Wong Kar-wai

Four of his ten planets sit in fire signs, three in water and two in air, which leaves a single one in earth. Fire acts and water registers; the element that would hold a thing to a fixed shape is down to one planet, which in the record of a director who works without a finished script is the first thing to notice. The record names Wong Kar-wai the Hong Kong director of Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love, and says he moved from Shanghai at five.

The Sun sits at twenty four degrees of Cancer and his Moon on the twenty ninth degree of the same sign at noon, though it may have crossed into Leo, so the private half is either the Moon in the sign it rules or the Moon wanting the room. Mercury sits in Leo at nineteen with Uranus at eleven. Cancer looks after what it belongs to and withdraws rather than confronting. For a filmmaker who shoots without a script, a chart whose two lights may both sit in the most protective sign there is explains the method better than the biography does.

Jupiter sits a fifth of a turn from Uranus seven hundredths of a degree from exact, the closest contact here, and that reads as being in the right place when something shifts. Mercury sits that same fifth of the circle from Neptune at just under nine tenths, picking a thing up without being told, and in easy contact with Saturn at just over a degree, which is patience and long concentration. Intuition and structure on those terms, in a director improvising a film, is the pair that makes it possible. Saturn alone was retrograde at his birth.

Jupiter came the whole way round to its Libra starting point on 5 September 2017, at fifty nine, nine months after Saturn had closed its own second lap, and four circuits precede it. Libra asks who the work was made alongside, which for a director who finds the film while making it rather than before it is the question that recognises it. One planet in earth, in a method with no script in it, is the fact to keep.