CHUNGKING EXPRESS — Wong Kar Wai puts "Dreams" on the menu

Shot on a shoestring in six wild weeks, CHUNGKING EXPRESS is the movie that put legendary Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai on the international map—along with his star, pop diva Faye Wong...and her Cantonese cover of The Cranberries's hit "Dreams."

Host Rico Gagliano learns how the song, the director, and the singer all came together to capture Hong Kong at a moment of anxiety and hope—and how the tune still unites people in karaoke bars across Asia. Featuring Cranberries guitarist Noel Hogan, Hong Kong-born indiepop star Emma-Lee Moss (aka Emmy The Great), Variety and Artnet writer Vivienne Chow, "Chungking" score co-composer Roel A. Garcia, and NPR critic-at large John Powers—the author, with Wong Kar Wai, of "WKW: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai."

The third season of the MUBI Podcast, titled “Needle on the Record,” dives into the unifying power of movie music and tells the stories behind some of cinema’s most renowned “needle drops”—moments where filmmakers deployed pre-existing music instead of an original score. Each episode explores an iconic marriage of song and image that’s become part of pop culture. It’s a six-part mixtape for film lovers.

CHUNGKING EXPRESS is now streaming on MUBI in India, the Netherlands, Latin America, and many other countries.

SWITCHBLADE SISTERS is streaming on MUBI in the UK, Ireland, Canada, and the US. And to stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

And to listen to many of the great songs featured in this season, check out our "Needle on the Record" Spotify playlist here.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode contains spoilers. I want to take you back to 1989, in the cramped little bedroom of a teenager named Noel Hogan. One of the many bored kids in Limerick City. Which is kind of so West of Ireland. It was a pretty dull place in the eighties, kind of very gray, old kind of industrial town that had seen better days. There wasn't a lot of, kind of, employment here. That's Noel. And like a lot of local kids back then, he had figured he might as well start a band, called The Cranberry Saw Us. As in S-A-W, U-S Not sauce. Terrible name. We were really young, so I'm going to use that as my defense here. That name was the brainchild of their lead singer who almost immediately quit. Leaving Noel, as lead guitarist, to write the band's songs, just rudimentary instrumentals. And one evening up in his room after a night on the town. He was inspired to break out his guitar. Yeah, I had... I'd seen a guy play in a bar, I'd seen a guy play acoustic. He was playing a song, I don't know what the song was, it was something he'd written. But there was one part of the song where he was playing and he... And he let go of the E string and it was just open... And it just turned that E into something else. And I'd never seen that before. I still remember that it was kind of the nucleus of what I was thinking. That's great. That sounds so cool. And I took that basic part from the middle of some guy's song that I'd seen him just move his finger off one string and built the whole song like around that, then. Not long after the Cranberries Saw Us, got a new lead singer, a girl who lived in the country outside of town named Dolores O'Riordan. She added lyrics, making it a song about the joy of first love. And they cut a demo.<i>♪ Oh, my life is changing everyday</i><i>♪ In every possible way</i> It's a song they ended up calling <i>Dreams</i>.<i>♪ And oh, my dreams</i><i>♪ It's never quite as it seems</i> We were so young. I can't kind of tell you, like I was, I suppose, 17 or something when I came up with that idea. And I mean, if you saw my bedroom at the time, I mean, it'd just fit a bed in there, and me. You do this thing lying on your bed one day, and then you flash forward to five years and it's been played for, you know, the president's wife. Yeah, in 1992 <i>Dreams</i> became the first monster hit for the now way better named The Cranberries. And two years after that, with help from one of the world's greatest filmmakers, it was reportedly the favorite of a president's wife. The president of China. Technically, he's called the General Secretary of China. But anyway, I'm Rico Gagliano, and welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the streaming service that champions great cinema. On this show, we tell you the stories behind great cinema. This is season three. We're calling it Needle on the Record As we're diving into a few