Get your own Free HomepageINTRODUCTION
"It's just like the 1930s, when Fritz Lang came to Hollywood as the first of a whole group of artists from Germany who revolutionized American movies. I think John Woo is the first in a new wave of film talent from Asia that, in the 1990s and beyond, will transform our cinema beyond recognition."
—Reginald Hudlin, director, Boomerang
At just around the stroke of midnight on June 30, 1997, somewhere in Orange County, CA, , the émigré Hong Kong film director John Woo and his family sat glued to CNN, watching a live broadcast of the official ceremony marking the return of the former British Crown Colony to Chinese rule.
In this, Woo was just like countless other ethnic Chinese around the world, another witness to a turning point of history.
But John Woo is also a special case: In 1992 he had become the first Asian to make a feature film for a major Hollywood studio. And within days of the Hong Kong handover his third and most successful Hollywood production—the John Travolta / Nicholas Cage thriller Face/Off—had opened across America.
The story of Woo's journey from Hong Kong to the United States is the story of one refugee among millions in the latter half of the 20th century. It is also a multicultural odyssey with unique global implications.
To the American movie industry, John Woo is new blood, one of the most exciting talents in the crowded action film arena.
But in Hong Kong, John Woo (born Wu Yu-sum in Guangdong China 51 years ago) has been a central commercial film figure for over two decades, racking up 26 feature credits and achieving top-ten box office status in three successive decades. He was known primarily as a hit comedy specialist until the mid-1980s, and then as the creator of a series of romantic and violent gangster melodramas that broke records, won awards and changed the face of the flourishing local movie industry forever.
Woo's gangster films, notably The Killer, and Hard Boiled, migrated to several festivals and quickly made him a cult hero around the world. And now he has become a member of a very exclusive club: the select circle of foreign-born directors who have achieved true A-list status in Hollywood. (Others include Independence Day's Roland Emmerich, Starship Troopers' Paul Verhoeven and Twister's Jan De Bont.)
FILMMAKER
Woo's "action films rediscover the lyricism of violence. . . . Woo, employing a supercharged blend of slow motion and fast editing, breaks a scene down into hard, atomic kernels of mayhem."—Owen Gleiberman, critic, Entertainment Weekly
.It is John Woo's current status as one of the most exciting "new" directors in Hollywood that will initially attract attention to any book about his life.
It's immediatly clear that he is a master of action-movie pyrotechnics, a bold stylist whose trademark gestures (two-gun shoot-outs, slow-motion mayhem) have already influenced a generation of young directors.
"Woo's camera was everywhere at once," wrote film scholar Barbara Scharres, in American Cinematographer magazine, of her discovery of his work, "moving in on his actors innermost thoughts, but traveling frequently with a momentum that seemed to express a force of life large than his character's world ... Rather than the minimal and straightforward storytelling that the audience expected in an action film, (Woo) gave them time fragmented in the realm of myth, tragedy drenched in romanticism, emotions expressed in velocity, earth-shaking explosions, and spurting blood as the ultimate sacrifice. It was action with a soul..."
It was not, that is, a matter of craft alone. Woo is also celebrated for investing sequences of conflict with passion and humanity, for re-examining old-fashioned moral imperatives of loyalty and self-sacrifice in an action-adventure context. He has been acclaimed for bringing soul and feeling and a bold sense of style to a mostly moribund genre. His work takes violence out of the realm of shock and spectacle and turns it back into human action — into a drastic and often tragic activity undertaken by fully fleshed-out characters for reasons that make sense. At least to them.
These are genre films with deep roots in Asian culture. Like the yakuza eiga gangster movies of Japan, the idiosyncratic sub-genre of Hong Kong mobster films unspool in an echo chamber of legends, centuries old. The root myths are the wuxia "Chinese Robin Hood" tales that fill the 11th century epic novel Water Margin, with its noble outlaw-patriots, and the kung fu tradition of the Shaolin Temple, two-fisted rebel monks arming the populace to resist tyrants.
Understandably, perhaps, considering his hardscrabble background of early poverty, Woo tends to assume that the world is a harsh and dangerous place, to be redeemed only by individual human acts of random high-mindedness. This is an unquestioned axiom of all his films. One of his best early pictures, 1978's Last Hurrah for Chivalry, is a swordplay romp set in a corrupt medieval milieu in which absolutely everything has a price tag. "But I paid 1,000 taels of gold for her!" gasps a rich landlord after being skewered by his new bride. "Yes," sneers his enemy, "But I paid her 2,000 taels to kill you."
