The Master of time: Wong Kar-wai in America

On a SoHo film set last August, Jude Law and Norah Jones were getting intimate. Repeatedly intimate. To be precise, they had kissed upwards of 150 times in the past three days.

The occasion for this outbreak of passion was "My Blueberry Nights," the first English-language film by Wong Kar-wai, the maverick Hong Kong director turned avatar of cosmopolitan cool. This particular night was stifling as the crew spilled out of Palacinka, a small cafe on Grand Street that was the principal New York location, preparing for yet another take of the scene known as "the Kiss."

It's closing time, and Ms. Jones, the only remaining customer, is slumped on the counter, her eyes shut. A smudge of cream rests on her upper lip, the telltale sign of a dessert binge. Mr. Law, cleaning up behind the bar, gazes at her, slowly leans in and steals a lingering kiss. When he surfaces, the cream on her lip is gone.

The shot lasted less than a minute, but the number of permutations that Mr. Wong and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, devised -15 set-ups, by the count of the script supervisor - ggested it would play a central role in the finished film. The Kiss was being shot at different film speeds and from a multitude of angles: a wide shot, his point of view, hers, through windows, with objects in the foreground.

"I've never worked with someone who's put so much emphasis on a single moment,"Mr. Law said between takes one night. "It's extraordinary how he'll take a moment and replay it and slice it up."

The consecration of a fleeting, fugitive moment is one of Mr. Wong's specialties. Perhaps more than any filmmaker since Alain Resnais, his great subject is time - or more specifically lost time. His rhapsodic movies, haunted by voice-over ruminations and swathed in lush regret, seem to transpire in the realm of memory. People and places are mourned even as they are captured on camera.

Mr. Wong, 48, is keen to describe “My Blueberry Nights," a road movie shot in New York, Memphis, Las Vegas and Ely, Nev., with a cast that also includes Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz and David Strathairn, as a new beginning. His last film, "2046," was planned as science fiction but demonstrated the gravitational pull of the past as well, succumbing to the hothouse delirium of 1960s Hong Kong. A kaleidoscopic head rush, "2046" quoted so extensively from Mr. Wong's earlier work that it felt like a midcareer retrospective unto itself.

To a notorious degree Mr. Wong finds his way as he goes, often plunging into production with little more than an outline. His exploratory method gives his films a unique shape and intensity; the result is inseparable from the process.

In the mid-1990s, with Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese sovereignty looming, Mr. Wong directed three films - "Chungking Express," "Fallen Angels" and "Happy Together" - in quick succession. Made as if on deadline, they have a brash Polaroid-like immediacy. The films that followed, "In the Mood for Love" and "2046," are period reveries rooted in the melancholy of transience. It's only fitting that he had a hard time letting go; each took a seeming eternity to complete. "In five years you can make five films, but I spent five years making one," he said in his Manhattan hotel room soon after the shoot, referring to "2046."

"My Blueberry Nights" - repeat kisses notwithstanding - is a conscious attempt to pick up the pace. For one thing, Mr. Wong shot it in just seven weeks. "We thought of this as a vacation film, spontaneous and contemporary," he said. "Making a film under the best conditions, it's like a rock band on tour," he added, ever the rock-star director: his trademark sunglasses stayed on through the New York night shoots.

For another, Mr. Wong said that the project "happened overnight." He was in New York last year researching another movie, "The Lady From Shanghai," a period drama (no relation to the Orson Welles film noir) that would star Nicole Kidman and shoot in Russia, Shanghai and New York. When that was postponed, he decided to make a smaller, off-the-cuff film, which he conceived as a vehicle for Ms. Jones, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, who had never acted before.

"She's a natural," he said, adding that he had instructed her not to take acting lessons.

As he sees it, "My Blueberry Nights" is in a sense about Ms. Jones's face as it reacts to different environments. "In Memphis there's something very classic about her presence," he said. "In New York it's very contemporary."

Ms. Jones seemed less confident than her director. "I have no idea what he saw in me or where he saw it," she said on a coffee break one night. "When I got the call, I thought he wanted some music for his movies. It's weird because I feel like I've looked uncomfortable in every music video I’ve been in."

William Chang, who has been Mr. Wong's editor, production designer and costume designer from the start, is with him on “My Blueberry Nights," but for the first time in 15 years Christopher Doyle, the iconoclastic Australian cinematographer, is not. Together Mr. Wong and Mr. Doyle invented a much copied visual shorthand for romantic alienation, a mix of neon-smudged kinesis and slow-motion contemplation. But their relationship has been strained of late, with Mr. Doyle's Hollywood workload and Mr. Wong's erratic schedules becoming incompatible. In Mr. Doyle's place is Mr. Khondji, the French cinematographer best known for the dank atmospherics of David Fincher's "Seven."

Just as striking as Mr. Doyle's absence from the project is the presence of Hollywood actors. Over the years Mr. Wong has built up a repertory of Hong Kong luminaries who learned to thrive under his impulsive demands. "My Blueberry Nights" subjects its starry ensemble to an open-ended process that would be inconceivable on a studio movie. (The film was acquired for American distribution by the Weinstein Company earlier this month.)