“He was the king”: the one director John Woo places on the same pedestal as Akira Kurosawa
Not even the most self-assured directors in the business would contemplate placing themselves on the same pedestal as Akira Kurosawa, but John Woo maintains the belief that his most influential mentor was more than deserving of being spoken about in the same breath as the transformative auteur.
Like many other accomplished, acclaimed, and iconic filmmakers, Woo was just one of an infinite number of aspiring cinephiles who took their cues from Kurosawa. There aren’t many places better to learn from than an all-time great, even if they took drastically different approaches to carving out their respective niche.
That’s where Woo’s other pivotal influence comes in, with Sam Peckinpah and The Wild Bunch opening his eyes to how there could be so much beauty in bloodshed. When he decided to hit the reset button on his fledgling career and make the kind of movies he always wanted to make, the end result was Hong Kong classic A Better Tomorrow.
From that point on, Woo would become one of action cinema’s leading lights, setting the benchmark for heroic bloodshed and knocking out multiple masterpieces before making the leap to Hollywood in the early 1990s, where he found himself rubbing shoulders with the rest of the top-level talent who worshipped at Kurosawa’s altar.
Before he’d even directed his first solo feature, 1974’s The Young Dragons, and before he’d even changed his professional name from Yu-Shen Wu to John Woo, he was an assistant director who sat under an invaluable learning tree. Of his nine AD gigs, five of them were helmed by the same filmmaker, whose protege held them in the highest possible esteem.
“I worked with a great master named Chang Che,” Woo told Alex Simon. “He was the king at the time. He was equal to Akira Kurosawa. He made a lot of period films, always about friendship, honour, loyalty. He also created a lot of big stars, and I was so lucky. I worked with him for about two and a half years, then I got my first chance to direct a movie.”
Woo’s proving ground under Che’s tutelage served him well, with everything he’d learned on Ma Zhong Yen, The Water Margin, Nian Qing Ren, Four Riders, and Chinese Vengeance standing him in good stead to break out on his own. Admittedly, he wasn’t thrilled at emulating his idol and taking the reins on so many formulaic martial arts and wuxia flicks at first, but everybody has to start somewhere.
Cheh was arguably the most famous behind-the-camera talent Shaw Brothers Studios had at its disposal during the outfit’s golden period in the 1960s and 1970s, which earned him the nickname ‘The Godfather of Hong Kong Cinema’.
He was heavily influenced by the work of Kurosawa, Peckinpah, and Sergio Leone, too, taking those international influences and using them to breathe new life into local genre fare. It’s not a coincidence that Woo would do almost exactly the same thing in the ’80s, even if he maintains that Cheh wasn’t a devotee of the Japanese maestro but an equal.
