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John Woo Yu-Sen (Chinese: 吳宇森; Pinyin: Wú Yǔsēn) (born May 1, 1946) is an internationally and critically acclaimed Chinese film director and producer. Woo is widely known for his stylised movies which are renowned for their balletic action sequences, Mexican stand-offs, and use of slow-motion.^[1] He directed the notable Hong Kong action films, A Better Tomorrow, Hard Boiled, and The Killer.^[1] His English-language movies include Hard Target, Broken Arrow, Face/Off, and .^[1] As a young boy, Woo wanted to be a Christian minister; he later found a passion for movies influenced by European film, the French New Wave and Jean-Pierre Melville.^[1] Woo has said he was shy and had difficulty speaking, but found making movies a way to explore his feelings and thinking and would "use movie as a language".^[1] Woo cites his three favourite films as Lawrence of Arabia, Seven Samurai and Melville's Le Samouraï.^[1] Woo was described by Dave Kehr in The Observer in 2002 as "arguably the most influential director making movies today".^[2]

Biography

At age five Woo's parents were faced with persecution and his Christian family fled to Hong Kong. During this time, the Woo family led a hard life in the slums at Shek Kip Mei, since his father had tuberculosis and could not work^[3][4]. Woo went to Concordia Lutheran School and received Christian education. In 1953 the family was rendered homeless, when their house was burned to the ground as part of the famous HK Shek Kip Mei fire<ref name="Elder" />. Thanks to donations from charities, his family was able to move into another house. Unfortunately, by this time, a wave of crime and violence was beginning to infest Hong Kong's housing projects.

In order to escape his dismal surroundings, Woo would retreat to the local movie theater. Woo found his respite through musicals like The Wizard of Oz. During his youth, he enjoyed watching Western movies, especially the final scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where the two comrades run out gun blazing (where he got the inspiration of holding two guns). Woo is also a fan of Hollywood musicals.

Woo married Annie Woo Ngau Chun-lung in 1976 and has had three children<ref name="Elder" />. He plans to continue living in the United States.

Hong Kong career history

In 1969, when he was 23, Woo got a job as a script supervisor at Cathay Studios. In 1971, he became an assistant director at Shaw Studios, where the famous Chang Cheh took him under his wing. In 1974 he directed his first feature film The Young Dragons (鐵漢柔情, Tie han rou qing). Choreographed by Jackie Chan, it was a Kung fu action film that featured dynamic camera-work and elaborate action scenes. The film was picked up by Golden Harvest Studio where he went on to direct more martial arts films. He later had success as a comedy director with Money Crazy (發錢寒, Fa qian han'') (1977), starring Hong Kong comedian Ricky Hui.

By the mid-1980s, Woo suffered a burnout. His films were failures at the box office and he retreated to Taiwan in exile. John Woo— once called the new comedy king of Hong Kong— seemed to be on his way out. It was then that director/producer Tsui Hark provided the funding for Woo to film a longtime pet project called A Better Tomorrow (1986).

The story of two brothers— one a cop, the other a criminal— the film became a sensational blockbuster. A Better Tomorrow singularly redefined Hong Kong action cinema with its emotional drama, slow-motion gun-battles and gritty atmosphere. The film's trenchcoat/sunglasses fashion sense, and combat style of using a gun in each hand in close quarters— often referred to as 'Gun fu'— would later inspire Hollywood filmmakers such as Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowski brothers.

Together with leading man Chow Yun-Fat, John Woo would make several more Heroic Bloodshed films in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His violent gangster thrillers typically focused on men who were steadfast in their honor and friendship, even though such values forced them to become outcasts in a rapidly-changing world that was more motivated by money and progress. In this respect, Woo's characters were modern-day knights who wielded guns instead of swords. He was heavily influenced by the films of French director Jean-Pierre Melville.

