The first John Woo movie everybody should watch, according to John Woo
Having directed almost 40 features during a career that spans over half a century and repeatedly pushed the action genre to new heights, deciding where to dive into the filmography of John Woo can be a daunting prospect.
Fortunately, the maestro knows exactly where everybody should start, and it’s not at the beginning. Woo was more than a dozen features deep before he truly announced himself as a singular stylist with a penchant for orchestrating balletic bursts of expertly choreographed chaos, but it took him a while to get there.
As a young filmmaker coming up through the Hong Kong studio system, Woo may have taken writing credits on the majority of his early productions, but they weren’t reflective of who he wanted to be. The majority of them were martial arts flicks and comedies, which offered little indication that he was about to redefine the gun-toting set piece forever.
After forming his seminal partnership with Chow Yun-fat, the pair put their heads together and delivered greatness. The Killer and Hard Boiled are undoubtedly two of the finest actioners ever made, and it was inevitable that Hollywood would come calling sooner rather than later based on the awe-inspiring sequences on display, but that’s not where Woo thinks anybody should start, either.
Instead, he settled on his breakthrough picture, one that influenced everybody from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez to John Wick director Chad Stahelski and Wong Kar-wai. Tarantino was so taken he even spent months dressing like the main character, which makes it as good a place to start as any.
“Well, I would like them to start with one of my Hong Kong movies called A Better Tomorrow,” Woo told Collider. “That was my first auteur movie. I think it was the first time I really could do whatever I wanted. All the shooting with two guns and all the action, the slow motion all start from that movie.”
From there, Woo would prefer if viewers moved on to The Killer, Hard Boiled, and Bullet in the Head, with Face/Off the only one of his American pictures that made the cut, which is “also one of my favourite movies,” according to the director. A Better Tomorrow was the genesis point for what would quickly become the director’s career-defining aesthetic, and it sent shockwaves through the genre.
Not only was it the first time Woo had been able to stretch his wings and make exactly the kind of movie he’d always wanted to make, but it established Yun-fat as the coolest hero in all of cinema, and by the time their partnership had run its course when Hard Boiled released, they were firmly entrenched as one of the most influential actor/director teams of the modern era.
