The movies John Woo doesn’t even consider “real cinema”
Most film fans are aware of the influence that some of the masters of the medium have had on their successors, the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese, for example, but one man has been responsible for the style of hundreds of movies since the 1980s, although you rarely hear his name, and that’s Hong Kong’s John Woo.
Almost every action film that features any kind of gun-to-gun combat from Reservoir Dogs through to The Matrix and even John Wick owes a debt of thanks to Woo’s unique style and cinematic tricks, taking their inspiration from classics including The Killer, Hard Boiled and 1986’s A Better Tomorrow.
Woo’s techniques became known as ‘heroic bloodshed’, with heroes flying through the air holding a gun in each hand, bullets in slow-motion and the much-parodied white doves flapping away from a scene of violence.
The filmmaker partnered with legends like Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-fat to produce thrillingly inventive movies that eventually earned him a shot at Hollywood, where he continued to thrive making mainstream films like the brilliant (and occasionally hilarious) Face Off with Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, Hard Target with Van Damme and the Tom Cruise blockbuster Mission Impossible 2.
However, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Woo’s own influences were not as visually spectacular as some of the films he would go on to make, with the director citing titles like Coppola’s The Godfather, Jean-Pierre Melville’s fantastic Le Samourai starring Alain Delon and the 1964 musical romance The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
He revealed to Variety, “I’ve never liked watching movies with big special effects, or anything based on comic books. I prefer Martin Scorsese’s movies, that kind of cinema. I like old-fashioned movies, you know? Real cinema. There aren’t many movies like that lately.”
Woo moved back and forth between the US and Asia over a 20-year period, making films on both sides of the world like 2008’s historical epic Red Cliff and most recently remaking his own classic with 2024’s The Killer, starring Nathalie Emmanuel.
But amidst it all, he felt that he wasn’t getting the projects he would have liked to do, lamenting, “There were a lot of good scripts that I wanted to shoot, but they never came to me. Scripts for historical dramas never came to me, either, because I’m Chinese. I’m a foreigner, so they couldn’t believe that I could make an American historical film.”
Woo is now back making another film Stateside and again casting one of his favourite actors, Nicolas Cage, for the third time, almost 30 years after the last occasion, for a New York mob movie called Gambino, which tells the true story of Carlo Gambino, a butcher’s son from Sicily who gets involved in organised crime and eventually rules the underworld, before being murdered, prompting a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist to pick up the trail and find out why.
Woo and Cage reuniting has sparked hope that a Face Off 2 could be in the works at some point in the near future, but as of yet, nothing has been confirmed. On the other hand, Cage has finished filming two major projects, the superhero TV mini-series Spider-Noir, which will hit Prime Video on May 27th, in both colour and black and white versions, and the American football movie Madden, alongside Christian Bale.