The most famous of these movies would be The Killer (1989), which brought Woo international recognition and began the Triad film movement. Often named as the best Hong Kong movie ever made, it was widely praised by critics and fans for its action sequences, acting and cinematography. With The Killer becoming the most successful Hong Kong film in the U.S. since Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon (1973), John Woo became a cult favorite. One year later he made another masterpiece, Bullet in the Head, that he still considers his most personal work. The movie was a major commercial failure compared to the other films however.

It was only a matter of time before Hollywood took notice. By this time, John Woo had many American admirers, including the likes of Martin Scorsese, and Sam Raimi - who compared Woo's mastery of action to Hitchcock's mastery of suspense. Enormously impressed with his work, American executives green-lighted a contract for Woo to work in America. With the 1997 handover of Hong Kong fast approaching, Woo decided that it was indeed time to leave.

John Woo's last Hong Kong film was Hard Boiled (1992), which he made as an antithesis to his movies that glorified gangsters. Upping the ante with an all-out action film, it featured a Hollywood-scale spectacle in its second half with policemen and criminals waging war inside a hospital, while helpless patients are caught in the crossfire. The sequence lasted nearly 30 minutes. There is a long take in this scene which follows Tequila and Tony go from one floor to another. It lasts 2 minutes and 42 seconds. On the Criterion DVD and laserdisc, this chapter is called 2 minutes, 42 seconds. The film climaxes with supercop Chow Yun-Fat singing a lullaby to a baby while gunning down incoming gangsters, and then jumping out of a window to safety below, baby in arm.

John Woo: Interviews (ISBN 1578067766) is the first authoritative English-language chronicle of Woo’s career. The volume includes a new 36-page interview with Woo by editor Robert K. Elder, which documents the years 1968 to 1990, from Woo’s early career in working on comedies and kung fu films (in which he gave Jackie Chan one of his first major movie roles), to his gun-powder morality plays in Hong Kong.

United States career history

In 1993, John Woo found himself in a new land with a new culture. He was commissioned by Universal Studios to direct the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Hard Target. While Woo was used to creative freedom in Hong Kong, he was forced to deal with a compressed production schedule. Like many foreign directors who come to Hollywood, Woo found himself hamstrung at every turn by the studios, having to deal with things such as how many people could be killed in each scene, how many bullets Van Damme could pump into somebody, how Van Damme could behave and so on. When initial cuts failed to yield an "R" rated film, the studio took the film from Woo's hands and pared it down themselves in order to produce a cut that was "suitable for American audiences". A "rough cut" of the film, supposedly his original unrated version, is still circulated among fans.

It would be three long years before Woo made another American directorial attempt. Starring John Travolta and Christian Slater, Broken Arrow was a frantic chase-picture with a bigger budget. Unfortunately, Woo once again found himself hampered by studio interference and editors who did not share his sense of aesthetics and filming style. What resulted was a film that, despite modest financial success, lacked Woo's trademark style.

Still smarting from his bitter experiences, Woo cautiously rejected the script for Face/Off several times until it was rewritten to suit him (by shifting the futuristic setting to a modern one). With Paramount Pictures offering him significantly more freedom this time around, Woo set out to craft a complex story of two enemies— a law enforcement agent played by John Travolta and a terrorist played by Nicolas Cage—who embark on a fantastical surgical procedure that allows them to switch faces. Trapped in each other's identities, they play a cat-and-mouse game that allowed Woo to do what he did best: emotional characterization and elaborate action. Face/Off opened in 1997 to critical acclaim and performed well at the box office, grossing over $100 million in the United States alone. As a result, John Woo became the first Asian director to hit mainstream, paving the way for other Asian filmmakers to follow in his footsteps. Many fans and critics consider this his best American film.

John Woo has made three additional Hollywood films: , Windtalkers and Paycheck. While Mission: Impossible II was a huge hit in 2000, Windtalkers and Paycheck have been box office duds that were lambasted by critics. It is unclear whether Woo will be able to bounce back from these disappointments.

