John Woo reflects on a career driven by action, ambition, and artistry.
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More than three decades ago, John Woo reinvented the action movie.
Now, its fair to say that we are undergoing a revival and re-appreciation of Woos work.
The Criterion Collection recently released his 1979 filmLast Hurrah for Chivalry.
AFace/Off4K comes out next month.
(One forHard Targetcame out a couple of years ago.)
I see the Jean-Pierre Melville poster in the background.Yeah.
He was my hero.
I loved his movies.
I stole from two of his movies,Le SamouraiandThe Red Circle,when I madeThe Killer.
He was the biggest influence on me.
We studied them in the library.
We had a community, a group of young people who would get together and make experimental films.
We watched great movies at the Italian, French, and British embassies.
Art films were showing in commercial theaters back then.
That was how we learned the movies.
I learned so much from European films in my 20s.
If you didnt have a relationship with anyone in the business, youd never get a chance to work.
My first job was script supervisor for a film.
So I grouped them together again and madeLast Hurrah for Chivalryas a tribute.
I tried to pay tribute to Akira Kurosawa.
I really liked the Chinese swordsmen in ancient times, who had the true spirit of chivalry.
I was fascinated with four very famous assassins in ancient China and their code of honor.
I used their story as a base, then created my kind of hero.
In Hong Kong back then, there was a lot of competition.
Ive never learned kung fu.
Ive never learned any sword-fighting.
But Im crazy about dancing and musicals.
I wanted the action to look beautiful, exciting, and elegant.
And I went with my instincts.
Like, the character of the drunken swordsman [inLast Hurrah for Chivalry] was me!
When I was young, I was a drunkard.
But I believed I had a code of honor.
I wanted to do good and defend justice.
But I wanted to show some kind of humanity.
In the film, the drunken swordsman sacrifices himself for a friend.
That always moves me.
Even when I was making gun-battle movies, likeHard BoiledorThe Killer, they had that kind of spirit.
Thats my philosophy of life.
Life is beautiful as long as you have real friends.
I was too young.
I hadnt learned enough.
I think the dialogue is a little too cheesy.
When you understand Chinese, the dialogue is too modern.
It doesnt sound like a classic movie.
But in general, I still love the movie.
Its too early to make that kind of movie.
Those kinds of movies are poison.
Nobody wants to watch them.
At the time, the most popular movies were what we called fist and pillow movies.
The fist was kung-fu, martial-arts fighting.
And the pillow was a sex film.
So I was frustrated.
All I could do was make some kind of kung-fu film and a comedy.
I like comedy, but I dont have that kind of passion.
Where did that anger come from?I had so much anger about society.
Rich people were getting richer, and poor people were getting poorer.
The criminals were nearly untouchable, and good people never got true justice.
The studio still didnt let me make the real movies I wanted to make.
So I put all of my anger into the comedies.
I dont want to hide and be happy.
If Im not happy, I dont want to do something to have a go at just anybody.
Later, I met my good friend Tsui Hark, a brilliant, talented filmmaker.
I recommended him to a new studio.
I put all of the French elements into the film.
At last, I really could do whatever I wanted.
The fist and pillow movies didnt work anymore.
There was a young audience, a new generation, and they wanted something new.
We had some open-minded financiers and producers who trusted us, which gave us a lot of creative freedom.
But for me, it was hard.
I came from the old-time movies like the French New Wave.
It was hard to talk to the crew about Federico Fellini, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville.
It was hard to let people know what I was really thinking.
Thats why I feel like a lot of our movies shot without a script.
There was no script.
It was all in my mind.
But this was a good thing as well, because I could control everything myself like Stanley Kubrick.
I love to shoot on soundstages.
Every day, I just shut the door and made my own film.
The financial people never came to the set, never asked anything.
And the audience loved it.
We both came from very poor families, and we struggled by ourselves.
When I was writingA Better Tomorrow, all of the dialogue came from my heart and life experiences.
When he read the dialogue, he said, Hey, its my dialogue!
I have these same kinds of feelings.
He had been a failure for three years.
People had been laughing at him.
