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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Ip Man was an extraordinary man who lived during extraordinary times. He was born to a rich family when the country was still a monarchy and lived through various civil wars, revolutions, the Japanese invasion, and the establishment of the Republic. "

" Sometimes, when you're on the streets, certain music inspires you, and then you have a vision. But, at the end of the day, it's a synthesis of visions, so you have to think, as a director, of a scene, or how to deliver a line, or how do this visually. "

" Chinese martial artists consider themselves to be gardeners, and it's an honor for them to take care of this garden, to better it and hand it over to the generations that follow. I think that's a very important message in a time when personal achievement seems to be the only criteria of success. "

" To make films, it always begins with two words: what and how. First of all, you have to find a story, or what are you going to tell? And you have to find a way to tell it visually. "

" I have an image of Shanghai, which is quite different from other directors, I think. The story of Shanghai should happen in back alleys. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" The reason it takes me so long to make a film, the reason it gets so difficult, is that I'm trying to think of every film as the last one I will ever make so it can be the best it can possibly be. I don't want to have regrets or excuses or think, 'I can do better next time.' "

" 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. "

" My mother has a very big family in Shanghai, so I have, like, almost 40 cousins, so we stayed together all the time. So by the time I get to Hong Kong, I become the only child and the only one surrounded by adults, you know. "

" I'm not coming from film school. I learned cinema in the cinema watching films, so you always have a curiosity. I say, 'Well, what if I make a film in this genre? What if I make this film like this?' "

" 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. "

" I sometimes compare making a film to cooking. Some dishes need to be stewed, while others need to be fried. "

" 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. "

" 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 think of action as a dance. It's a riddle; it should have emotion in it. "

" To make a film like 'The Grandmaster,' I know I'm not going to make just a standard kung-fu film; it's not going to be just tricks or like wire works. So I spent seven years on the road interviewing different schools and a lot of real grandmasters from Chinese martial arts. "

" I don't want to be a grumpy old man or too pessimistic, because if I have a chance, I would prefer to watch a film in the cinema with an audience on a big screen instead of watching it on a cell phone. It's a very different experience, but somehow I think this form will have its own future and life. "

" 'Ashes of Time' was my third film, and as a young director at that point, it's not very often that you have the chance to make a big martial arts film, so of course I jumped at this opportunity. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I didn't know anything about martial arts. I'm a big fan, but I never practiced martial arts. "

" The Chinese government promised Hong Kong '50 years, and change.' And 50 years later, after 1997, will be 2046; I think, 'Well, that's a very interesting promise.' So I want to make a film about promise. "

" In our case, we have no script. So the only people we can work with are people who have been working with us in the past, and they know we are going to do something; it's kind of a trust. "

" 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. "

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