Recently, John Woo directed and produced a videogame called Stranglehold for next gen consoles and PC. It will be a sequel to his 1992 film, Hard Boiled. He is also slated to return to China with Chow Yun-Fat sometime in 2008 to shoot his next major project, the highly anticipated Red Cliff, based on a historical epic battle from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is currently in pre-production. He is also involved in numerous projects in a producing capacity.

Quotes

By Woo

• Woo discovered then television actor Chow Yun-Fat to star in A Better Tomorrow, not anticipating the level of stardom the actor would achieve. Woo said of Yun-Fat in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder, "This guy was so elegant and also had great charisma. He reminded me of Alain Delon, and Steve McQueen, Ken Takakura—all my great idols, all in him. And I thought, while we are shooting, I just felt, "He’s a great actor; he will be popular.” But I didn’t know he’d be that popular, you know?"
• Woo was quoted in the June 2000 edition of Premiere magazine: "I love doves. I am a Christian. Doves represent the purity of love, beauty. They're spiritual. Also the dove is a messenger between people and God... When I shot The Killer, these two men, the killer and the cop, they work in different ways, but their souls are pure, because they do the right thing. In the church scene, I wanted to bring them together. I wanted to use a metaphor of the heart. I came up with doves —they're white. When the men die, I cut to the dove flying —it's the soul, rescued and safe and also pure of heart. So the dove became one of my habits: I used it in Hard Boiled, Face/Off, and in Mission: Impossible II".
• Woo likes the look of the Beretta 92F/FS pistol and had featured it in many of his movies. He stated in an interview that it "is a great character" and added that "it's so strong and elegant." He also mentioned that other pistols looked dumb to him.

By others

• In reply to a studio executive who said "I suppose Woo can only direct action scenes," Quentin Tarantino has been quoted as saying "Sure, and Michelangelo can only paint ceilings!"
• When Jean-Claude Van Damme was trying to get Woo for Hard Target he described him as "the Martin Scorsese of Asia".

References in other media

• In the anime series, R.O.D the TV which features three girls named after real life Hong Kong action stars, 'John Woo' is the name of a mysterious carrier pigeon.
• In another anime series, FLCL, two characters can be seen watching the climactic end sequence of an action movie. Although the screen in not visible, it can be surmised that it is indeed a John Woo film, as one of the film's characters exclaims, "What are all these pigeons doing in here?" and a multitude of flapping wings heard. The screen was then broken, and a flock of white doves flew out of the TV set. Also the episode uses gun fu and frequent slow motion, as common in John Woo films. Also in the preview of the above mentioned episode (a preview of the next episode is alway shown at the end of the previous, as with most anime series), the character Haruko mentions humorous things to keep in mind when seeing a John Woo film.
• Japanese professional wrestler SUWA, of the promotions Dragon's Gate and Pro Wrestling NOAH, utilizes a seated dropkick that frequently sends its victim flying back-first into the corner. As a fan of Hong Kong action cinema, he calls this move the "John Woo", as a homage to the impact of shotgun blasts on the human body in Woo's films.
• In the video game Max Payne there are many homages and references to John Woo. For example, the black suit and tie Max is seen wearing at the beginning, as well as the dual guns and jumping and shooting in slow motion. One of the game's difficulty levels is named "Hard Boiled," and John Woo's name is mentioned as a password for entering into a gangster hideout, Also a quote by the main character when he is ambushed is "I made like Chow Yun Fat".
• In the PC game F.E.A.R., the developer admitted that they been inspired by John Woo action movies that they wanted the action to be exactly epic to Woo movies.
• The Christian rock band Newsboys has a song called "John Woo" which makes reference to the religious symbolism he often employs in his films.
• "I've got more action than my man John Woo" is a lyric from the Beastie Boys song "Sure Shot" from Ill Communication.
• In one of the versions of the PC game "Unreal Tournament", when a character is killed by another wielding dual pistols, the deceased character is listed by the kill readout as having been "John Woo'd" by the victor.
• Typing the cheat code "JOHNWOO" in the PC game Rise of the Triad gives the player dual pistols.
• Picking up a second submachine gun in the PC game Shadow Warrior causes the player's avatar Lo Wang to quip "Be proud, Mr. Woo!"
• Comedian Daniel Tosh references John Woo in a joke on both his CD "True Stories I Made Up" and his DVD "Completely Serious." ("I want to be rich enough to release a dozen doves every time I walked into a room. Everyone would be like 'Did you see that guy come out of the bathroom? The one with doves!' 'I bet that's John Woo's kid.'")