A Bullet in the Head (1990) updates the concept to war-ravaged Vietnam, with its utter amorality and no-holds-barred savagery. (A typical set piece: During a bank robbery in Saigon, a Jeep full of ARVN soldiers screeches to a stop out front, seemingly to intervene. But after they've dispersed the thieves, the troops proceed to loot the premises themselves.) Into this maelstrom Woo tosses three street toughs from Hong Kong, friends since childhood, and studies the stresses and strains upon their relationship. For him, only bonds of loyalty on a microcosmic, one-on-one scale, like love or friendship, have the tensile strength to resist corrosion.
When Woo made the transition to Hollywood, some observers declared that his flamboyant visual style and his full-hearted emotionalism would never fly here, that American audiences just wouldn't buy it. So he was reigned in, with mostly dubious results.
Woo's first two Hollywood efforts (Hard Target in 1992 and Broken Arrow in 1995) were well received and turned a handy profit, but they just weren't in the same league as his best Hong Kong efforts. They were widely perceived as watered-down Woo, conventional commercial action films that never gave him room to cut loose. It was the dramatic side of the equation that suffered most. There were stunning action episodes in both films, but the characters were off-the-rack clichés.
Face/Off was another story. It quickly garnered some of the best reviews recently recorded for an action picture: The critics embraced it as a sweeping change of pace, daringly stylized, and soaringly romantic where the typical Hollywood specimen is blunt and brutal. "Woo proves that the best special effect of all in an action film is acting," wrote Ken Turan in the Los Angeles Times The director's longtime fans observed that the science-fiction premise of Face/Off, along with a supportive actors (John Travolta and Nicholas Cage) and a sympathetic producer (Michael Douglas) had finally supplied the freedom Woo needed to pull out the stops stylistically, to give free reign to his operatic visual sense.
With a box office gross of over $100 million dollars in the US alone, Face/Off is already one of the major commercial successes of 1997. Apparently, American audiences were ready for John Woo after all.
HONG KONG
Memorably described in one local film as "the world's biggest Chinatown," the city-state of Hong Kong itself will be a key supporting player in A Better Tomorrow.
From its origins in 1842, as a British prize in the infamous Opium War, to its present incarnation as the supreme business center of Asia (recent hiccups notwithstanding), this inhospitable lump of rock in the South China Sea has been a colonial trading post writ large, a hub of international trade.
Now thickly encrusted with high rise office towers and clashing slabs of neon, Hong Kong is a uniquely energized synthetic megalopolis that has been likened to an Asian Manhattan overlayed the glitz of Los Vegas. The high-strung mood of the city is nowhere so clearly embodied as on its movie screens, which crackle with energy and ambition.
The British may have been all-but oblivious to the Chinese-ness of the city they occupied, but at least their laissez faire attitude allowed parallel Chinese cultures, both traditional and popular, to flourish just below the colonial radar.
The cliché postcard shot of an ancient-looking ragged sampan lying at anchor with an ultra-modern skyscraper in the background is an apt visual metaphor for the surreal juxtapositions of the very old and the brand spanking new that lurk around every corner in Hong Kong. Religious and folk observances like fung shui, all but obliterated on the mainland, lingered in the Territory, practiced even by that newest of stereotyped figures the go-getting Hong Kong yuppie, with his designer clothing, his razor cut mop, and his ubiquitous chirping cel phone.
A rich Cantonese-language pop culture grew up, as well, with unique home grown sub-genres of rock music, TV comedy and cinema. The market for these products extended far beyond Hong Kong itself, to international centers of the so-called "Chinese Diaspora," turning up in record stores and on movie screens in Chinatowns around the world
Much of the drama of Hong Kong in recent years has centered upon the event that drove John Woo and many other longtime residents to emigrate, the handover of the former Crown Colony to the People's Republic of China. It is often said that Hong Kong's symbolic importance for the Chinese outweighs even its economic potential. As the first chunk of Chinese territory ceded (at gunpoint) to a foreign power, it set the stage for a century of colonial exploitation, and has stood as a prime symbol of that exploitation ever since.
According to a recent history of the area, "As the loss of Hong Kong initiated these (foreign) depredations, its recovery in 1997 will, it is believed, mark the end. The history of the colony is therefore in indissolubley linked with that of China's relations with the West."
SUMMARY OF CONTENT
The story of John Woo's life to date closely parallels the rise and fall of a distinct and independent film industry in Hong Kong. He is a truly representative figure, because his personal story intersects with a much larger social and cultural story at so many key points.
