In setting the stage for the drama, Wong drew upon memories of his own childhood in Hong Kong, to which his family moved after emigrating from Shanghai. “We shared flats with strangers,” he recalled years later in an interview with the British Film Institute. “There was no such thing as privacy; your life was an open book that everyone read over your shoulder. Today, we barely know who lives next door. But in those days the walls were thin and the connections were thick. The characters in In the Mood for Love are inventions, but the world they move through came straight from my childhood memory.”
Fortissimo Films acquired worldwide distribution rights to the $16 million project, produced by the filmmakers’ own Block 2 Pictures and Paris-based Paradis Films. USA Films, a forerunner of today’s Focus Features, picked up U.S. distribution. And Wong had to rush to complete the film in time for its debut in May 2000 at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival, where it was an immediate sensation and Leung took the best actor prize. The film would eventually gross more than $16 million worldwide while securing Wong’s reputation as one of cinema’s great sensualists.