Filmography

• Fist to Fist (1973)
• The Young Dragons (1974)
• The Dragon Tamers (1974)
• Hand of Death (1975)
• Princess Chang Ping (1975)
• From Riches to Rags (1977)
• Money Crazy (1977)
• Follow the Star (1978)
• Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1978)
• Hello, Late Homecomers (1978)
• To Hell with the Devil (1981)
• Laughing Times (1981)
• Plain Jane to the Rescue (1982)
• When You Need a Friend (1984)
• Run, Tiger, Run (1985)
• Heroes Shed No Tears (1986)
• A Better Tomorrow (1986)
• A Better Tomorrow II (1987)
• Tragic Heroes (1989)
• The Killer (1989)
• ''A Better Tomorrow: Love & Death in Saigon
• Bullet in the Head (1990)
• Once a Thief (1991)
• Hard Boiled (1992)
• Hard Target (1993)
• Broken Arrow (1996)
• Once a Thief (1996)
• Face/Off (1997)
• Blackjack (1998)
• (2000)
• Windtalkers (2001)
• Paycheck (2003)
• All the Invisible Children (2005)
• The Battle of Red Cliff (2008)

Other works

• Hostage (short BMW film) (2002)
• Stranglehold (video game) (2007)
• Appleseed Ex Machina (2007)

References

See also

• Cinema of China
• Cinema of Hong Kong
• Hong Kong action cinema

External links

• John Woo at the Internet Movie Database
• John Woo at HKcinema.net
• Hardboiled.de (via Internet Archive)
• A John Woo Retrospective
• ACTION WEB - Your John Woo & Tsui Hark Resource
• John Woo - The Independents
• John Woo Interviews
• Ten HARD BOILED Moments - The Best of John Woo
• A John Woo inspired Short Prime Justice

•  • [ e] Films directed by John Woo

Fist to Fist (1973) • The Young Dragons (1974) • The Dragon Tamers (1974) • Princess Chang Ping (1975) • Hand of Death (1975) • Money Crazy (1977) • Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1978) • Hello, Late Homecomers (1978) • Follow the Star (1978) • From Riches to Rags (1980) • To Hell with the Devil (1981) • Laughing Times (1981) • Plain Jane to the Rescue (1982) • The Time You Need a Friend (1984) • Run Tiger Run (1985) • Heroes Shed No Tears (1986) • A Better Tomorrow (1986) • A Better Tomorrow II (1987) • The Killer (1989) • Tragic Heroes (1989) • Bullet in the Head (1990) • Once a Thief (1991) • Hard Boiled (1992) • Hard Target (1993) • Broken Arrow (1996) • Once a Thief (1996) • Face/Off (1997) • Blackjack (1998) • (2000) • Windtalkers (2002) • Paycheck (2003) • All the Invisible Children (2005) • Red Cliff (2008)

•  • [ e] Cinema of Hong Kong
	• Action films • Films by year: • • • • • • • • • • • • • Shaw Brothers Studio

A Better Tomorrow A Better Tomorrow 2 Blood Brothers (2007 film) Bullet in the Head Fist to Fist Hand of Death Hard Boiled Hard Target Heroes Shed No Tears John Woo (disambiguation)

John Woo (musician) Last Hurrah for Chivalry List of action films Once a Thief (1991 film) Red Cliff (film) Robert K. Elder Stranglehold (video game) The Magnetic Fields Thrive More results