The director Quentin Tarantino calls “a major hero”
Taking a myriad of influences and melding them into something entirely his own is basically Quentin Tarantino in a nutshell, with the filmmaker weaponising his love of cinema to gather his biggest inspirations and refit them into an unmistakably unique style.
His filmography is stuffed to the brim with tributes, homages, nods, winks, and musical queues that acknowledge the way in which his forebears shaped his sensibilities, but one of his heroes blazed a new trail in a genre that Tarantino hasn’t tackled by its strictest definition.
While plenty of his movies feature gunplay, bullet-riddled standoffs, and explosive set pieces, Kill Bill is the closest thing Tarantino has ever made to a genuine action movie. Even at that, Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo was a lot fonder of the blade than she was of firearms, but the two-time Academy Award winner nonetheless anointed John Woo as a pivotal figure in his filmic upbringing.
Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Woo – along with his most iconic collaborator Chow Yun-fat – made a habit of pushing the action genre to brand new heights with the likes of A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled, to name but three examples. The ‘heroic bloodshed’ style was defined by the duo, and it forced Tarantino to sit up and take notice.
“John Woo was a major hero to me at the time, I was just so influenced by Hong Kong cinema,” he said. “To this day, I still think it’s the most invigorating cinema that’s made in the world… there had not been a Sergio Leone to come out and show us what we’d seen before but with new eyes until John Woo.”
It’s nigh-on impossible to reflect on Woo’s most fruitful period without drawing Yun-fat into the conversation, too, something that wasn’t lost on Tarantino as he admitted their partnership so transfixed him that it even influenced his wardrobe.
“I was really taken with Chow Yun-fat at a lot at that time, I thought he was one of the cooler actors to come out in movies,” he continued. “He kind of had this Chinese Alain Delon quality. When I saw not even The Killer but Better Tomorrow, part two in particular, I got a big long coat like him, I got a pair of glasses like him and walked around for like three months dressing exactly like Chow Yun-fat.”
It’s reasonable to expect Tarantino didn’t look anywhere near as cool as he thought he did parading around dressed like the gun-toting legend, but neither is it a coincidence that the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs features its key characters wearing black suits and sunglasses, something lifted directly from Woo’s A Better Tomorrow II, the exact same movie that took over the filmmaker’s fashion sense.
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