Every one of his movies was a flop, and I was in the same situation.
People were laughing at me.
So he thought my dialogue was speaking from his heart.
Then, when I gave him a raincoat and sunglasses, he looked like Alain Delon or Ken Takakura.
Hed never fired a real gun, and he hadnt learned any martial arts.
He had never punched a guy before.
You guys were thinking of working together again for a while.
Do you think that could happen?Its hard.
The hardest thing is to get the right script.
And we got old.
I would still like to do something like Clint Eastwood.
Like, a main character thats going back to the old days.
But you were dealing with such elaborate action set pieces.
At that time, in 1990, Hong Kong gangsters were out of control.
They had firearms, weapons much more powerful than the police force.
They were robbing banks and shooting people on the street.
Originally, it was a story about a serial killer, a psychopath, who was murdering babies.
This was really happening in Japan.
I read news about people who would sneak into the supermarket and put poison in baby food.
I was so upset and angry.
Where was the justice?
Some people might learn from the movies!So I changed my mind.
Tony Leung was supposed to play that role, the psychopath.
I changed my idea, made him an undercover cop.
I gave up the idea of shooting babies.
Then, after that, the Gulf War happened.
The war in Kuwait.
This made me very angry and made me change the story.
The second half is pretty much a war movie.
It wasnt like the usual criminal or gangster film.
I put the biggest gun-battle scene in a hospital, which was being attacked by a huge army.
Theyre stuck in a war zone like in Hanoi.
The action sequences were all sort of by instinct.
The opening action scene in the teahouse we shot that before we had a story or script.
The real location was gonna be torn down in two weeks.
The teahouse was a memorable building.
Everybody in Hong Kong knew it.
So I had to shoot it before they tore it down.
It looked great, you know?
I made up the rest of the story afterward.
It was fun to make that movie.
It wasnt fun for the financier.
It took 150 shooting days, and we went way over budget.
But it made money.
Tell me about how your first American film,Hard Target, came to be.
WhyHard Target?Before that, I had never dreamed of coming to Hollywood.
He and A. Kitman Ho had a production company, and they offered me a very interesting script.
It was kind of like a martial-arts movie but with a lot of great philosophy.
Oliver Stone lovedA Better Tomorrow.
And I liked him.
When I came to his office, I said, My English is pretty poor.
So he told everybody, Read his mind.
And I wanted to try something new.
Then later, I got a phone call from Universal.
In American films, every kind of movie had its own audience.
The action fans only watched action movies.
The comedies were only for the family.
The melodrama was for whatever intellectual audience.
So they wanted me to makeHard Targetmore like a Hong Kong film with all of these elements.
It was maybe not a good idea.
We had a test screening, and it was horrible.
After 15 minutes, some people left the theater.
So, uh, anyway, it was nice to learn something.
Im really surprised and grateful that people still rememberHard Target, and so many people now love it.
How do you like it?I like it.
I like the original cut, which was never released by the studio.
The version that people see had been cut by the studio.
For a while, there was a much longer cut circulating on bootleg VHS.
Is that your preferred cut the original?Yeah, maybe!
What was it like working with Van Damme?Uh … well … he …
I think he liked movies, and he liked to do a good job.
He was, you know, quite popular at that time and a little too busy.
He got so many phone calls!
On the set, we had to spend some time waiting for him after he talked on the phone.
Anyway, I think hes very serious about his work, and hes smart.
He can fight, hes charming, and hes kind of a romantic.
He was willing to try new things.
Even if an action scene looked pretty dangerous, he still wanted to go for it.
And he loved my movies.
He always wanted to be better than Chow Yun-fat.
Is it true that he wanted a camera focused on his muscles?Yeah!
He was like a big kid.
My specialty is: I know how to make my actors lookgreat.
I know how to find the proper angle to make them look beautiful.
Because I love my actors.
I respect my actors.
The actors in my films are everything.
And I like to stand beside a camera to watch their performance.
At that moment, I dont care about the background, the color, or the lighting.
I just want to look at the eyes.
And Im so happy when they do something unexpected.
