The Principle
Andrew Lau Wai-Keung's cinematography is inseparable from the city that formed him. Hong Kong — its cramped alleyways, rain-slicked streets, flickering neon signs, and layered urban density — is not merely a backdrop in his work but an active visual participant. Before he became a director, Lau spent years honing his craft as a cinematographer under directors like Wong Kar-wai and Ringo Lam, absorbing wildly different sensibilities: Wong Kar-wai's lyrical, impressionistic drift and Lam's gritty, pressurized tension. The synthesis of those two influences defines his signature — images that are aesthetically gorgeous yet never decorative for decoration's sake, always in service of psychological and emotional weight.
What separates Lau from his contemporaries is his insistence that beauty and danger occupy the same frame. In Infernal Affairs, the city rooftops and glass-walled corporate towers are rendered with a cool, almost architectural elegance, yet every image carries a quiet dread. Identity, deception, and moral erosion are not communicated through dialogue alone — they are embedded in the way light falls on a man's face, in the shallow depth of field that isolates characters in their loneliness, in the reflective surfaces of glass and water that suggest fractured selves. Lau understands that a thriller is only as suspenseful as its visual grammar allows it to be.
His directorial career deepened his visual ambitions rather than diluting them. Even in more commercially-oriented productions like Initial D or Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, his cinematographic instincts remain active. Racing sequences in Initial D are shot with a tactile immediacy — the camera placed low, close, feeling the centrifugal pull of mountain curves — while Legend of the Fist deploys theatrical light pools and expressionistic shadow reminiscent of 1930s Shanghai as filtered through a modern action sensibility. Across genres, Lau's eye is consistent: charged, precise, and emotionally calibrated.
The emotional core of his philosophy is one of surveillance and intimacy. Characters in his films are constantly watching and being watched, and his camera literalizes this tension. He shoots people as though observing them without their knowledge — candid, close, occasionally distorted by lens choice — creating a voyeuristic unease that is central to the moral architecture of films like Infernal Affairs, Infernal Affairs II, and Infernal Affairs III.
Camera and Movement
Lau's camera work is defined by a productive tension between control and spontaneity. Handheld operation features heavily throughout his filmography, but unlike the chaotic, aggressively unstable handheld of pure cinéma vérité, his approach is more considered — a slight, breathing unsteadiness that suggests presence and proximity rather than chaos. In Chungking Express, where Lau served as cinematographer for Wong Kar-wai, this technique reaches one of its most celebrated expressions: step-printed frames, fast focal lengths, and handheld movement combine to create the sensation of a city simultaneously in frenetic motion and elegiac stillness. The camera moves through Kowloon's Chungking Mansions like a restless consciousness.
Framing choices reflect his interest in confinement and exposure. Lau frequently employs tight, compressed compositions that emphasize the claustrophobic pressure of urban environments and moral entrapment. In Infernal Affairs, characters are often framed against massive glass windows overlooking the Hong Kong skyline — isolated figures dwarfed by the city they are trying to control, the outside world both visible and unreachable. He also uses deep, wide establishing shots to establish spatial geography before collapsing into intimate close-ups, creating a rhythm of surveillance and intimacy. Telephoto lenses flatten backgrounds and compress space, reinforcing a sense of inescapable proximity between hunter and hunted.
Movement choices are genre-sensitive but always purposeful. In action sequences — the nightclub confrontations of As Tears Go By, the rooftop moments of Infernal Affairs, the driving sequences of Initial D — the camera is low, close, and physically committed. Crash-zooms, whip pans, and quick reframes inject visceral energy. In quieter dramatic moments, the camera slows almost to a locked stillness, letting actors breathe within the frame while light and color do the emotional heavy lifting.
Light
Lau's approach to lighting is fundamentally source-driven and atmospheric rather than conventionally motivated. He gravitates toward practical light sources — the ambient spill of neon signage, fluorescent tubes in police stations, the warm tungsten glow of a cramped restaurant kitchen — and allows them to shape and sculpt rather than simply illuminate. This gives his images an authenticity that feels lived-in, even when the compositions themselves are rigorously designed. In As Tears Go By, the warm, suffocating amber tones of Mongkok's back streets are built almost entirely from available practical sources, lending the gangster milieu an unglamorous, bruised intimacy.