His official date of birth, in 1947, coincides with the beginnings of the Hong Kong movie industry as such. (Scattered films were made there in earlier decades, but no stable moviemaking infrastructure was established.) But with the end of Word War II, the return of Hong Kong to British rule after 20 years of Japanese occupation, and the victory of the Chinese Communists on the Mainland, the tiny, rock-bound Territory became a haven for refugees from the veterans of the mainland film capitol of Shanghai. It has been one of Asia's leading film production centers ever since.
Woo's family was one of almost two million that fled to Hong Kong in a five year period beginning in 1949, creating horrendous overcrowding and transforming a colonial backwater into a reluctant metropolis. Almost exactly 50 years later, Woo became a refugee again, as the Chinese began to gear up for repossession in 1997. At that moment, as June became July this summer, Hong Kong cinema, as such, was a thing of the past. It has become an outpost of the centralized Chinese movie industry.
Born in Guangzhou, Canton, China in 1946, Woo came to Hong Kong with his family in at age four. Their father had been a scholar and a university professor in China, but in Hong Kong they were just one more family of refugees, crammed into a numbered government "squatter shack" in the sprawling slum district of Shek Kip Mei. The earliest known photo of the future filmmaker is a family shot taken by the census bureau, in front of their tin-panel dwelling.
Several events of this period had a profound effect on the future director: political riots and gang fights in the street, and a flood that washed corpses onto the front steps. Frequently, from a neighbor's yard, the anguished cries of puppies could be heard as they were killed for food. A decade later, John Woo's first professional creative effort was a newspaper story recalling the slaughter of those puppies.
Woo says he owes his education and, in effect, his life, to the American family that "adopted" him from afar, through a Lutheran charity organization. To this day Woo considers himself "a pure Christian." Christian imagery, from looming crosses to billowing flocks of doves, crop up again and again in his films, along with resonant themes of honor, guilt, and redemption through self-sacrifice.
Even with assistance from abroad, Woo's family was so poor that they could not afford to let him begin first grade until he was nine years old — two years past the legal limit. Woo's personal documents were altered to indicate a 1948 instead of a 1946 birthdate, and there has been some confusion about his exact age ever since.
As a boy, Woo was an avid member of the local movie audience. At 11, he began his first hands-on experiments with filmmaking: drawing scenes on panes of glass — "cowboys, cartoon characters, Chinese knights" — and using a blanket as a booth and a flashlight as a light source to project dim images on the wall.
As a self-consciously hip teenager in the 1960s he was an enthusiastic amateur theater actor and 8mm filmmaker. When he wasn't lounging in a black turtle-neck strumming Beatles tunes on the guitar, or teaching mambo classes at a nearby youth club, he was retiring to local rooftops (the only available open space in his cramped neighborhood) to shoot his earliest auteur efforts.
""You could say I was an artist and also a hippie," Woo says. "I was always concerned about the war and society. I went to anti-war demonstrations. In the movies we especially admired the French, the Italian, and the Japanese, and in the '70s, I fell in love with Sam Peckinpah, Francis Coppola, Stanley Kubrick — we thought Kubrick was the greatest in the world. We liked Yukio Mishima's novels, and we were influenced by existentialism. I read a lot of these books and decided I was an existentialist."
In the 1970s, Woo went looking for entry-level professional film jobs — "working and training on real sets at some of the independent productions that needed young and willing apprentices," he told the Hong Kong Evening Standard in 1977. "The pay was just enough to survive — on bread and water."
From 1969 to 1971, John Woo worked as a Script supervisor for the Cathay Organization, and then at Shaw Brothers, which at that time was still the biggest studio in town. He worked as an Assistant Director with martial arts master Chang Cheh on pictures like The Boxer From Shantung and Blood Brothers.
"Chang was the one local director I admired," Woo says. "He made swordplay or 'martial chivalry' (wuxia pian) films. Chang was the first one to make 'male bonding' movies instead of the 'female bonding' pictures that were popular there in the early 1960s. Before Chang Cheh, only actresses were popular in leading roles, and male actors only played supporting roles. He changed the techniques and the level of skill in the Hong Kong action film."
In 1973, Woo began directing his own films for Golden Harvest, a company, formed by a breakaway Shaw's executive, Raymond Chow. Woo's graduation to director status at such a relatively early age turned out to be the beginning of a trend: "I was the first young director in Hong Kong, and I was 27 years old. At that time most of the directors were at least 45 and had worked as an assistant for 15 years. But I had only a year and a half as an assistant, and that made some people uncomfortable."
Woo spent two pleasant years on Korean locations making inexpensive kung fu films like the ineffable Belles of Tae Kwan Do, a martial arts quickee about a hit squad of jump-suited karate-babes.
