Manhunt star Ha Ji-won first to play a female killer in a John Woo film
Korean actress who plays an assassin working for a shady drugs company in Woo’s new thriller says it was tough to find inspiration for her role given cinema’s overabundance of male killers
Ha Ji-won, the Korean star of John Woo Yu-sen’s new thriller Manhunt, vividly remembers her first encounter with the Hong Kong action auteur.
“The first time we met, we were just eating a meal,” the 39-year-old Seoul native tells the Post at an interview during the Venice film festival, where Manhunt received its world premiere. “We were sitting beside each other and all of a sudden Mr Woo asked me, ‘Can you shoot?’”
It was not your typical dinner-table conversation, but then Woo was clearly sizing up Ha for a lead role in Manhunt. Based on the novel by Juko Nishimura – which was previously adapted by Junya Sato for a 1976 film version starring Ken Takakura – Woo’s film stars Zhang Hanyu as a lawyer framed for murder and on the run trying to clear his name.
For Woo fans, it is a delicious return to the old-school action movies of his past in the vein of The Killer, Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow, following the director’s sojourns in Hollywood and recent historical epics Red Cliff and The Crossing.
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The twist here is that the killers are female – the first female assassins in Woo’s male-centric canon. With recent Hollywood films such as Atomic Blonde (with Charlize Theron) and Ghost in the Shell (with Scarlett Johansson) proving that females can be just as deadly, Woo’s Japan-set film seems to be squarely hitting the zeitgeist.