movie history's iconic needle drops. When filmmakers take preexisting tunes, drop them in their films and end up with something legendary. And while I know you know the song<i>Dreams</i> from ads and movie trailers and just like hearing it playing at the grocery store, you probably have no idea how legendary it became in corners of Asia. Thanks in part to <i>Chungking Express</i>, the movie that launched the international career of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai and helped make <i>Dreams</i> and the band who wrote it icons of the era. The Cranberries became huge in Hong Kong. Like when Dolores O'Riordan died, there was like a tribute show on the radio. That is Hong Kong born indie pop star Emma-Lee Moss, a.k.a Emmy the Great, and she is one of many folks I talked to about this film, this song, and the pop diva turned movie star who covered it, Faye Wong. I spent years at karaoke trying to imitate the way she sings, and I still can't. You know, I haven't succeeded. For me, it's a story about a moment of hope and optimism that's hard to imagine today. So stop doomscrolling and listen up as we drop the needle on <i>Chungking Express</i>. Wong Kar-wai was born in Shanghai, China in 1958. But when he was five, his family moved to the British colony of Hong Kong, part of town called Kowloon. He was an only kid. Didn't speak Cantonese. Kind of isolated. So it's easy to imagine him taking solace in one thing about his new home. He grew up on a street where there were lots of music stores. And as you walk down the street, partly because a lot of sailors went there from various places, it was a big port, so there was music from all over the world that was playing there. That's film critic John Powers.

He wrote the book <i>WKW: 5:29

The Cinema of Wong Kar-wai</i> along with his co-writer Wong Kar-wai. So he grew up listening to things like Xavier Cugat and Johnny Mathis and then Chinese songs, both Cantonese and Mandarin. So he grew up surrounded by a soundtrack of music, playing almost all the time when he'd be out walking. I've always said that, you know, that maybe shaped his sense of life a little bit, because his almost all of his movies are musicals in a way. Really? How would... They're not literally musicals, but they're carried by music. You know, in his first film,<i>As Tears Go By</i>, there is in the middle this incredibly long scene where they play all of <i>Take My Breath Away</i>, Which was in <i>Top Gun</i>. But this is the Hong Kong version by Sandy Lam. Yeah it's not so much a scene as a whole chapter, over seven minutes of screen time. The gangster hero and the woman he loves connect in part and follow each other all around, yes, Kowloon. The song fading in and out on the soundtrack. Like a breeze blowing through the scenes. Right off the bat and Wong Kar-wai's debut movie as in his life, pop songs felt like they're just in the air. And actually, for a guy that into music cinema crazy Hong Kong at the end of the eighties was kind of the perfect place and time to start directing movies.'Cause the line between the film world and the pop music world, in fact, basically boundaries of any kind were totally blurred. It was a zoo. I mean, it was like a wild west thing. It really was all about churning out movies fast for an audience that couldn't get enough of them. There's almost no regulation. People were just doing stuff and there wasn't a deep bench of great actors. So often people were just taking pop stars and models and putting in movies to see if it worked. And Wong Kar-wai had always had a particularly good eye for that because he could see the special thing. And in 1990, when he was casting his two part, second film, film called <i>Days of Being Wild</i>, he saw that special thing in a singer named Faye Wong. Who is Faye Wong? Don't know. She's whatever you want her to be, I guess. That again, is Emma-lee Moss. When she's not making music she's writing a book about Hong Kong pop, a.k.a. Cantopop. And she says early in Faye Wong's career, people wanted her to be anything but herself. She had come to Hong Kong when she was 18 from Beijing to join her dad, and she was taking singing lessons and she got a record deal. And because she was from the mainland, they tried to force her to have this Hong Kong personality. Because they were worried that Hong Kong audiences wouldn't accept someone who was from the mainland. Because remember, back then, Hong Kong was still part of the British Empire. Locals saw mainland Chinese people is kind of backwards. Stuck in the