Only one film from this period stands out: Hand of Death (a.k.a. Countdown in Kung Fu). Woo took a chance here, handing a featured role, for the first time, to a former stuntman and fight choreographer named Cheung Long, better know today as the martial arts superstar Jackie Chan.
Upon his return to Hong Kong from Korea, one of Woo's first assignments at Golden Harvest working as "associate director" with the popular TV comedian Michael Hui, helping him to get his sea legs on his first three films as a writer-director. Hui became Hong Kong's leading screen personality in the years following Bruce Lee's untimely death, and his topical satiric comedies did a lot to reestablish Cantonese-language film production in the Territory. Michael's brother Sam Hui, who co-starred in the films, was also a pop star, and pioneered a new genre of "Canto-pop" — lively rock songs with cheeky satiric lyrics sung in Cantonese. Michael Hui co-stars in the new Wayne Wang film Chinese Box, which will be released in the US this fall.
Woo seems to have made contact, at least glancingly, with every major genre of Hong Kong cinema: The 1976 Princess Cheung Ping was a Cantonese opera movie, a remake of a 1959 film directed by Zuo Jie and a conscious attempt to revive a genre that had been a staple of the Cantonese film industry into the 1950s and '60s. It was not terribly successful, in part, according to some critics, because it was a bit too "cinematic," violating the nostalgic stage-bound aesthetic of the original production
Woo's comedies of the 1970s, especially Money Crazy (1977) were transitional films that prefigured the high-energy renaissance of the "New Hong Kong Cinema" that swept through the Territory in the 1980s. Woo looked to Western films for fresh ideas and incorporated raucous sarcastic devices like fast and slow motion, and surreal dream sequences into a genre that had previously been quite conservative visually.
Money Crazy was a major hit, one of the top ten films at the Hong Kong box office in 1978 — which for Woo turned out to be a mixed blessing: "The studio just liked to follow trends. If kung fu films were popular, they made kung fu films. And when my first comedy was a success, they just wanted me to make more. You could say I was a big director after Money Crazy, but I still couldn't do what I really wanted."
With success, Woo became a champion of other young artists struggling to win a foothold. When he moved from Golden Harvest to Cinema City in the early 1980s, he urged his new bosses to hire Tsui Hark, an auteur in his 20s who had made two edgy independent features. Tsui, born in Vietnam and educated at US film schools, went on to become a pivotal figure of the Hong Kong New Wave. His super-high-energy entertainments, notably Peking Opera Blues, A Chinese Ghost Story and Once Upon a Time in China, were among the first HK productions of the 1980s to attract serious international interest.
For Woo, comedy after comedy followed, with steadily diminishing results, both creatively and financially. At his lowest ebb, Woo's career went into virtual exile in Taiwan, where the comedies became more and more marginal and sentimental and too much of his energy was drained oof into routine producing assignments. He became severely depressed and began drinking heavily.
Woo's pictures in this period included The Time You Need a Friend, a Mandarin-language carbon copy of The Sunshine Boys, and Laughing Time, a vehicle for one of the founders of the Cinema City company, who was inordinately proud of his Charlie Chaplin imitation.
"At that point," Woo says, "I honestly thought my career was over."
Woo was resurrected as a filmmaker in 1986, when Tsui Hark invited him to write and direct an entirely personal movie in a commercial genre for his brand new company, Film Workshop. Woo leapt at the chance, and the result, A Better Tomorrow, was like nothing the Hong Kong crowd had ever seen, a unique mixture of all-out mayhem, criminal glamour, and full-bore macho sentimentality. It set box office records, swept the local film awards, and made movie stars of several of its performers.
The cast was an inspired mix of veterans and newcomers: Ti Lung had been a top star in Shaw Brothers martial arts movies of the 1970s, including three that Woo had worked on as an assistant to Chang Cheh. Leslie Cheung was a heartthrob pop singer still at the threshold of his film career; he went to star in A Chinese Ghost Story and dozens of other local productions, and recently has become a favorite of the Chinese art-film directors Chen Kaige and Wong Kar-wei, taking leading roles in Chen's Farewell My Concubine and Temptress Moon and in Wong's Ashes of Time and Happy Together.
But the biggest splash of all was made by Chow Yun-fat, a TV idol who became an overnight movie superstar playing a doomed hot-head who risks death to save a friend. During pre-production, Woo told Chow to study the elegant and soulful gangster characters played by the French star Alain Delon and the Japanese Takakura Ken, but Chow also gave the character a sly glint of humor. Dubbed "the best actor in Asia" and 100% convincing in a wide variety of roles, Chow will make his Hollywood debut this fall, co-starring with Mira Sorvino in the New Line Cinema release Replacement Killers.