I tried so hard to make Van Damme look great, and he knows it.
Even Tom Cruise he understands it.
Tell me about Wilford Brimley.
He was highly recommended by my stunt coordinator Billy Burton, who was a good friend of his.
I didnt know he was a big star.
He was a funny guy and a very respectful person, and he had a great sense of humor.
He tried to make everybody happy.
I was so young.
I didnt know how to talk to him.
When I tried to talk to him, I felt so small, even though he was pretty short.
I didnt know how to tell him what to do.
But he was just, Haha, dont worry, son.
I can do this and that and that.
He was so humble and never got mad.
Then for the explosion shot, he asked to do it himself.
He wanted to do the running through the house, then the big explosion.
The whole performance came from him.
I learned so much from him.
He liked to talk about the old times, a lot about movies, a lot about life.
Face/Offmight be your most popular American film.
The movie was set about 200 years from now.
In the meantime, I started to make it like a comedy.
Or a comedylikemovie, not a real comedy.
Im a big fan ofMADmagazine.
The characters in my movies sometimes feel like characters from there.
The whole thing is so ridiculous.
People who can change their faces its so unreal.
I was so shocked and surprised.
I got to have so much creative freedom.
In the meantime, I was inspired by Travolta.
He was just like his character, Sean Archer.
He always came to me John, dont feel upset or anything.
Its only a movie.
We used that kind of attitude to make the film, and the two actors worked together so well.
They spent about two or three weeks rehearsing with each other.
They were imitating each other, walking and talking even the laughs, the crying, everything.
They made it a lot of fun.
Thats why I make a film.
Its not Travolta or Cage.
The audience understands that the most dangerous action is usually played by the stunt guy.
And I didnt want to do digital faces.
I just tried to maintain the beauty of the action.
If a shot looks beautiful and stunning, I want to keep it.
Its about the film language.
I think they have a true spirit and great professional honor.
If something is memorable, beautiful, or challenging, they love to do it.
In some way, I feel they have the same qualities as a ballet dancer.
Even if they gave me notes, they still let me make the last decision.
The only thing they were concerned about was the violence usually.
Not more than five shots instead of a hundred bullets in your film.
I understood, and I sympathized.
They learned it fromBullet in the Head.
This was many, many years ago, but I still feel pretty bad.
Is there a film from your American period that you wish people would take another look at?Windtalkers.
There were not many people who really understood that movie or liked it.
It was not good timing.
The movie had to be released in 2001.
Then 9/11 happened, so they had to push it.
They were so afraid audiences wouldnt want to watch a war movie at that time.
I had a conflict with the writers.
I said, My kind of movie is usually about friendship, respect, and honor.
But the writers didnt feel good about that.
They said, The enemy is the enemy.
The enemy has to be destroyed.
I tried to make it a human story.
The audience didnt expect a movie about friendship.
But Im still proud of that movie.
Did you sense that at the time?
Thats when you went to China and didRed Cliff.Yeah, I sensed it.
I didnt like it.
Even the drama movies were always using a handheld camera.
I couldnt read the actors faces.
I couldnt hear what they were saying.
I couldnt pay attention to their performances.
I had a problem with that kind of style.
I left the theater.
I couldnt stand it.
I think its not a real movie.
I didnt feel I got old or anything like that.
I just didnt like the new changes.
You just shot another movie,Silent Night, is that correct?Yeah.
The whole movie is without dialogue.
It allowed me to use visuals to tell the story, to tell how the character feels.
We are using music instead of language.
And the movie is all about sight and sound.
But in this movie, I tried to combine things without doing any coverage shots.
I had to force myself to use a new kind of technique.
Some scenes were about two or three pages, but I did it all in one shot.
Its almost like youre finally doing a musical.Yeah.
[Laughs]
How do you view your American period now?
I learned how to shoot an action scene with CGI and other technical things.
But in Hollywood, it feels safer, because everybody is so professional.
In Hong Kong, they just shoot the movie even without a script.
But Im still learning.
Every movie is a learning process for me.
This is a great world.
Everybody deserves to learn.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
