What they said about The Killer: director John Woo and stars Chow Yun-fat and Sally Yeh on shooting the classic Hong Kong action movie

The Killer put John Woo on the international stage and introduced Chow Yun-fat as an action hero

The stars, director and producer talk about how the film was cast, preparing for scenes and the dangers during shooting

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Chow Yun-fat (right) as the hitman Ah Jong and Danny Lee as Detective Li Ying in a still from The Killer (1989), directed by John Woo.

Published: 8:15am, 25 Sep 2022

Although The Killer made John Woo Yu-sum famous internationally, he was already a well-regarded director in Hong Kong – in fact, as a 1989 Post interview with Gary Chan noted, Woo was already a star filmmaker three times over.

“The popular action-packed comedy format, the resurgence of Cantonese Opera films [due to the 1977 hit Princess Chang-ping] and, most recently, the run of gangster-cop productions [after the success of 1986’s A Better Tomorrow] can all be put down to the local filmmaker, who started each craze with an innovative picture that captured the imagination of the audience and proved a box-office hit,” wrote Chan.

The Killer, which was inspired by Japanese director Teruo Ishii’s 1964 film An Outlaw, features Chow Yun-fat as a hitman who accidentally blinds nightclub singer Sally Yeh Chian-wen while carrying out a final kill before retirement. The hitman falls in love with her, and takes one last job to pay for her medical treatment.

But then the hitman himself becomes a target. Much of the film is taken up with the friendship that the hitman develops with a police officer (played by Danny Lee Sau-yin) who is pursuing him – an examination of the idea of brotherhood that results from Woo’s time as assistant director to martial arts legend Chang Cheh.

The Killer won Woo the best director prize at the 1990 Hong Kong Film Awards, and it saw him refine the elegant and bloody action choreography he had begun to develop in A Better Tomorrow into a fully fledged auteurist style.

“As far as technique is concerned, this gangster drama must rank as one of the slickest works to emerge from the local film industry,” said a Post critic at the time.