Woo himself has dismissed the sequel, A Better Tomorrow Part II, but the surreal ferocity of the fight scenes has endeared them to Woo fanatics like Quentin Tarantino, whose True Romance includes a shot of Christian Slater watching its final battle sequence reverently on video.
Woo's next film The Killer (1989), is apocalyptic pulp that sums up, and tops, the entire gunplay cycle, the bloodiest, the showiest, the most shamelessly sentimental of them all. Some of Woo's flourishes are kitsch classics (doves fly up in a candle-it church as a heavily armed Chow strides down the aisle in slow motion) and the action sequences are rapturous. "Life's cheap," a character suggests. "It only takes one bullet" — but in fact it always takes about a dozen geysering bullet hits to kill anybody here, as soulful Triad mobsters in mirrorshades and duster overcoats blaze away with high-tech weaponry.
It was while working on the Killer that Woo hooked up with his future business partner Terence Chang, an executive at Tsui Hark's Film Workshop. It was Chang who followed through on the splash made at film festivals by A Better Tomorrow, actively pursuing foreign markets and courting interested critics — including the co-author of this book. Chang's role in helping to bring John Woo, and other Hong Kong film talent to Hollywood cannot be overestimated.
A Bullet in the Head, Woo's Vietnam film, was not a hit with home audiences, and one can see their point: Woo pushes the carnage to such extremes that the experience is finally numbing. Still, this is a 'Nam film like no other. To begin with, there wasn't an American G.I. in sight.
"For me," Woo says, "Vietnam was an Asian war. I didn't make a Vietnam War movie to cater to the American and European market. I wanted to make a point about the present and future of Hong Kong, all those beautiful things that we once had in the '60s that are now lost. I want to remind people that war only ends up distorting humanity, that it brings out the worst in people, not the best. War only turns us Chinese into a wandering people."
Once a Thief (1991), a caper flick about upper-crust art thieves filmed partly in the South of France, was a conscious effort to make a more commercially congenial film after the assaultive Bullet in the Head. Chow Yun-fat is the Cary Grant figure in this nod to the Hitchcock lite of To Catch a Thief. This year, Once a Thief became the basis of a syndicated TV series.
The co-author of this book visited the set of Once a Thief in Hong Kong and appeared as an extra in one scene.
Hard Boiled (1992) is all-too easy to read as Woo's sad farewell to his home town, although he denies this interpretation. The film takes an unflinching look at the freakiness of crime in Hong Kong as the city falls pray to 1997 jitters. Chow Yun-fat is a sort of Cantonese Dirty Harry, a tough cop who shrugs off red tape and obliterates the baddies. This film is less gut-wrenching than Woo's other recent efforts, much more like a conventional commercial action picture. Even the serious themes are handled playfully, especially in sequences in which Tequila's he-man guru, a jazz bar proprietor and ex-cop named "John Woo" (and played by Himself) holds forth ruefully on themes of loyalty and blood-brotherhood.
With the help of his business partner, Terence Chang, Woo had been working for several years toward his life-long dream of making a picture in the US. Chang began to entertain offers, and many formulaic action scripts were rejected before a chance came along to work for a major studio (Universal) and with congenial producers (filmmaker Sam Raimi and his partner Robert Tapert, the team behind the Hong Kong-inflected action of the Hercules and Xena TV franchises.)
According to Chang, Hard Target was the best script the director was offered in two years of looking, a superior example of the kind of headbanger action film American audiences like best — "or have been taught to like," as Woo prefers to express it. It was a ticket to Hollywood, by way of the deep south.
Hard Target filmed for just under four months, roughly October 1992 thru January 1993, in and around steamy New Orleans, with co-author Chute serving as Unit Publicist. Jean-Claude Van Damme plays an unemployed merchant mariner who agrees to help a young woman (Yancy Butler) search for her missing father. His fee: the exact amount of his unpaid union dues, so that he can finally get a job and ship out. Lance Henriksen is the ex-mercenary warrior, Fouchon, who offers rich men a chance to hunt "the most dangerous game." The pray are homeless combat veterans willing to risk everything for a shot at $10,000.00 in cash.
This "very simple story" (per Woo) afforded few opportunities for visual display — but there were still a few too many, as far as some early test audiences were concerned. Recruited crowds of Van Damme fans found some of Woo's flourishes either confusing or inadvertently amusing, and during the editing phase the picture was carefully de-flavorized. (Van Damme himself briefly commandeered an editing room and came up with an "Actor's Cut," although his close-up laden version was never seriously considered.)