Contrast is a critical tool. Lau consistently works with high-contrast light ratios, allowing deep shadows to occupy significant portions of the frame. This chiaroscuro tendency — likely developed through years of working in Hong Kong's inherently photogenic nightscapes — becomes a moral vocabulary in the Infernal Affairs trilogy. Characters who cross ethical lines are frequently lit from strong lateral or underlighting sources, introducing an element of visual instability. The cool blue and silver tones of the trilogy's police headquarters sequences are counterpointed by warmer, more orange-hued triad settings, using color temperature as a kind of moral thermometer that, crucially, never resolves into simple coding — both worlds are corrupt, and the light reflects that ambiguity.
In Legend of the Fist, lighting takes on an almost theatrical expressionism — deep shadows cut across action scenes, single hard sources create dramatic pools of light amid darkness, echoing both Casablanca-era Hollywood and traditional wuxia aesthetic. This marks Lau's ability to adapt his foundational principles to different registers: the light is always purposeful, always in dialogue with character psychology, whether it operates naturalistically or expressionistically.
Color and Texture
Color in Andrew Lau's work is not cosmetic — it is structural. His palette tends toward desaturation punctuated by bursts of intense, localized color, a strategy that creates emotional hierarchy within the frame. The Infernal Affairs films are perhaps his most disciplined color exercise: the overall palette is cool and steely, dominated by greys, blues, and muted silver tones that evoke institutional coldness and moral ambiguity. Against this controlled desaturation, moments of warmer color — a lamp, a woman's dress, the amber of a whiskey glass — carry extraordinary emotional weight precisely because they are rationed.
During his work on Chungking Express and Days of Being Wild as cinematographer alongside Wong Kar-wai, Lau engaged with a richer, more saturated palette — the deep greens, yellows, and reds of Days of Being Wild establish a lush, hothouse melancholy that influenced his own directorial color sensibility. The textural choices in these films — the slight grain of faster film stocks, the softness of diffused practical sources — create a tactile quality, as though the image itself has a physical temperature. That interest in texture carries through to his directorial work, where digital formats are graded to retain a sense of material weight rather than clinical clarity.
In Initial D, color is deployed with a more commercial vibrancy — the saturated night sequences on Mount Akina, with racing headlights cutting through deep blue darkness, reflect the film's genre energy — but Lau still maintains his characteristic discipline of using color psychologically rather than decoratively. Characters' emotional states correspond to subtle shifts in color temperature, grounding even the most kinetically-edited sequences in an emotional logic.
Signature Techniques
- Step-printing and frame manipulation: Used to notable effect during his work on Chungking Express, selective step-printing creates a stutter between stillness and motion, capturing the subjective experience of time distortion in an urban environment — a blur of movement around a stationary emotional center.
- Shallow depth of field portraiture: Throughout the Infernal Affairs trilogy, extreme shallow focus isolates characters from their environments, rendering backgrounds into soft, impressionistic washes of light and color. This technique literalizes psychological isolation and the impossibility of trust.
- Reflective surface composition: Glass, water, mirrors, and polished floors are consistently used to create doubled or fragmented images of characters, particularly in Infernal Affairs, where identity duality is the central theme. Reflections are never incidental — they are compositional arguments.
- Low-angle, ground-level camera placement: Especially pronounced in Initial D and action sequences throughout his directorial career, placing the camera low and close creates physical immersion, communicating speed and danger through spatial geometry rather than editing alone.
- Practical neon sourcing: Rather than gelling units to simulate neon, Lau works with actual practical sources wherever possible, allowing the inconsistency and color bleed of genuine Hong Kong signage to create organic, non-reproducible light conditions.
- Compressed telephoto surveillance framing: Telephoto lenses used to observe characters from a distance, flattening spatial depth and creating the sense of subjects being unknowingly monitored — a visual metaphor that runs through the moral architecture of his crime filmography.
- Cool-to-warm color temperature counterpoint: Systematically using cool institutional blues against warmer human-scale tones to map moral and emotional geography within a scene, ensuring that color temperature functions as subtext rather than mere production design.