“She spent a year in Hong Kong [making In the Mood for Love]. I mean, ultimately, it wrecked our relationship,” he recounts, with a laugh, “because she spent a year in Hong Kong, and I was myself shooting a very complex, expensive period piece [Sentimental Destinies] in provincial France. And so all of a sudden, we were really on two different planets.… It was created by cinema and it was in a certain way destroyed by cinema, I guess.”
On the set of Clean, Assayas recalls: “I told her, ‘Maggie, it’s really great I’m making this film for you, which I imagined for you.’ And there was a double take and she said, ‘But Olivier, my present to you is that I’m here and we’re making it together.’ And somehow, I think it kind of, for me, eased the pain.”
In the years since Clean, Cheung’s only substantial role in a movie has been in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds in 2009, where she played the aunt of Mélanie Laurent’s character Shosanna in one scene. In the end, the director decided to cut the scene for storytelling purposes; although various home-video releases of the film have included deleted scenes, Cheung’s scene, her only real big-screen acting work since 2004, has never seen the light of day. (Asked to comment for this piece, Tarantino declined to participate through his publicist.)
In a red carpet interview, Cheung said about Inglourious Basterds: “It’s fine. When you’ve been in enough films, you’ve seen that happening enough times to other actors.… For me, it’s a normal thing. The most important thing in the end, does it work in the film?”
“Quentin Tarantino was head of the jury in Cannes when she won Best Actress for Clean,” Assayas tells me. “Quentin Tarantino really liked her in Clean and that’s why he wanted to use her in Inglourious Basterds. But I don’t think it’s Tarantino’s best film, and I am not sure the part he gave to Maggie was that exciting. There was a crossroad there. I mean, if something had happened on Tarantino’s film, my guess is that possibly she would still be making movies.”