Hard Target was Van Damme's most successful picture to date, if not quite the breakaway smash he'd been hoping for. The kick-boxer has since made films with two more Hong Kong émigrés, Ringo Lam and, of all people, Tsui Hark, John Woo's old protégé turned mentor turned acrimonious competitor.
Woo spent almost two-years developing and trying to set up a South American jungle adventure film called Tears of the Sun. When that project fell through he once again found himself in the position of shouldering "the best script he could find," in this case a nuclear-extortion thriller from the screenwriter/producer team that created Speed, which had been a surprise hit for the studio, Fox, the summer before. So at the very least it would be a high-profile production. With John Travolta and Christian Slater signed to star, it also stood a fair chance at the box office. Woo consciously strove to make Broken Arrow a 100% "American looking" movie — and mostly succeeded, to the dismay of his long-term admirers.
Chute, again, was the Unit Publicist on the film.
The irony of this troubled production was that a conspiracy, of sorts, was in operation behind the scenes, spearheaded by the studio with the active connivance of more than one of the film's producers, an effort to pressure Woo to make exactly the kind of mainstream, meat-and-potatoes action headbanger that he already fully intended to make.
A the midpoint, half the crew was fired and replaced, as department heads who got along a little too swimingly with the director were forced out and more studio-friendly-hands were substituted.Toward the end, Woo was openly saying that he might never again make a picture for a major studio; that the mainstream American industry had become a blood-streaked arena for gladiatorial egos.
The man who turned things around for John Woo was Michael Douglas, a producer who is also an actor and a hands-on moviemaker, the magic formula for creative success in Hollywood if anything is. Douglas gave Woo a free hand on Face/Off, and the result was his most successful American film by far.
Woo is currently (as of November, 1997) shooting Blackjack, a TV pilot, in Toronto, Canada. In 1998 he will begin production on King's Ransom, a modestly budgeted Hollywood crime film starring his "sworn brother" Chow Yun-fat.
WORKING METHODS AND FORMAT
A Better Tomorrow will trace the achievements of a unique and influential figure in contemporary pop culture, an exemplary international artist whose life story resonates with many of the key issues of Pacific Asian history since WW2. It is the story of a refugee, first from China to Hong Kong as a small boy, and again, as an adult, from Hong Kong to America. This is a pattern that has been duplicated in the lives of thousands of Overseas Chinese around the world over the past five decades.
Named for the director's first great gangster film, A Better Tomorrow will be a first-person account written in collaboration with David Chute, a journalist and film critic who has been covering the Hong Kong film scene for over ten years.
As the Unit Publicist on John Woo's first two Hollywood pictures, Hard Target and Broken Arrow, Chute formed a close working relationship with the filmmaker. He was the producer of two award-winning laser disc special editions of classic Woo thrillers for The Voyager Company's Criterion Collection, The Killer and Hard Boiled, filling over a thousand text frames with information on Woo and his films and on Hong Kong cinema in general.
The text of the book will be adapted by Chute from detailed interviews, and from material dictated by Woo directly to his assistants. Mr. Chute will act as the recorder and/or editor of Mr. Woo's story, but it is to be clearly understood that the story and the voice will be John Woo's alone. Every edited page of text will be proofread, revised and approved by the subject himself.
This version of John Woo's story will be unique, not least because it will be Woo's own account of his adventures, with unprecedented anecdotes, an insider's view of the cut-throat world of Hong Kong movie making, and a wealth of exclusive photographic material from Woo's own scrapbooks.
As the sample chapter included here clearly demonstrates, Mr. Woo is an eloquent and perceptive narrator. No one else could tell this story as well. The editor's task is to help him to speak to the reader as directly and as clearly as possible, with a minimum of filtering or "translation."
At the same time, it seems to us essential to place this first-person account in context for American readers who may have little prior knowledge of the political or cultural history Hong Kong. This contextual material will be compiled from original research by co-author Chute and integrated into the text.
Sidebars written by Chute might be used to supply contextual information that could not be comfortably so integrated. However, footnotes and similar devices, while serving much the same function, have academic/pedantic associations that we would prefer to avoid if at all possible.
Above all, we believe that A Better Tomorrow should be a down-to-earth and readable book. As an account of a key career in an arena as rough-and-tumble as the film industry of Hong Kong, it needs to find a crisp, direct tone of voice and a sense of urgency to match the subject matter.