communist past. So Wong's handlers gave her an Anglicized name. Shirley Wong. And she didn't enjoy it. She felt forced into like a fake version of herself, I guess. And audiences seemed to sense it. She put out three albums full of the kind of easy listening ballads that were big at the time, and each sold fewer copies than the last. But none of that apparently bothered Wong Kar-wai, because when he auditioned her, he saw an edge that her handlers had been trying to sand away. He was very much taken with Faye Wong, who's an interesting figure because she was a mainlander, and she had a particular aura that he thought was interesting. She seemed cooler than the people in Hong Kong. Because there's something kind of other-worldly about her. Yeah. And in fact, she seemed cooler and then cooler. Cooler than even the Hong Kongese who think of themselves as the coolest. Yeah, you'd look at her and think, oh, that that's the cool person. He could see it and, you know, and that's, that's part of his gift is to find people and realize, oh, I can make them cool. He was going to cast Faye Wong in part two of <i>Days of Being Wild</i>. Except there never was a part two. In fact, after part one came out in 1990, you'd have been forgiven for thinking there'd never be another Wong Kar-wai movie ever again. When Wong Kar-wai made <i>Days of Being Wild</i>, I think everyone thought it's going to be a gangster movie because his previous movie had bee <i>As Tears Go By</i>, it had been billed as a gangster movie and it had every big star in Hong Kong. You think you're going to see <i>The Godfather</i> with every big star in Hong Kong and you get there and you get this weird art movie about this self-destructive rich kid and how he treats women badly and nothing violent happens. And then it ends with the weirdest ending maybe of any movie you can think of. Where suddenly somebody is preparing to do something and he's not been in the movie to that point. And it just ends. At the time when the film came out and it was a box office flop. That's Vivian Chow. Back then, she was barely a teenager, but she grew up to write about Hong Kong arts and culture for the <i>South China Morning Post,</i><i>The New York Times</i> and these days for <i>Artnet</i> and <i>Variety</i>. I remember my uncle went to see it because of this ensemble cast, and afterwards we had a family dinner and he was like so angry. He was like,"I don't know what this film was about."This is like totally nonsense."It's rubbish, has no story!" Blah, blah, blah. It's like, you fooled me. I thought I was in for an action film. Yeah, exactly. I think he was so angry that he almost wanted to slash the chairs in the cinema. So for Wong Kar-wai, this is not the zenith of his popularity. Well, that's the thing. So among the general public, people just thought that, oh, this is, he's like, being too pretentious. But I think from critics, they raved. And so it was it was a film that got everyone talked about. Especially because something that was on the whole city's mind as the eighties rolled into the nineties, was the fact that in less than a decade, 1997, Hong Kong wasn't going to be British. It'd be handed over to China. In the meantime, shouldn't Hong Kong filmmakers be striving for something more than violent gangster flicks? That was definitely discussed. What kind of stories ought to be told and how Hong Kong cinema can reflect the culture or the conditions of the city. What's next for Hong Kong cinema? Turns out what was next would be <i>Chungking Express</i>. But before Wong Kar-wai could figure that out, Faye Wong, with her fake persona she hated and now no <i>Days of Being Wild, Part Two</i>, to act in, was figuring out what was next for her. She disappeared for some time and she went to study in New York. Or, you know, she tried to. She got there too late to enroll in music school. Instead, as she recalled in an interview years later, she just roamed the Big Apple for a few months, and saw a quote"So many strange, confident looking people."They didn't care what other people thought of them." And then when she came back, she became a different person.