John Woo names his all-time favourite action movie
For someone who popularised the ‘heroic bloodshed’ subgenre of action cinema and directed several of the genre’s indisputable greats, John Woo surprisingly drew his influences from elsewhere when it came to crafting his signature style.
The filmmaker is a massive, unabashed, and lifelong fan of musicals, which he took to heart when choreographing and staging set pieces that were almost balletic in nature, albeit with plenty of blood squibs being detonated along the way while characters soared through the air in slow motion.
The western genre was another touchstone and inspiration, with Woo having acknowledged on multiple occasions that those are the two forms of cinema he’s always wanted to tackle without ever being afforded the opportunity to do so. Naturally, then, one of the two serves as the basis for his favourite action movie of all time, and it obviously isn’t a song-and-dance spectacular.
When pressed during a Reddit AMA, Woo named Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch as his number one actioner. Deemed hugely controversial at the time of its initial release in 1969, the levels of graphic violence displayed on-screen in the gun-toting epic eventually had a monumental impact on cinema.
In addition, Peckinpah’s use of multi-camera setups, shooting action from a myriad of different angles, rapid-fire editing, and liberal use of slow motion left its mark on the art form, and it’s not difficult to examine Woo’s back catalogue and see the shadow of The Wild Bunch looming large over it.
His Hong Kong masterpieces A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Bullet to the Head, and Hard Boiled, his Hollywood blockbusters Broken Arrow, Face/Off, and Mission: Impossible II and even his recent return to American filmmaking for the first time in 20 years with Silent Night all owe at least a small debt of gratitude to Peckinpah’s seminal six-shooter.
Jacques Demy’s musical romance The Umbrellas of Cherbourg might be Woo’s all-time favourite motion picture that he calls “the most beautiful movie I’ve seen” for the way it “taught me what romanticism is in movies”, but when it comes to action, The Wild Bunch is head and shoulders above the rest.
As if his adoration of Peckinpah’s film wasn’t enough, Woo even subtly referenced his love of the movie in what’s arguably the single best entry in his own oeuvre. Prior to the climactic shootout in The Wild Bunch, William Holden’s Pete Bishop polishes off a bottle of tequila and makes the call to rescue Jaime Sánchez’s Angel from the ruthless clutches of Emilio Fernández’s General Mapache.
Chow Yun-fat’s clarinet-playing jazz enthusiast, Yuen Ho-yan in Hard Boiled, goes by the nickname of ‘Tequila’ given his preference for the alcoholic beverage, something Woo confirmed was directly inspired by the tipple taking pride of place in a pivotal scene from The Wild Bunch.