In the aftermath of the handover to Chinese rule, our book will put a specific human face on tumultuous historical events that promise to reshape the global cultural environment in the coming century.
by John Woo with David Chute
When I was making my first Hollywood film, Hard Target, in New Orleans in 1992, the Key Grip on the film said something interesting: "You try to stump us every day, to ask us for something that we won't be able to deliver." And he was thanking me for doing that! He was saying that while it was hard and a challenge to work for me, it was also very satisfying, because I pushed everyone on the crew to try new things and to extend their skills. He felt he had learned a lot working with me. And I must say, there was never anything I asked that crew to do that they were not able to accomplish. I never did succeed in stumping them!
Of course, I want to learn new things, too. I feel I am always learning. This is especially true now, in America. I am always learning something from the crew people in Hollywood, who truly are the best in the world. That's why I work the way I do, always trying to push beyond what has been planned or what has been done in a scene of that kind before — by me or by anybody else.
I would hate to do the same thing over and over in film after film, even though I think some of my fans would prefer that I did that. This is one of the limitations of being a "cult director." I love my American fans; I think I owe my Hollywood career to them, in large part. But the fans have to understand that nobody can stand still. If an artist worries too much about how his original fans will react he can become afraid to move on or to make progress.
Younger filmmakers are still making movies that look like my gangster films of a decade ago. I have seen episodes from A Better Tomorrow and The Killer reproduced almost shot for shot in several pictures. I understand that and I am flattered by it. When I was a young director, I too looked very closely at the films of directors I admired. But why, at this point in my career, would I want to copy my younger self? The style of a film has to emerge naturally from a consideration of the material. It is a question of what will make each story as clear as possible for the audience. If a filmmaker is sensitive to each of the different stories he has to tell, his techniques and his style will also always be different. This is practically a law of nature for any creative endeavor.
So even in a situation like the one in Hard Boiled, when I wanted to try something new, the way a scene is shot can never be arbitrary. It must be the nature of the scene that dictates a new approach. My "classic scene" in Hard Boiled was a long continuous tracking shot within an action sequence. It followed two characters as they moved through a location, battling a long series of adversaries.
This may not sound like an especially radical or difficult thing to pull off, but when you are directing action, the whole tendency of the enterprise is away from long continuous takes and toward many shots and very fast cuts. Most action filmmaking involves a lot of cutting because the action itself has to be staged and shot in fragments. Making a virtue of necessity you then use cutting to make the action even more exciting, by speeding it up or by building in many small surprises. Yet shooting action continuously, in long takes, can at times be even more exciting.
One of my Hong Kong colleagues, the performer and filmmaker Jackie Chan, has practically built his career on this principle. In every one of his major films there is at least one dangerous looking stunt sequence that draws its power precisely from the fact that it has been shot non-stop, without cutting away: You see Jackie himself standing on top of a three-story building, falling, bouncing off an awning, hitting the ground, and then standing up and delivering a line of dialog —- all in one unbroken shot!
But obviously Jackie Chan is a special case. Even in Hong Kong, where the actors and stuntmen are famous for their daring, most filmmaking cannot be done that way. You do not ask an expensive actor like Chow Yun-fat, who has no stunt training, to jump off a three story building. So a stuntman has to do that section of the scene, and that footage will then be cut together with shots of Chow preparing to make the jump, and landing on the ground. For similar reasons, you can't fire a gun too close to an actor even if it is loaded with blanks, so the actor firing and the other actor being hit must often be done as a cut between two separate shots.
Many people who have worked with me will tell you that I am quite willing at times to push the boundaries of safety as far as I can to get dramatic effects; performers who have been bruised or singed working on my films might say that I push too hard! There are shots in both A Better Tomorrow II and Hard Boiled in which you can clealry see that Chow Yun-fat was terrified by how close the flames of an explosion came to his face. But no director who is sane deliberately endangers his performers. Even Jackie Chan spends days and days planning his big stunts, so that they are never actually as dangerous as they look. Movies are always, ultimately, a medium of trickery and slight of hand.
Quite apart from the safety issues, though, it is very hard to shoot action in what is called a "wide master" shot. If the action is at all complex there are simply too many elements that must be timed perfectly and that have to fit together seamlessly. A lot of the effect of a memorable action scene is a matter of rhythm. Trying to get all of those elements not just to look right but to be timed correctly can take forever. If even one tiny detail out of dozen goes wrong, the entire sequence will have to be re-shot. It is almost always much safer, not to mention more economical, to stage and shoot each discreet chunk of action separately, and stitch the pieces together later in the editing room. If the scene is working well the audience will neither notice or care that it is a stuntman jumping through the plate glass window.