<i>♪ She told me once again</i><i>♪ Never go away</i><i>♪ The look in your eyes I'm so free</i> Like in every way. Her first album, post hiatus, added more smoky R&B to her repertoire. It included this tune <i>Tears on the Wind</i>, her first in English, and the CD cover proudly announced her new old name. She gave a self the name Faye Wong, which was her Mandarin name, Wong Faye. And then she just, I think she did like two or three albums a year or something for a really long time. Each a little different, tweaking her sound and her image. In 1993, she dropped the LP<i>100,000 Wise</i>, doing covers of songs from Western alt rockers like Tori Amos and throwing in some killer, alt pop originals like this one called <i>Flow Not Fly</i>. The Hong Kong kids fell in love with her. Oh, she was the huge, like, rising star because it was so cool to be a fan of Faye Wong. She was like the Nirvana of that moment. Oh, interesting. When you mention Nirvana, because, yeah, I remember the way she dressed at the time and she was like wearing all these grungy style clothes and... I mean, there was no internet at the time, so I had no idea about, you know, Nirvana or, you know, the grunge music scene. And the people were commenting like,"Oh, how come Faye Wong dresses like this? They're not like glamorous outfits that people would be expecting like, Cantopop starts to be wearing. And she'd never dance. She never pandered. You know, she would do shows where she didn't dance. She would just sing. In fact, Wong once told an interviewer that she designed stage costumes with long sleeves that hid her hands so she wouldn't feel self-conscious about how little she moved them. You know, a lot of people, obviously, they try to entertain and, and that's great. But Faye Wong just... you had to come to her I guess. She just did her thing. She just couldn't be put in a box. In other words, Hong Kongers finally saw what Wong Kar-wai had seen years before. A mainlander who out cooled them all, something totally modern. Which made her, and her music, the perfect fit for the director's next movie. A wry snapshot of modern Hong Kong, 1994. Now just three years before its handover to mainland China.<i>Chungking Express</i> is basically a two part movie. And so you actually have two stories that only have the most tenuous links, but which show the different sides of Hong Kong. The first story is set at night in gritty Kowloon. The second longer one happens in daylight in an area called Hong Kong Island. I think he wanted to Hong Kong day and night for a couple of reasons, I think. The first reason is, he told me that the Island of Hong Kong was suddenly live and happening with young people and was it felt a bit like Soho. So he wanted to do something about that. But but I think also, like many people in Hong Kong, they could feel that at some point they were going to be given away. So he's trying to capture a particular moment of Hong Kong. You know, everything's vibrant, but they know it could all change. Yeah, that it would change. So you want to capture that, too. And he did. In a movie that, like most Wong Kar-wai films, is about a million things, but kicks off with the story of a guy who, like his city, is obsessed with time running out. He's a Kowloon cop who's been dumped by his girlfriend on April Fool's Day. Lovelorn, he decides to wait exactly a month for her to take him back. He marks the days by buying cans of her favorite food, pineapple. One can a night, making sure each one has the same expiration date as his relationship might, May 1st. But on the last night, grocery clerk says he's already taken the old pineapple cans off the shelves."Get a fresh one!" He tells the cop."People like you are hung up on freshness." The cop yells in desperation. But then, a minute later, in a voiceover, he resignedly sighs."Even plastic wrap expires."Is there anything in the world that doesn't?" A lot of people would reference that to the anxiety of the upcoming handover in 1997. In just three years. What is going to happen to Hong Kong? And a lot of people were leaving at the time because of the uncertainty of the future of the city. So there was this expiry date. This staring expiry date, it's 1997, an expiry date. People didn't know at the time. So that's the dark nighttime side at <i>Chungking Express</i>. But then a third of the way through the movie, Wong Kar-wai shifts to daylight and story number two. Featuring a food server in hip Hong Kong Island, played by Faye Wong, named Faye, who's like real life Faye in ways every music lover in the audience would probably recognize.