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" 1936 is a very important year: a golden time for martial arts, right before the Japanese invasion. "

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" I think, to be a director, sometimes you need to have certain hunches - you have to believe in some gut feeling. "

" The original title for 'In the Mood for Love' was called 'A Story About Food.' The idea was to tell a love story through different courses. "

" My films are never about what Hong Kong is like, or anything approaching a realistic portrait, but what I think about Hong Kong and what I want it to be. "

" In most kung fu films, they want to create a hero who's always fighting a bad guy. In the story of Ip Man, he's not fighting physical opponents. He's fighting the ups and downs of his life. "

" I don't do rehearsal. Some directors prefer to do rehearsal - readings before the actual shooting - but I don't like this process because I think there are certain things that are so spontaneous, and they cannot happen twice. "

" Some actors like encouragement. Some actors prefer to have pressure. And sometimes, for some actors, its better to give your comment by silence, because they are so skillful, so gifted, that they understand without talking too much. "

" What's so great about inspiration is sometimes it finds you when you're not looking. "

" When you look at martial arts films, the later ones became more and more exaggerated. It's like, wow, is martial arts only a show? "

" I'm a big fan of martial arts films, novels and radio programs. "

" To me, romantic means, um, you follow your heart more than your mind. Sometimes when you're shooting a film, you have to follow your heart. "

" I was born in Shanghai and moved to Hong Kong the year I was five. "

" After the Revolution in '49, all the films were propaganda. They serviced the government and carried the message that the government wants to relay to the people. But I think, in the last 10 years, because the film market is opening and there's an expansion of all the cinemas in China, it's now a lot like Hollywood productions. "

" I never studied film formally at school, but as a kid, I spent most of my time in cinemas. "

" The industry and support in China has really matured because there are so many productions there. At the same time, there's been a lot of changes in the market, which I think also has enabled productions like 'The Grandmaster' to happen and to be possible to shoot in China. "

" When it's time to let go, I don't look back, and I start another project as soon as possible. One thing I remind myself is that I don't want to Photoshop my past. "

" The laboratory where we stored all our negatives went bankrupt overnight following the Asian economic crisis in 1997. So, on short notice, we had to retrieve all the materials in the middle of the night before the debtor-receiver took over the laboratory the next morning. "

" Sometimes, we have to turn our camera to a mirror to shoot something, and people think, 'Oh, that's very stylish.' Yes it is, but at the same time, we did it because we are shooting in a very small space, and that was our only option. "

" When I look at 'Fallen Angels,' I realize it is not a film that is truly about Hong Kong. It's more like my Hong Kong fantasy. I want Hong Kong to be quiet, with less people. "

" I think one day I can make a book about coffee shops in Hong Kong. I spent almost most of my time in coffee shops, in different coffee shops. "

" For 'Chungking Express,' the way we shot the film was all handheld and with all this existing light, and that became very popular. Everybody thought it was cool. "

" It used to be when you eat, you eat with people. But instant noodles are so instant that people eat by themselves. And it's a very convenient way of eating but also a very lonely way of eating. "

" Somehow, we fall in love with the films and don't want to let go, but financially and physically, we cannot afford it. "

" In my first film, we always tried to have a script and work in a normal way, but I was constantly changing things during shooting. Because I worked as a scriptwriter for 10 years, I understood that directors always wanted to change what was originally written, to improve on it. "

" Heritage is something martial-arts films don't often talk about. "

" It is always good to work with a very regular group of people because we know how high we can fly and what are the parameters, and it becomes very enjoyable. "

" I never had a problem with genre because a genre actually is like a uniform - you put yourself into a certain uniform. But if you dress up in a police officer's uniform, it doesn't mean that you are an officer; it can mean something else. "

" This is what the difference is between Hong Kong and Chinese cinema - Chinese cinema was made for their own communities. It was for propaganda. But Hong Kong made films to entertain, and they know how to communicate with international audiences. "

" I've always wanted to make a film about the Tong Wars, the rioting and the crime factions in San Francisco's Chinatown in the early part of the last century. "

" I came to Hong Kong when I was five, but we didn't have any relatives in Hong Kong. My mom is a big movie fan, and she watched all kinds of movies, so when I was a kid, basically, we went to watch a movie every day. "

" Because we don't have a lot of light, because we have a very low budget, we have to adjust the speed of our camera to get the effect that we want. So sometimes this is the way we work, and the result of the filming becomes a kind of a style. "