But in Hard Boiled we had a scene to shoot that seemed to me to be defined by the idea of continuous movement. It involved two cops, played by Chow Yun-fat and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, fighting side by side while trying to go from a lower floor in a hospital, which has been taken over by gangsters, to a higher floor to rescue a nurseryful of newborn babies. So their non-stop movement from one place to another, despite every obstacle that is thrown in their way, is what makes their behavior especially heroic; it is what the sequence is about.
Now: the best way to convey a feeling of movement in a movie is, almost always, to have the camera move, too. The director George Miller, for example, says that the chase scenes The Road Warrior are unusually exciting because he made a point of always placing the camera in or on one of the moving vehicles that is involved in the chase. It is always inside the action, as Alfred Hitchcock says, never watching it from outside, from a stationary position. On that principle I felt that the camera in the hospital scene in Hard Boiled had to be a hand-held, moving along with the two cops, following their progress every step of the way —- in "real time."
I chose that approach not just because it was a challenge or would look impressive, but because it was the best way to communicate the built-in excitement and momentum of the action I was presenting. From that point on, the difficulty was not so much how to shoot the scene, as how to stage it so that it could feasibly be shot in the way we had envisioned.
In the end, instead of actually taking the elevator from one floor to the other and building a complete set on each floor, we built just one set and redressed it completely while the two actors were off screen, having their conversation on an elevator that was supposedly moving but was in fact stationary. So the door opened again onto the same floor, but now it looked completely different, and the second half of the scene unfolded.
Despite all our efforts, it was not possible to commit the entire sequence to a single piece of celluloid. We shot it all the way through each time, but never without a few nagging mistakes. And we simply didn't have time to repeat the episode again and again until it was perfect. Finally I was forced to cut together the first half of one take and the second half of another, in order to get the best possible results visually. The splice, which occurs in the middle of a swish-pan, is so well disguised that it was not until the deluxe Voyager laser disc edition came out in 1994 that it was really possible to see the splice. One of the features of the laser medium is that it allows rock-steady freeze frames. Viewers were able to move the sequence forward one frame at a time, and in that way they could spot the cut.
The hospital episode was so difficult to pull off that I wanted to record the shooting process itself on film. At least then I would have something to point to if people began to doubt my version of events. I would able to say, "Look at this! It really was as difficult as I've been saying." So for most of a week I assigned a member of the camera crew to shoot 35 mm documentary footage of the preparation, rehearsal and execution of these sequence. We had almost six hours of unique behind-the-scenes footage by the time the work was finished.
Unfortunately, as far as we can tell, all of that footage has since been destroyed. It was saved in a vault at the Mandarin Film Labs in Hong Kong, along with all of our outtakes, and when we went to look for it a few years later, it had vanished. Recently we heard that some Triad gangsters, whose influence has been a big problem for the Hong Kong film business, had broken into the lab to steal some footage from a production they were trying to blackmail, but that their extortion plot failed because they stole the wrong footage by mistake. I couldn't help thinking, "Maybe they stole our footage, instead!"
The truth, I'm afraid, is less dramatic but also sadder than that: What almost certainly happened is that our footage was destroyed offhandedly by the people at the lab, to clear space in the shelves for a newer production. It is not just this particualr film lab that is at fault, but the attitude toward their work that people in the entire Hong Kong industry have grown accustomed to. They do not seem to have a very high opinion of their own profession. By and large, they think of their works as disposable, temporary productions. Even now, when there is a market for films on video after they play out in theaters, it is very rare for a movie to remain on the shelves of video stores in Hong Kong, or in American Chinatowns, for more than a few years after its release. Although the distant Chinese past is still vividly alive for many Chinese people, the recent past seems to be fading before our eyes. Psychologists might say that if the long term memory of we Chinese is almost flawless, our short term memory is non-existent.
So I'm afraid I don't have the concrete proof I wanted that the long tracking shot in Hard Boiled was done the way I've said it was. You'll just have to take my word for it.
FILMOGRAPHY
Key films are listed in bold face. Official English titles are followed by literal English translations of the original Chinese titles in parenthesis.
STUDENT FILMS
1968
1968
1969
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR / EDITOR
1971
1972
1972
1973
"ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR"
1975
1976
1977
PRODUCER
1985
1985
DIRECTOR
1973
1974
1975
1975
1977
1977
1978
1978
1979
1981
1982
1982
1984
1985
1986
1986
1987
1989
1990
1990
1991
1992
1993
1995
1997
1997
1999
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