<i>♪ All the leaves are brown(All the leaves are brown)</i><i>♪ And the sky is gray</i> In the movie Faye dreams of leaving Hong Kong for the West. She's constantly blasting The Mamas and the Papas' <i>California Dreaming</i>. Like Faye Wong, movie-Faye does leave for the West. And like Faye Wong, movie-Faye also comes back. Changed. Got so... Now she's an airline attendant. and she's come to pay a visit to a guy she was obsessed with but never quite dated. Played by Tony Leung."Where do you want to go?" She asks him."Wherever you want to take me" says Tony. Will they stay in Hong Kong, will they go? Instead of telling us Wong Kar-wai smash cuts to the end credits, accompanied by Faye Wong's cover of a different song about dreaming. Her version of the Cranberries tune is called <i>Dream Lover</i>. It's as joyful as the original with Cantonese lyrics that add a hint of trepidation. They're about waiting to fall into a long kiss with an enticing stranger. It could be movie-Faye singing to Tony Leung. Or maybe a city singing to the country it's about to get involved with. Kind of freaked out, but hoping that just like mainlander Faye Wong, it'll turn out to be really cool. There's no right or wrong, you know. No yes-or-no answers to how things would develop. But I think it tried to give the film a more positive, upbeat ending. And a more positive outlook to the question of the handover. Or, that's one interpretation. Anyway, I should say<i>Dream Lover</i> came out a month before the movie debuted. The tune was already a smash, but now it was about to get bigger.<i>Chungking Express</i> goes global. Coming up in a minute. Stay with us. Okay, everyone, so MUBI is a curated streaming service which means every film on the platform is there 'cause an actual human being, who actually loves movies, actually loved that movie and thinks you're going to love it. And in that spirit, let me recommend a movie I love that is streaming on MUBI in the U.S. right now. That would be <i>Switchblade Sisters</i>, directed by Jack Hill. It is a pulp classic from the seventies. It's about a kick ass girl gang called The Dagger Debs who deal with betrayal while they're locked up in juvie. A user left a review on a MUBI that calls this film, quote, "The Trash Othello." That's accurate. By the way, <i>Switchblade Sisters</i>, a movie not unrelated to <i>Chungking Express</i>, because Quentin Tarantino's very short lived company, Rolling Thunder, distributed both of them back in the mid-nineties. So there you go. It has the QT stamp of approval, if that's of value to you. I have to mention the selection of movies on MUBI can be different depending on your country, and they don't stay forever. So if you're listening to this a year from now, you know, don't be surprised if you miss this particular film. But if not <i>Switchblade Sisters</i>, I know you will find movies you'll love on MUBI because, yeah, we love them. Subscribe now at MUBI.com and start digging to your little film loving hearts content. One last thing. Since this season is all about great needle drops, we've created a Spotify playlist of all the songs we're covering so you can listen along with us week by week. You will find the link to that playlist in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to it. So it's Summer 1994 and Wong Kar-wai's first film since<i>Days of Being Wild</i> is finally about to hit theaters.<i>Chungking Express</i>, which actually might have caught some of its fans by surprise.'Cause he'd been working for years on something totally different. See, back in 1990, after <i>Days of Being Wild</i> tanked, no producer in town would bankroll a Wong Kar-wai movie. So he set up his own company named Jet Tone after the roar of planes flying in and out of the airport nearby. And he started making a martial arts epic called <i>Ashes of Time</i>. And he kept working on it. And kept working on it. Ok, his style of making a movie, the most striking thing about it is often he wouldn't write the script till the morning.- Before the shoot?- Before the shoot. And he's painstakingly, he's doing and he's writing it in the morning, and some mornings he can't think of what to do. And his production designer friend, editor William Chang is as perfectionistic as he is, so that sometimes in building the sets, they will be months behind because it's not perfect for William. So you're making this martial arts movie off in China, and it's really hard. You have this perfectionism where every shot has to be perfect, every detail in every frame has to be perfect. And as he was editing<i>Ashes of Time</i> after this huge, long, complicated shoot, he needed to do something quick. As in make another movie quick. It had taken years just to shoot <i>Ashes of Time</i>. Now, Wong realized he'd need profits from two films to keep Jet Tone afloat And to be profitable the second one would have to come together fast and cheap.

