Testimony…
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In Hollywood, two Chinese directors are very famous, one is Ang Lee, who shined at last year’s Oscars, and the other is John Woo. John Woo’s childhood life also had a great impact on his subsequent film career.
Wu Yusen, born on May 1, 1946, was born in a poor family in Guangzhou. Soon he followed his family to Hunan, and then to Hong Kong as a refugee. He dropped out of school when his father died of illness when he was about to graduate from high school, but he still used his spare time to teach himself history, philosophy, art, etc., and more importantly, he loved movies from a young age. As he recalled his childhood life in an interview with Hong Kong’s “Film Fortnightly”: “Since I was a child, I have loved movies, whether it is Western, Cantonese or Japanese.
At that time, I didn’t have the rich money to buy a ticket to get in. I remember one time, at the Great World Cinema, I took my little brother and sneaked into the balcony of the theater when I entered the theater, unfortunately, the usher found me and rolled me down the stairs with a palm. But this palm did not make me give up my desire to watch this movie, on the contrary, I quickly picked up my brother and followed the crowd downstairs. When I was in middle school, my passion for watching movies never diminished.”
In addition, it is said that the place where he grew up was rampant with gangsters and that he was able to attend secondary school because of the American donation (i.e., the help of the church) sent by Luther. This had a great impact on John Woo’s film career, on the one hand, he wanted to show the masculine and violent aesthetics produced by the conflict between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” in the gang, and on the other hand, he did not forget to exaggerate the benevolent spirit of the “good guys” of the gangsters, and even repeatedly appeared in his works, the church, a symbol of sacred Christianity. He also said, “I am a Christian, influenced by religious ideas of love, sin, and salvation. The ancient chivalrous spirit of chivalry is now gone, and we have to face evil alone.”
John Woo’s early works
John Woo’s film style, in addition to the influence of his childhood life, is also deeply influenced by his mentor Zhang Che, but his film career did not start with Zhang Che.
In 1069, John Woo entered the Cathay Pacific Film Company by chance and soon met Zhang Che as a production assistant. After Cathay Pacific announced its closure in 1970, he was introduced to Shaw Brothers Films by Zhang Che and served as Zhang Che’s assistant director, such as “Water Margin”, “Ma Yongzhen”, “Stinging Horse” and so on. Zhang Che’s film works, after “One-armed Knife” established its position in martial arts films, more and shows the world of friendship and violence between men, “Broken Intestine Sword”, “Revenge”, “Thirteen Taibao”, “Stabbing Horse”, “Crippled”, etc., full of tragic pictures of shirtless battles and intestinal battles, “Casting Names”, which will be released at the end of this year, is also adapted from Zhang Che’s classic movie “Stinging Horse”, and its ending is the tragic picture of Zhang Wenxiang played by Jiang David being disemboweled, although there is no “Thirteen Taibao” The corpse of the five horses is as tragic as that, but it is also extraordinary. Zhang Che’s film style is in line with the mentality left by John Woo’s growth process, and it also had a profound impact on him – nearly 20 years later, John Woo also adapted “Stinging Horse” into “Bloody Street” to pay tribute to his mentor Zhang Che.
Heroic nature
In the early 80s, John Woo quit Golden Harvest and joined New Arts City Shortly after filming “Funny Times” for New Arts City, but his film career did not develop smoothly, and he was even arranged by New Arts City to go to Taiwan to inspect the local film production situation. It wasn’t until the appearance of this “True Colors of Heroes” that John Woo and Chow Yun-fat took their film careers to the next level.
At this time, John Woo was full of pride and ambition for movies, but he didn’t have the time to play well, and Chow Yun-fat, although he was popular in the TV series “Shanghai Tang” ten years ago, but many of his film careers were literary films, such as “Love in a Fallen City” (blog), “The Legend of Yu Dafu”, etc. (there are also action movies, such as “City Patrol Horse”), but the box office is not good, known as “box office poison”. So, such two depressed men, plus Dillon, who was born in Shaw Brothers and also collaborated with John Woo (“Stinging Horse” was the film they collaborated on that year), popular singer Leslie Cheung, etc., jointly performed this movie full of men’s feelings, ambitions and even ups and downs, “The True Colors of Heroes”.
“The True Color of Heroes” broke the local box office record of a Hong Kong film with a box office of 34.65 million, and won the Best Film and Best Actor awards at the 6th Hong Kong Film Awards. The father-son love, brotherly love, friendship love, male and female love, wronged victimization, and revenge of the men touched by it vividly portrays the love in the hearts of men The mentality of the Hong Kong people after it was determined that Hong Kong’s sovereignty would be recovered in the early morning of July 1, 1997: in the context of the return to the motherland, their citizens are powerless to change this reality, but they do not know what will happen after the return; and in “The True Color of Heroes”, they also lamented several times that the times are different from the past……
The Road to Hollywood
John Woo came to Hollywood in 1993 and has been directing for more than ten years, and has also directed many movies such as “The Ultimate Target”, “Broken Arrow”, “The Face of the Heroes” (also known as “Changing Face”), “Mission Impossible 2”, “The Wind Whisperer”, “Fatal Reward” and many other movies and TV movies such as “New Across the Seas” and “Supreme Black Jack”. But I don’t know if it’s because of the lack of adaptation or what, John Woo’s Hollywood film career is not so wishful.
Comparing “Mission Impossible 2”, which John Woo is good at in action movies and has achieved good box office in North America or around the world, compared with the previous “Mission Impossible”, may illustrate this problem. “Mission Impossible” is directed by the famous thriller director Brian De Palma, adapted from a classic action TV series in the 70s, the director is not satisfied with copying the plot of the TV series, which not only changes the leader of the secret service team in the TV series to the behind-the-scenes of the criminal, but also sets up twists and turns of the plot, enigmatic characters, etc., creating the suspense in the film, and making the plot full of tension. The sequel directed by John Woo, except for the change of face at the beginning of the film (or borrowing from the plot in the first part) with a little suspense, basically narrates this action movie in a straight line, so in terms of action, “Mission Impossible 2” is far better than the first part, but it is beyond the reach of the tension of the plot – John Woo made a suspenseful spy movie into a pure action movie. This also exposes a problem of director John Woo himself: the incongruity between the control of the action scenes and the control of the plot. (Similar problems arose with his war film “The Wind Whisperer” and the sci-fi film “Deadly Pay.”) )
“Red Cliff” returns
Today, after more than a decade of twists and turns in Hollywood, John Woo finally decided to “return”, not only serving as the executive producer of the film “Heaven’s Mouth”, but also directing “Red Cliff”, the most expensive film work so far.
John Woo also revealed that if he wanted to start filming a documentary, he will choose a documentary with the theme of Sun Yat-sen, the father of the nation. Recently, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” was a big hit, and John Woo, who is a Christian, said that he had seen it, and he liked it, and said that if he was not a director, he would have become a pastor and help those most in need.
