera so that they would seem far away.
Why is Fallen Angels partly in black and white?
A batch of stock came back foggy, underexposed and grainy, and there was no chance to reshoot. Those scenes went to high-exposure black and white, and from there the rule became black and white whenever things go wrong between the leads.
Is the restored Fallen Angels different from the 1995 version?
Yes. The 2020 restoration, supervised by Wong, is reframed from 1.85:1 to 2.39:1 and fully regraded, with some color shots turned black and white and parts of some black and white shots colorized. Screenshots and palettes online come from one version or the other, and they don't match.
Why do Wong Kar-wai films look green?
Partly the places, green walls and green signs, and partly the tubes. Fluorescent light that looks white to the eye records green on color film unless a magenta gel or filter corrects it, and Wong and Doyle mostly shot with the light a location already had.
Read next
- In the Mood for Love: how Wong Kar-wai colors longing, the same partnership five years later, moved indoors, and its rationed red.
- Color in film, the hub of this series: how hue and light become feeling on screen.
- Why Tarkovsky switches between black and white and colour, Stalker's sepia and the Bruegel in Solaris.
- The colours of Paris, Texas, and why a white tube goes green on film.
References
- Tony Rayns, "Poet of time: Wong Kar-Wai on Chungking Express," Sight and Sound, September 1995: bfi.org.uk
- "Painting With the Camera": Christopher Doyle on cinematography, Berlinale Talent Campus, 13 February 2005 (archived): web.archive.org
- Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega, "Zen Palette: An Interview with Christopher Doyle," Reverse Shot, 27 August 2004: reverseshot.org
- Jordan Raup, "Wong Kar-wai Has Written a Chungking Express Sequel," The Film Stage, 24 September 2020 (Wong's 1998 interview): thefilmstage.com
- Wong Kar Wai, director's note on the World of Wong Kar Wai restorations, 2020, as reproduced by The Film Stage: thefilmstage.com
- Jordan Raup, "Christopher Doyle on Wong Kar-wai's Changes," The Film Stage, 2021 (from Página 12): thefilmstage.com
- "How Wong Kar-wai's 'Restoration' of Fallen Angels Spoils Pre-1997 Hong Kong," Cinema Escapist, 23 January 2021: cinemaescapist.com
- J. D. Lafrance, "Cinematic Pleasures: Chungking Express," Erasing Clouds, 2004 (Wong interview quotes): web.archive.org
- Ann Lee, "Christopher Doyle on shooting Chungking Express for Wong Kar-wai," BFI, 24 July 2019: bfi.org.uk
- Campbell Mah, "Fallen Angels (1995) review," Aspect, February 2022: aspectfilmjournal.web.unc.edu
- Kelvin Chan, "New rules, tech are dimming Hong Kong's signature neon glow," Associated Press, 31 August 2017: morungexpress.com