“Masculine tough guys”: how John Woo and John Wayne inspired Jia Zhangke
Due to its history as a former British colony, Hong Kong is officially a special administrative region of China, and as such, it enjoys many freedoms that mainland China does not. Considering its cinema industry, Hong Kong filmmakers have earned widespread acclaim all across the world, particularly those who are considered as influential as John Woo.
A true master of the action film genre, Woo has established himself as an auteur of cinema, known and loved for his heroic bloodshed and gun fu genre movies. Detailing stunning choreography, slow motion and western cinema homages in the likes of The Killer, Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow, most action movie directors have been inspired by Woo at one point or another.
In fact, it’s not only directors known for working within the action boundaries who find influence from Woo; it’s filmmakers in general, and interestingly, one of China’s most admired contemporary filmmakers, Jia Zhangke, has admitted to finding elements of Woo’s works influential, particularly in his 2018 film Ash Is Purest White.
Based on the story of the leader of a gang from Jia’s childhood whom he had admired, Ash Is Purest White, starring Zhao Tao and Liao Fan, competed for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and earned widespread acclaim upon its release. Jia’s films are often dramatic in tone, but with Ash Is Purest White, he faced a narrative dealing with more criminality than he was known for.
As such, Jia said that his Ash Is Purest White characters are based on men from the old mining city of Datong who had looked up to people considered “being very masculine, tough guys, like John Wayne.” Speaking with Filmmaker magazine, Jia explained how such people had learned how to act tough by watching a number of movies, particularly the crime films of Hong Kong.
“They learned a lot from Hong Kong films, John Woo movies and others because they were so popular in the 1980s,” Jia noted. “They would gather around the arcade and it’s all they saw. The ones that Jiang hu were really crazy about were the triad films. A lot of them learned from that particular genre of film and expressed that in their daily life.”
The term Jiang hu generally refers to the social environment in which many Chinese movies dealing with secret and underworld criminal organisations are set, including those of John Woo. However, Jia was keen to differentiate between typical mafia movies and Ash Is Purest White, noting, “It’s not gangsters in the strictest sense. It’s more an underworld society, brotherhoods that form organically within certain neighbourhoods and pockets of society.”
What Ash Is The Purest White taps into is the kind of marginalised members of society who form “loose societies” in order to protect themselves. The films of John Woo, on the other hand, normally examine the criminal underworld and show the battle between crime bosses and the police.
While Jia’s 2018 film did not mirror the kind of narratives of John Woo, he showed how the kinds of characters he was writing about were influenced by the Hong Kong director’s movies, as well as those of John Wayne. By gathering around and watching Hard Boiled and The Searchers, they learned out to be macho and form secret societies of borderline criminality.
