The eclectic mix of directors who shaped John Woo’s singular style: “They’re so powerful that way”
Thanks to a style that’s uniquely and unmistakably his own, there’s never any doubt in a viewer’s mind that they’re watching a John Woo movie whenever the filmmaker steps behind the camera for his latest exercise in visually dazzling, balletic, and frequently bullet-riddled bursts of cinematic chaos.
Even his lesser films – most recently a remake of his own classic, The Killer, that failed to justify its own existence – are very nice to look at. There’s going to be slow motion, there’s more than likely going to be doves, and there’s definitely going to be someone jumping gracefully through the air, earning bonus points if they do so in slow motion while doves fly through the background.
At his peak, Woo transformed the face of the action genre from the forefront of the ‘Hong Kong New Wave’, knocking out gun-toting masterpieces like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled without a care in the world. His talents would be wasted on drama, but even though he’s never realised his own dream of helming a song-and-dance flick, his set pieces are musical enough in a metaphorical sense.
It was Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch that opened Woo’s eyes to the inherent beauty of bloodshed, but his influences stretch significantly further and wider than that. Some are obvious, but many are less so because who in their right mind would watch one of his features and immediately spot the fingerprints of Federico Fellini?
“Fellini was such an incredible visual storyteller,” Woo told Alex Simon. “Everything he did was with images. Just beautiful. And his films are so much like him. When you’re watching them, you can really feel Fellini. Very personal work.” Alfred Hitchcock is more pronounced, though, with the director learning “everything about suspense there is to know from his films.”
Bonnie and Clyde packed plenty of bullets, but Arthur Penn’s influence on Woo stretched beyond blowing holes in key characters. “Arthur Penn’s films take such a strong point of view,” he mused, with his 1958 debut The Left Handed Gun and 1962 biopic The Miracle Worker getting singled out, despite neither being action-orientated. “They’re so powerful that way.”
Akira Kurosawa gets name-checked, which tends to be the case when any notable auteur rattles off their influences, as does Francis Ford Coppola. For Woo, was it The Godfather or Apocalypse Now? Neither; with the filmmaker instead opting for intimate road drama The Rain People.
Stanley Kubrick and David Lean are another pair of near-inevitable inclusions, but Woo has an especially soft spot for William Friedkin, apt when they both put fresh spins on well-worn genre tropes. What the former helped do for action in the 1980s, the latter did for crime thrillers and horror a decade previously with The French Connection and The Exorcist, respectively, which is why he’s so appreciative of how “he did so many amazing experimental things in what were supposed to be mainstream films.”
Coming straight from the horse’s mouth, if the DNA of Fellini, Hitchcock, Peckinpah, Penn, Kurosawa, Lean, Kubrick, Coppola, and Friedkin were distilled down into a cinematic stew, shipped over to Hong Kong and handed a pair of pistols, then Woo’s back catalogue handily explains itself.
