The movie that gave John Woo his Alfred Hitchcock moment: “It required that I find a new style”
John Woo once said that he learned everything he needed to know about cinematic suspense by watching the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the ‘Master of Suspense.’ The acclaimed action director behind Hollywood hits like Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II, as well as Hong Kong classics like Hard Boiled, learned something else from Hitchcock, though. Interestingly, it was this other lesson that he applied to his Hollywood comeback, and it helped finally give him his very own Hitchcock moment.
In 2003, after a string of massively profitable American movies, Woo made his first significant misstep in Hollywood. His sci-fi action flick Paycheck, which starred Ben Affleck, made decent money at the box office, but the reviews were so vitriolic that Woo found himself in the purgatory known as “director jail.” in 2023, Woo admitted to IndieWire, “Because I failed with Paycheck, I didn’t get a good script offered to me for a long, long time.”
Seeing how the wind was blowing, Woo returned to Hong Kong and made a succession of historical epics. Amazingly, it took two decades removed from the Hollywood machine before he was finally sent something that might tempt him back to the US. That script was called Silent Night, and it was the story of a father who is shot in the throat when his son is killed by a local gang. He then swears silent vengeance on the entire crew.
Reading a script with a main character who can’t speak for 90% of the film fascinated Woo. As the movie would feature minimal dialogue, he realised the usual grammar and language of the feature wouldn’t apply for most of the runtime. Instead of cutting back and forth between characters talking to each other, the movie would have to find new ways to convey information to the audience.
Luckily, Woo knew just who to look to for inspiration. He explained, “Alfred Hitchcock saw every movie as an experiment, and this was an experiment for me. How do you make an audience understand a story with no dialogue? It required that I find a new style and a new format.”
Woo decided to use a trick Hitchcock pioneered more than 70 years ago. In 1948’s Rope, Hitchcock made the picture appear as if its 80-minute runtime had unfolded entirely in one long, unbroken shot. In reality, because of the limitations of how much film a camera magazine could hold at the time, Rope was actually a series of ten-minute shots brilliantly joined together with secret cuts. In 1962, Hitchcock told François Truffaut, “I undertook Rope as a stunt. That’s the only way I can describe it. I really don’t know how I came to indulge in it.”
While Hitchcock may have referred to his gambit on Rope as a “stunt”, Woo saw it for what it was – an experiment in cinematic storytelling that suited his purposes perfectly. In Silent Night, he couldn’t rely on words to illuminate the plot or reveal the character’s inner thoughts and feeling. Instead, it all had to come through action and movement.
In his previous films, Woo used multiple cameras to capture as many angles as possible in his action sequences. This made the movies exciting, frenetic and varied when edited together. By contrast, the long, extended takes with meticulously choreographed action that he chose for Silent Night would be a change of pace. However, he was adamant that it was the only way to make the film and its characters seem “real.”
Ultimately, returning to Hollywood to make Silent Night was a worthwhile experiment for Woo. Because it was an independent production, he was given carte blanche to make the movie how he wanted to, and it reminded him of his early days as a Hitchcock-loving filmmaker in Hong Kong. He noted, “The money and the time are tight, but that’s the nature of independent film. I feel pretty pleased because I feel free.”