Voila: 23:28

<i>Chungking Express</i>. They decided to shoot at a place called Chungking Mansions. It's this big building of many, many levels that at one time was a fancy place. By the time he shot the movie, it was a place filled with immigrants swirling, doing business illegally, avoiding the cops. And they simply one night plunged into that and began shooting with no permits. Nobody knew they were coming. And they did that for several days just racing through doing that. That was for the nighttime Kowloon story and for the daytime story. There's famously on Hong Kong Island, an escalator that actually rises up outside through the city. It's very cool that you can look into apartments. People look at you, and it's very, very close. And as it happens, one of the people who lived right near that escalator was his cinematographer, Chris Doyle. So they would just go in and use his apartment as the place where the cop, played by Tony Leung, lives. Speaking of Doyle, he kept the camera mostly handheld so they could shoot fast. Ending up with a woozy documentary look. And post-production was also a blur. That was the first time I remember in my life not sleeping for three or four days. That's Roel A. Garcia, along with Frankie Chan he created the film's amazing score pretty much overnight. We only had two weeks before the premiere, or even less. 2 to 3 weeks from the moment that you started until the moment the movie premiered. Until the movie premiered. You know, it was all rushed, and I've been sitting for three or four days smoking, you know, in the studio, we smoke a lot during that time. And, you know, it's just so unhealthy, really. Luckily, I was still young then. Wong Kar-wai later said the whole process was like making a student film. So when <i>Chungking Express</i> debuted in July, beating the big budget <i>Ashes of Time</i> into theaters by months, probably few in Hong Kong had high expectations. They were wrong. When it came out, it became a sensation because it captured something. You know, I think this was probably maybe the first really youthful movie that Hong Kong had produced that felt cool in a youthful way rather than just young people being dumb. In fact, for some young Hong Kongers like Vivian Chow, it was life changing.<i>Chungking Express</i> is a film that I've seen 400 times at least, and how important it is. I think it gave me, the little me at a time, where I wanted to live when I grew up. Because the film was set in the central escalator and I thought, wow, it would be so cool to live along the central escalator when I grew up. And eventually I did. I lived there for a decade. And then the movie started finding that level of fan worldwide. It's a big sensation in Hong Kong. Then it plays... Japan loves it, and Japan being, you know, one of those great places, if people love it, then somehow that expands out. Illegal copies got into China, so that was cool. But then it began playing at all the festivals. And I remember seeing it playing when it played, I think for the first time maybe in North America at the Toronto Film Festival. And the audience going berserk, just loving it so much 'cause it just it was like suddenly the French New Wave had been discovered, but more fun. I mean, <i>Chungking Express</i> isn't a demanding film, but it had all the stuff people loved in French New Wave stuff. It had beautiful people. It had it had liveliness, it had film style tricks. It had it had energy and life and wit and all of that. And if you watched film school student films, the number of people who were copying Wong Kar-wai in that period was flabbergasting. I mean, people all over the world were doing it. Because it also looked like something you could do. Oh, yeah, because it's so like. It seems so seat of the pants. Yeah, exactly. It looks like you just grabbed it. And the other thing international audiences took from the film was Faye Wong. In that great sequence, when she's at the snack bar and she's dancing to <i>California Dreaming.</i> The first time it ever played in North America at the Toronto Film Festival. After she finished dancing, the crowd applauded.'Cause it was such a magical sequence, and people came out thinking,"Who is that woman?" That's the other thing about Faye Wong, people, I mean, I mean, hardened film critics came out thinking, "Who was that?" For sure,<i>Chunking Express</i> was a great introduction of her to a much bigger international stage. She became quite popular in Japan, thanks to the film. And so she did quite a few concerts in Japan, and she did the theme song of Final Fantasy, the video game. What? So she was like that big.<i>♪ I never sang my songs</i><i>♪ On the stage</i><i>♪ On my own</i> Yep, this Faye Wong tune, <i>Eyes on Me</i>, graced the Japanese made videogame <i>Final Fantasy VIII</i>, sold half a million records in Japan and cracked the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S. Even before that, she'd become the first Hong Kong music star ever featured on the cover of<i>Time</i> magazine's Asia Edition. By the end of the century, the Guinness Book named her the best selling female Cantopop singer ever.