Once a Thief: Family Business

The first Asian filmmaker to helm a major Hollywood feature, John Woo initially emerged as the leading light of the Hong Kong action renaissance of the late ’80s. Celebrated for his unique, much-imitated style: a Molotov cocktail of graceful slow-motion sequences, staccato edits, freeze-frames, and dissolves; Woo brought a new depth of emotion and visual beauty to the action genre, perfecting an operatic, highly stylized brand of mayhem laced with melodrama, savage wit, and homoerotic undercurrents. Woo was born Wu Yu Sen on May 1, 1946, in the Guangzhou Canton Province of China, his parents relocating the family to Hong Kong three years later to escape life under communism. The Woos were quite poor, and were homeless for several years. His father, a philosopher, was later hospitalized with tuberculosis for over a decade. It was his mother who introduced Woo to the cinema, where he fell under the sway of American musicals and the films of the French New Wave, with Jean-Pierre Melville emerging as his greatest influence. After the death of his father, Woo was forced to leave school at the age of 16. He took a job at a newspaper called the Chinese Student Weekly, learning film theory by stealing books on motion pictures from area libraries and shops.

Influenced by Western cinema, Woo decided to begin making his own films in 1968. Over the next two years he made a number of shorts in 8 mm and 16 mm. By the close of the decade he was employed as a production assistant and script supervisor at Cathay film studios. By the early ‘70s, Woo had been elevated to the position of assistant director under the aegis of the prolific Shaw Brothers Studios. At the same time he drew great inspiration from the new breed of American filmmakers including Sam Peckinpah and Stanley Kubrick, the hypnotic violence of their work leaving a profound effect. At Shaw Brothers, Woo began working under martial arts director Chang Che, whose expressive, emotional brand of action filmmaking left an indelible mark on his protegé. After assisting Chang on several films, Woo was finally tapped by the rival Golden Harvest Studios to direct his own feature, 1973’s The Young Dragons. An innumerable string of low-budget efforts followed, ranging from chop-socky pictures like 1974’s The Dragon Tamers and 1975’s Hand of Death (Jackie Chan’s first major star turn) to the 1975 Chinese opera Princess Chang Ping. In 1977, he directed The Pilferer’s Progress, a comedy starring Ricky Hui. The tremendous success of the film established Woo as a comic filmmaker, and of the many features he subsequently helmed, including 1978’s Last Hurrah for Chivalry, 1979’s From Riches to Rags, and 1982’s Plain Jane to the Rescue, the majority were comedies.

By the mid-‘80s, Woo’s career had largely come to a halt. His later films, including a pair of efforts shot in Taiwan (1984’s The Time You Need a Friend and 1985’s Run Tiger Run), had all failed miserably at the box office. With the aid of producer Tsui Hark, Woo was able to mount his longtime pet project, A Better Tomorrow, a fusion of the themes of traditional martial arts tales with the kind of ambivalent protagonists and graphic violence found in Western action films. Released in 1986, the film was Woo’s commercial and critical breakthrough, becoming Hong Kong’s top box-office attraction of the year and launching stars Chow Yun Fat and Leslie Cheung into the upper echelon of Eastern film talent. A Better Tomorrow marked the true emergence of Woo’s balletic action style, an aesthetic he continued to hone in films like 1987’s A Better Tomorrow II and 1989’s masterful The Killer, which became his American breakthrough when released in the U.S. a few years later. The Vietnam war drama Bullet in the Head followed in 1990, and after the success of 1992’s Hard-Boiled, Hollywood came calling. With star Jean-Claude Van Damme in the lead, Woo took the helm for 1993’s Hard Target. An updating of The Most Dangerous Game, Hard Target ultimately fell victim to overzealous editing after it was stamped with the dreaded “NC-17” rating by the MPAA. Additionally, the film was inexplicably deemed “too Chinese” by the studio and by the time the film reached stateside theaters it was an little more than an anemic ghost of prime Woo. In its original, uncensored form (which was the form it was released in overseas), the film stands alongside many of Woo’s most entertaining Hong Kong efforts. After spending close to a year on a project dubbed Tears of the Sun, which never made it past the pre-production stage, he directed the 1996 box-office smash Broken Arrow. Eschewing the traditional two-fisted gunplay familiar to Woophiles, the film instead opted for suspense over action though it did show moments of inspired directing. After helming a 1996 made-for-TV English-language remake of his own 1991 Hong Kong film Once a Thief, Woo next turned to Face/Off, an intricate thriller starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage which was one of the biggest hits of the summer of 1997. With uncut version of Hard Boiled coming in a close second, Face/Off was the American film that came closest to recreating the action and excitement of Woo’s Hong Kong heyday, and fans couldn’t have been more satisfied. In 2000, Woo hit gold again with the much-hyped sequel to director Brian De Palma’s remake of the television spy classic, Mission Impossible. Woo’s M:I-2 stepped up the action and pacing of the original, taking the espionage thriller to James Bond proportions with a steady barrage of gadgets, disguises, gun battles, and blistering high-speed chases. Though, his war movie Windtalkers (2002) paled in comparison to such recent efforts as Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line (both 1998).

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:117248)