John Woo: Film retrospective showcases beauty of violence

UPI

31-07-2025

1 of 6 | John Woo, seen at the 2017 Venice Film Festival, considers "A Better Tomorrow" his first auteur movie. Photo by Ettore Ferrari/EPA
LOS ANGELES, July 31 (UPI) -- Editor's note: This article contains spoilers his article contains spoilers for "A Better Tomorrow," "The Killer," "A Bullet in the Head" and "Hard Boiled."
Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo came to Los Angeles in 1993 following the success of his gangster films like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer and A Bullet in the Head, which captured a unique style of action.
He brought heroes spinning and jumping in slow motion while they shot guns, sometimes two at a time, to Hollywood films like Hard Target, Face/Off and the recent Silent Night.
His Hong Kong films, along with A Better Tomorrow's sequels and the cop drama Hard Boiled, have now been restored in 4K. The Better Tomorrow movies and The Killer are already available, while A Bullet in the Head releases Aug. 22 and Hard Boiled's restoration begins a theatrical retrospective Saturday, which Woo will attend in Los Angeles.
In a recent interview with UPI, Woo, 78, said these earlier films signalled his auteur phase. Woo had been directing features since 1974, but it was 1986's A Better Tomorrow that allowed him to explore the aesthetics that would become his trademarks.
"With A Better Tomorrow, I got the opportunity to do whatever I want," Woo said. "I could say that was my first auteur movie."
The John Woo style
Woo credited producer Tsui Hark, who directed A Better Tomorrow III and other films also receiving 4K restorations and theatrical screenings, with empowering him to explore those techniques.
In A Better Tomorrow, Ho (Ti Lung) and Kit (Leslie Cheung) are on opposite sides of the law. Chow Yun-fat plays Mark, Ho's bodyguard in the counterfeiting business. The trio get involved in shootouts with police and Triad gangsters, but Woo focused on their friendship.
"I was using slow motion to emphasize the emotion of the action," Woo said. "So to make action look more elegant."
When Woo's characters would shoot at each other, Woo considered the gunfire musical.
"When I'm making the gun battle sequences, I just do it like I'm making a dancing scene," Woo said. "The body movement, even the rhythm of the gunshots, it sounds very much like music. I so care about the rhythm, especially the gunshot, the gunfire and the movement. The whole thing looks pretty much like ballet dancing."
Woo grew up watching movie musicals and listens to music on the set of his action movies. His playlist ranges from Ennio Morricone to classical music and rock n' roll.
While his characters may be spinning, jumping or rolling, slow motion is just as important to capture their facial expressions.
"I like movement, all kinds of movement, body movement or camera movement," Woo said. "I like everything on the move. It also can help the mythic quality, make a scene look more beautiful and have some kind of romanticism. I like to see beautiful things."
Drawing from childhood
1989's The Killer introduced another Woo trademark, doves flying through gunfire. Chow plays a hitman who befriends a cop (Danny Lee) while taking a job to atone for blinding an innocent singer on his last assignment. Woo remade the film with Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy last year.
In the original Killer's climax, Chow and Lee have to shoot their way out of a church. Woo chose doves to show the character within the violent men.
"Deep inside their hearts, they have good hearts and a lot of humanity inside," Woo said. "There's some kind of beauty inside their heart."
Woo was already familiar with doves because in high school, he would draw posters for his church, featuring doves. He did not realize they would become his trademark after The Killer, flying through many other violent scenes.
"I just love the bird," Woo said. "I think the bird is the most innocent and pure and very peaceful animal to me."
Woo continued to enjoy freedom making films like A Bullet in the Head and Hard Boiled. The latter, for example, afforded Woo 150 days to explore the story of hard boiled cop Tequila (Chow) teaming up with undercover cop Alan (Leslie Cheung).
"In Hong Kong I could work like a painter," Woo said. "The second half of the movie was shot without a script. I create on the set. I create dialogue, create every scene on set, because everything was so simple."
A Bullet in the Head is still the film Woo considers his most personal. It revolves around three friends (Leung, Jacky Cheung and Waise Lee) who attempt to escape poverty by joining the criminal underworld in Vietnam. It's 1967, so the trio end up embroiled in the Vietnam War.
"The first half of the movie was based on my biography," Woo said.
Growing up in the slums of Shek Kip Mei, Woo said he was friends with a gambler's son, whom he sometimes protected from police. They got into some trouble, but Woo said the second half of the film is fiction.
From tragedy to hope
Still, the gangster plot and war atrocities that test the characters' friendship ring true to Woo. Money and survival instincts test whether friendship can truly last forever.
"It's a test of their friendship," Woo said.
Some of the characters fail that test, as most of Woo's Hong Kong films end tragically to emphasize the turmoil Woo was expressing. Hard Boiled originally had a darker ending too.
In that film, Woo reconsidered Alan's heroic death after his crew vocalized their affection for him.
"When I shot the scene, everybody was so quiet," Woo said. "The women, they were crying. They were begging me, 'John, please don't let him die. Don't let Tony Leung die. He's a good man.'"
Other crew members tried to convince him that Alan had suffered enough during the events of the film. So Woo shot one more scene with Leung showing Alan survived.
"It brings in a lot of hope," Woo said. "That's how I changed the ending, because of the crew. They're really involved and Tony was such a nice man and nice character, everybody loved him."
The fate of one of Woo's Hollywood characters may be changing in the near future, too. Paramount is developing a Face/Off sequel without Woo.
Screenwriter Simon Barrett and director Adam Wingard are working on a sequel that would bring back Nicolas Cage and John Travolta in a film that would see their sons carry on their rivalry. They posit that Cage's character, Castor Troy, was not dead but only unconscious at the end of the original, which amused Woo.
"Well, Castor was dying," Woo said. "Some people like a producer or writer are always thinking what if they make a sequel? So they keep him alive. But I think he should die."