John Woo

John Woo Yu-Sen (born September 22, 1946) is a Hong Kong filmmaker, known as a highly influential figure in the action film genre.

He is a pioneer of heroic bloodshed films (a crime action film genre involving Chinese triads) and the gun fu genre in Hong Kong action cinema, before working in Hollywood films.

He is known for his highly chaotic "bullet ballet" action sequences, stylized imagery, Mexican standoffs, frequent use of slow motion and allusions to wuxia, film noir and Western cinema.

Woo was born as Wu Yu-seng (Ng Yu-sum in Cantonese) on September 22, 1946, in Guangzhou, China, amidst the chaotic Chinese Civil War.

Due to school age restrictions, his mother changed his birth date to 22 September 1948, which is what remains on his passport.

The Woo family, who were Protestant Christians, faced persecution during Mao Zedong's early anti-bourgeois purges after the communist revolution in China, and fled to Hong Kong when he was five.

Impoverished, the Woo family lived in the slums at Shek Kip Mei.

His father was a teacher, though rendered unable to work by tuberculosis, and his mother was a manual laborer on construction sites.

The family was rendered homeless by the Shek Kip Mei Fire of 1953.

Charitable donations from disaster relief efforts enabled the family to relocate; however, violent crime had by then become commonplace in Hong Kong housing projects.

At age three he was diagnosed with a serious medical condition.

Following surgery on his spine, he was unable to walk correctly until eight years old, and as a result his right leg is shorter than his left leg.

His Christian upbringing shows influences in his films.

As a young boy, Woo had wanted to be a Christian minister.

He later found a passion for movies influenced by the French New Wave especially Jean-Pierre Melville.

Woo has said he was shy and had difficulty speaking, but found making movies a way to explore his feelings and thinking and would "use movies as a language".

Woo found respite in Bob Dylan and in American Westerns.

He has stated the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made a particular impression on him in his youth: the device of two comrades, each of whom fire pistols from each hand, is a recurrent spectacle later found in his own work.

In 1969, Woo was hired as a script supervisor at Cathay Studios.

In 1971, he became an assistant director at Shaw Studios.

The same year, he watched Bruce Lee's The Big Boss, which left a strong impression on him due to how different it was from earlier martial arts films.

Lee's films inspired to direct his own action films.

His directorial debut in 1974 was the feature film The Young Dragons (鐵漢柔情, Tiě hàn róu qíng).

In the kung fu film genre, it was choreographed by Jackie Chan, and featured dynamic camera-work and elaborate action scenes.

The film was picked up by Golden Harvest Studio where he went on to direct more martial arts films.

He later had success as a comedy director with Money Crazy (發錢寒, Fā qián hàn) (1977), starring Hong Kong comedian Ricky Hui and Richard Ng.

By the mid-1980s, Woo was experiencing occupational burnout.

Several of his films were commercial disappointments, and he felt a distinct lack of creative control.

Woo would make several more Heroic Bloodshed films in the late 1980s and early 1990s, nearly all starring Chow Yun-fat.

These violent gangster thrillers typically focus on men bound by honor and loyalty, at odds with contemporary values of impermanence and expediency.

The protagonists of these films, therefore, may be said to present a common lineage with the Chinese literary tradition of loyalty among generals depicted in classics such as "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" (三國演義).

Considered one of the major figures of Hong Kong cinema, Woo has directed several notable action films including A Better Tomorrow (1986), The Killer (1989), Hard Boiled (1992) and Red Cliff (2008/2009).

It was during this period of self-imposed exile that director/producer Tsui Hark provided the funding for Woo to film a longtime pet project, A Better Tomorrow (1986).

The story of two brothers—one a law enforcement officer, the other a criminal—was a financial blockbuster.

A Better Tomorrow became a defining achievement in Hong Kong action cinema for its combination of emotional drama, slow-motion Gunplay, and gritty atmospherics.

Its signature visual device of two-handed, two-gunned shootouts within confined quarters—often referred to as "gun fu"—was novel, and its diametrical inversion of the "good-guys-bad guys" formula in its characterization would influence later American films.

His Hollywood films include Hard Target (1993), Broken Arrow (1996), Face/Off (1997) and Mission: Impossible 2 (2000).

He also created the comic series Seven Brothers, published by Virgin Comics.

He is the founder and chairman of the production company Lion Rock Productions.

Woo is a winner of the Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Editing, as well as a Golden Horse Award, an Asia Pacific Screen Award and a Saturn Award.