Born in Shanghai, he moved to Hong Kong with his parents in 1963. Coming from the Mainland and speaking only Mandarin and Shanghainese, he spent hours in cinemas with his mother. In the mid-1980s, he became a screenwriter/director at The Wing Scope Co and In-gear Film Production Company, the production houses owned by renowned Hong Kong actor/movie producer Alan Tang.
He made his directing debut in 1988 with As Tears Go By, produced by Alan Tang. A crime melodrama of the kind then hugely popular but already displayed one of Wong's principal trademarks in its atmospheric and sometimes expressionistic colour palette.
His next film, Days of Being Wild, also produced by Alan Tang, a drama about aimless youth set in the early 1960s, established his trademark form: elliptically plotted mood pieces, with lush visuals and music, about the burden of memory on melancholic, misfit characters. It was a box office failure but now regularly tops Hong Kong critics' polls of the best local films ever made.
He established his independent production company, called Jet Tone Films Ltd. Wong went on to direct several feature films in the 1990s produced by Jet Tone, which allowed him to work at his own pace. Among these was Chungking Express, which follows the lives of two Hong Kong policemen and the mysterious women they meet and fall in love with. Originally intended to be a distraction piece for him to get his mind off of the heavily delayed Ashes of Time, it ended up being one of his most popular films.
Fallen Angels was originally intended to be the third act of Chungking Express, but when the tone didn't fit with the other two parts, he cut it out and made it a stand-alone movie instead; it is seen as a semi-sequel to Chungking Express and is a neo-noir film about a disillusioned killer trying to overcome the affections of his partner, a strange drifter looking for her ex-boyfriend, and a mute trying to get the world's attention in his own ways, all set against a sordid and surreal urban nightscape.
Wong's fourth movie, Ashes of Time, is a star-studded wuxia (martial arts swordplay) story; the desert shoot in Mainland China dragged on for over a year and resulted in one of contemporary Hong Kong cinema's most notorious commercial disasters.
His first major international recognition was at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival where he won the Best Director prize for Happy Together. It "uses gorgeous, saturated images set to an eclectic soundtrack of tango by Argentinian maestro Astor Piazolla, Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso and Frank Zappa instrumentals to chronicle the stormy affair of a gay couple living as expatriates in Buenos Aires.
In the Mood for Love is a story about food that centres around a writer. Including scenes shot in Bangkok and Angkor Wat, the filming took 15 months. This was an especially arduous time for lead actress Maggie Cheung whose hair and makeup reportedly took five hours each day. Working without deadlines, the film's upcoming première at Cannes nonetheless put some pressure on Wong to finish editing.
Wong's 2046 (2004), a film about capturing lost memories, was the third chapter of a shared story that began with Days of Being Wild and continued with In the Mood for Love. Infamous for long, drawn-out shoots without any real regards to deadlines, a running joke amongst the crew was that he would finish in the year 2046.
Wong Kar-Wai's first full English-language film, My Blueberry Nights (2007), opened the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as one of 22 films in competition. The lead, American singer-songwriter Norah Jones, made her acting debut in the film.
Director Wong Kar-Wai is renowned for legendarily long incubation periods for his films.  Five years after his last movie, Director Wong brings us The Grandmaster, his kung fu-filled biopic of Wing Chun master, Ip Man, which reunites him with 2046's Zhang Ziyi and Tony Leung.  
Despite his background as a screenwriter, one of Wong's trademarks as a director is that he works largely through improvisation and experimentation involving the actors and crew rather than adhering to a fixed screenplay. This has been a frequent source of trouble for his actors, his financial backers and many other people connected with his films, sometimes including himself.
Source: Internet