John Woo says HK key to top Venice award
Being the first Chinese filmmaker to be honoured with the lifetime achievement award at the world's oldest film festival might have come as a shock, but Hong Kong director John Woo hopes recognition of his brand of highly styled action films can broaden the minds of young movie makers.
Speaking to the South China Morning Post yesterday from Hengdian in Zhejiang province , where he is producing a kung fu film starring Michelle Yeoh, Woo said he was surprised and excited when Venice Film Festival director Marco Mueller told him about the honour. The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement will be presented at the 67th Venice International Film Festival in September.
The master behind some of the productions that put Hong Kong on the world movie map is the third Asian director to receive the honour, after animator Hayao Miyazaki in 2005 and Woo's hero Akira Kurosawa in 1982.
The director of The Killer and A Better Tomorrow said he was grateful for not just the opportunity to make films and the creative partners he had worked with in the past four decades.
'I'm grateful that I grew up in Hong Kong,' said the 63-year-old, who received a lifetime achievement award at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival at the weekend in Taiwan's Kaohsiung county. 'Because of growing up in Hong Kong, I had the chance to learn a lot of things from around the world. I have been fortunate enough to learn from many film masters.'
The honour recognised the achievements of Chinese cinema, Woo said.
Growing up in the slums of Shek Kip Mei, Woo worked as an assistant director at Shaw Brothers, where he learned from director Chang Cheh, who had a deep influence on his filmmaking. He made his directorial debut in the 1970s, but it was the string of heavily stylised action films in the late 1980s and early 1990s that established his international reputation.
The Venice festival said Woo 'renewed action movies to the core, introducing an extreme stylisation [with] his revolutionary conception of staging and editing'.
Woo was glad that the style he pioneered had broken the boundaries of languages and cultures. 'Even though my films are action films, I stress on the humanity side of the characters. Audiences can find action, drama, romance and aesthetic beauty in my films, and they think that my films speak an international language which they can understand,' he said.
Woo made Hollywood films Face/Off in 1997 and Mission: Impossible 2 in 2000, before returning to Chinese-language movies with the war epic Red Cliff, which became the first film to earn more than 300 million yuan (HK$340 million) at the mainland box office.
Woo hoped his life story would inspire young filmmakers to explore the world of cinema.
'I hope they won't limit themselves by making just art-house films or commercial films,' he said. 'In the past, Hong Kong cinema put too much focus on action films, and then one day, when the market for action films collapsed, and when Hollywood could also produce action films, we had no other genres of films to support the market.
'Art and mainstream can co-exist in a harmonious way.'