<i>♪ You know, it's me there in the corner</i> And as for <i>Dreams</i>, after Faye Wong's cover blew up in Hong Kong in 1994, Noel Hogan and his band had some inkling it was out there. We noticed it happened and then kind of forgot about it a little bit because we were so busy touring. But then bit by bit you'd kind of hear oh yeah, <i>Dreams</i> has taken off in this country and that country and but you really, really didn't hit till we went to Hong Kong and then later to China that we saw the full impact of it and how big it was. The Hong Kong gig would have been the Cranberries World Tour, May 1996. And... We were absolutely shocked. This isn't an actual sound from the show that night, but it's an accurate recreation. Turns out Faye Wong had popularized both <i>Dreams</i> and the band who'd written it. They performed in Hong Kong at the Coliseum, and I went to see that show. The Coliseum hall holds more than 10,000 people, the biggest Hong Kong concert venue at the time. And how big a deal was that? A lot of other foreign bands, western bands, when they came to Hong Kong, they performed at smaller venues. Even for some bands that were very popular at the time, like Suede, Oasis. And then there was a huge, there was a crazy show that had Foo Fighters, Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth in one night. Amazing! But they didn't play at the Coliseum? No, they were at the Queen Elizabeth Stadium. And that had only, what, 3000 people? In fact, the Coliseum was usually reserved for Cantopop superstars. Which now the Cranberries kind of were. It was big. Way bigger than we thought it was going to be. We were shocked that people knew who we were. And then <i>Dreams</i> is always the last song of the set. It always has been for some reason. It was from a very early stage to the last show we ever did. And yeah, the place just erupted. I was sitting on the fourth row or something. It was quite mindblowing to see the band performing in front of me like that up close. And I really liked Dolores, so it was such a joy to be able to see her perform in person. 15 years later, when The Cranberries finally toured mainland China, they got a similar greeting and heard some pretty tasty rumors. Like that one about the First Lady of China being a fan of <i>Dreams</i>. I don't know what version, but apparently this was made known and everywhere she went, if she went to any kind of functions, they'd always play <i>Dreams</i> as she came in. And I think even at one point, I don't know how true this is, the Olympic team for China used it for a while as well as they would enter and things like this. I have to say, as a journalist, I found no evidence to corroborate either claim. But the fact that you can take them seriously at all maybe says something. I want to end this story by playing your cover of a cover. Emma-lee Moss, a.k.a. Amy the Great, doing <i>Dream Lover</i>. This is her playing it at WMYC Greene Space in New York City back in 2016. I was sitting on stage right next to her. It was a live taping of my old radio show. We'd asked her to do a few covers, and this is one she picked. Turns out it's been part of her set for years. It's just such a... it's first of all, it's a crowd pleaser because people are like,"Oh, I know that song." And then, you know, it takes them a while to figure out what it is. Unless you're in Hong Kong, in which case they know exactly what you're doing. But then she says the song started helping her sort of find her tribe. People she could connect with over shared culture and heroes. They turned out to be all over the place. Everywhere you go, there's someone who loves Faye Wong, like, I played in China and like I couldn't communicate with anyone because my Mandarin was so terrible. But the moment we started talking about Faye Wong, we're talking in Faye Wong song titles. That's how we were communicating. An Irish kid writes a song in his room. A mainlander sings it to Hong Kong. Then a movie sends her music everywhere. The world's got more fractured since <i>Chungking Express</i>. But look... We speak the same language. And that is the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us to make sure you get a front row seat for more deep dives into movies and music. Next week the credit sequence that launched the rock and roll era. This was a purposeful move to kinda capture the tone and the feeling of post-war America. But especially with the music that came out of it, it had unintended consequences. The story of the mother of all needle drops,<i>Rock Around the Clock</i> follow us so you don't miss it. Meanwhile, this episode was hosted, written and edited, by me Rico Gagliano. Jackson Musker is our booking producer, Ciara McEniff is our producer. Stephen Colon mastered and engineered. Martin Austwick composed our original music. Thanks this week to Eva Krysiak, Kevin Lee, Oliver Wang, and Michael Ziming Ouyang. This series is executive produced by me, along with Jon Barrenechea Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. If you loved the show tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen. Let them know we're not your standard movie chat show. Also if you've got questions, comments, or you want to share your hot take on what Chunking Express is all about, there are so many possibilities, email us at podast@mubi.com And of course, to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast, just head over to MUBI.com to start watching. Thanks for listening, be safe... Now go watch some movies.