How iconic director John Woo reinvented action movies in Hong Kong and Hollywood
- Mixing spectacular set pieces with sentiment in films such as The Killer and Hard Boiled, Woo started tropes now synonymous with the action genre
- His career has come full circle with his latest film Manhunt, featuring his patented slow-motion, multi-gun action – and, of course, his trusty doves
Director John Woo, who turns 74 on Friday, should be considered the godfather of the modern action movie.
Mixing spectacular set pieces with sentiment in films such as A Better Tomorrow (1986), The Killer (1989) and Hard Boiled (1992), he started tropes now synonymous with the genre. These include slow-motion fight scenes, Mexican stand-offs and characters firing multiple guns at the same time. The repeated use of doves, however, is all his own.
Born in Guangzhou in 1946, Woo grew up in Hong Kong after his family fled persecution under Mao Zedong. “As a kid, I always felt like I lived in hell – the slums of Hong Kong were horrible,” he told Venice Magazine. “I always had this dream of living in a better place, a place with no crime and violence … and I could only find that dream in the movies.”
Since then Woo has depicted more than his fair share of crime and violence on screen, with a career that mimics the three-act structure of a typical Hollywood movie: the rise, the fall, then the triumphant return.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Woo worked his way up through the Hong Kong film industry, graduating to director with 1974’s The Young Dragons, which featured show-stopping action scenes and fight choreography by Jackie Chan. But it was in the 1980s he found his true calling: as the main exponent of the so-called “heroic bloodshed” genre.