It is perhaps best to see Wong’s slow and protracted production sched-
ules through the looking-glass of a style of film-making that has a time-
honoured line: one could cite Erich von Stroheim and the making of Greed
(1925), Orson Welles’s Othello (1952) and Don Quixote (1957), and King Hu’s
A Touch of Zen (1969), as well as the fastidious methods of Terrence Malick,
Martin Scorsese, Michael Powell and David Lean. One could also point to
the experimental avant-garde cinema: for example, Harry Smith’s
Mahagonny (1980), a massive visual translation of Weill and Brecht’s opera
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which was constructed from eleven
hours of footage shot over a period of ten years. On the intimate scale,
Wong’s style may be likened to the Dogme school without the dogma; the
minimalism of Suzuki, Antonioni, Godard, Bresson, Ruiz and Jarmusch;
and the free improvisatory style of independent film-makers like John
Cassavetes and Rob Nilsson.