HOW movies end up getting made. We often think of them as products of the studio machine, borne of screenplays that swam their way through the system like agile sperm earning a deserving arrival at a well-financed egg. Yet this can be a deceptive picture. Some movies are as coincidental as the merging of chocolate and peanut butter. Some movies are the result of nothing other than pure chance.
Smoke is an excellent case in point.
The movie's beginnings trace back to December of 1990, when The New York Times hired novelist Paul Auster to write an inspiration piece for Christmas. Wang phoned Auster and they got along well enough that they agreed to make a film together, working backward from the incident described in the paper. Sporadically, over the next four years, they devised a small storyline that would follow the article's basic themes and allow them to work it into the final frames of the film. This would be an unremarkable tale of a movie's creation but for the fact that Smoke is based on how chance occurrences, rather than being the basis for tragedy and disappointment, can bring about happiness. Structurally, Smoke has the form of a jigsaw puzzle not unlike Pulp Fiction or Atom Egoyan 's recent Erotica .