ASHES TO ASHES Wong revisits one of his early films.

Stop recutting your films, Wong Kar-wai. It’s too early to say, but the legendary Hong Kong filmmaker is on a course to rival Oliver Stone for “most do overs.”

Wong is famous for discovering his films while shooting and editing, often finessing his movies at the last minute. The print of 2046 arrived so late for its world premiere at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival that the movie actually started unspooling before the last reels had arrived. (Wong reworked the film before its general release.)

Wong’s next movie, 2007’s My Blueberry Nights, has shown in both an international and a slightly shorter U.S. version—although Wong says the shortening, which critics viewed unfavorably, was intended to eliminate unnecessary cultural references. (“It’s a film about Americans, so I think it makes sense for me to work with the Weinsteins to say, well, this is more precise for the American audience,” he says. “I’m sure they know Americans more than me.”)

Now comes Ashes of Time Redux, a restored version of his 1994, Sergio Leone–inspired martial-arts epic, which until now was available in the U.S. only in substandard import copies. Although the movie is seven minutes shorter than its most commonly printed running time—it exists in several versions, some with extra action sequences the producer added against Wong’s wishes—fans have had difficulty determining exactly what has changed.

“A lot of people come to me and say, well, you have done a lot of things—we noticed, like, this part is longer and that part is shorter,” Wong told us at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. “I said, well, you have to find it out yourself, because we make a lot of changes, but somehow the film is the same film to me.”

It’s unlikely, however, that Ashes has ever looked this good. Filmed by cinematographer Christopher Doyle in shocking shades of orange and blue, frequently from angles so oblique it’s difficult to tell where the sky ends and land begins, this is martial arts imbued with the poetry of Wong’s romances. The elliptical story—following the experiences of a hired sword (the late Leslie Cheung) in southern China—is held together by the lush score, recorded for the new version by Yo-Yo Ma.

The need to recut the film was more a matter of necessity than of dissatisfaction. According to Wong, Ashes of Time had to be collected virtually overnight when the lab that housed the negative went bankrupt in 1998. Learning that the film hadn’t been properly stored, his team decided to restore it—a process that involved cobbling together pieces of the film from overseas prints. “I think, well, since there are so many different versions, why don’t we just do a definite version?” Wong says. “It started as a restoration but at the end, it’s more than a restoration.… Somehow it gave me a chance to revisit all these things again.”

Wong’s third feature (after As Tears Go By and Days of Being Wild), the film was unusual for the early ’90s for being a coproduction between China and Hong Kong. The fact that Wong was working in extreme conditions—and with elaborate period costumes and art direction—didn’t hamper his penchant for finding his story as he went. “We spent, like, six months in the desert,” he says. “The original novel [by Louis Cha] is like an epic. There were hundreds of characters in it.… Basically, we created a kind of a prequel to that novel. In the novel, actually, they are already in their seventies or eighties.”

For Wong, looking at his earlier work is almost like looking at an old photo album: The film is filled with early appearances by the actors who would become Wong’s stock company (Cheung, Tony Leung, Carina Lau and Maggie Cheung in a “special appearance”). It also forms a striking counterpoint to Chungking Express—Wong’s first international breakout hit—which he made on Ashes’ heels, eager “to create something totally different” from Ashes of Time.

“You have to refrain yourself from looking at it with the mind-set of today, because it’s like a Pandora’s box,” he says, regarding the recutting. “If I [were] to make this film now, I [would] do it this way and that way—but what’s the point? So I just want to keep it as what it’s supposed to be.”

Ashes of Time Redux opens Friday 14 at the Music Box.