Balletic Violence Revisited
John Woo returns to his signature “gun fu” action thrillers
It has been 50 years since John Woo, the renowned Hong Kong director, started his career in the film industry back in 1968. Woo, now aged 71, has staged more than 30 films throughout an illustrious career which has spanned both Hong Kong and Hollywood, winning applause both at home and abroad for his distinctive style of action movies.
This winter saw two of Woo’s films screened in cinemas with a rerelease of his 1986 blockbuster A Better Tomorrow and the release of his latest movie Manhunt. Woo’s highly regarded film A Better Tomorrow depicts the story of two brothers, a gangster and a policeman, and has been widely hailed as the first and defining film of the heroic bloodshed genre. Manhunt tells the story of a lawyer, in the frame for a murder he did not commit, who teams up with a detective in order to restore his reputation.
The two movies may be separated by a 31year gap, but they remain alike in their methods of story-telling and visual language. Both depict men bound by personal concepts of honor and loyalty at odds with contemporary values, each willing to fight in order to attain justice. Woo’s signature narrative tools; epic shootouts, slow motion gunplay, tense Mexican stand-offs, and carefully choreographed fight sequences, are recurrent spectacles in the two films, a style described as “balletic violence” which has inspired and influenced other directors all around the world.
Yet for all the influence of the style which has become almost synonymous with his name, Woo has in fact not made a signature “gun fu” thriller for 14 years. After working on several big budget historical epics which received generally mixed reviews, Manhunt marks a return to what he does best.
“I haven’t touched a gun film for more than a decade. I feel somewhat lonely without it. A director shouldn’t stay away from his signature genre for too long,” Woo said at the premiere of Manhunt in Beijing on October 31.
A meteoric rise
Woo’s early life helped to shape the kind of director he would later become. Growing up in a shanty town in Hong Kong, his family lived in poverty, whilst the young Woo was the frequent target of street bullies throughout his childhood. He described his feeling at the time as one of loneliness and claimed that he longed to rid himself of such miserable life. He later discovered cinema, for him a retreat from the suffering of his youth, and movies, especially musical films, began to shape his hopes for the future.
During his childhood Woo was a shy and quiet boy. Making movies thus became a way for him to explore his feelings and he was soon using film as a language to communicate his thinking and his vision of the world to those around him.
Making films also enabled the young Woo to make a lot of friends. ”When I was a kid I felt lonely, I didn’t have many friends. If you make a movie, then you can work with different kinds of people and make different kinds of friends. That’s very important to me,” said Woo at a ceremony in Beijing celebrating the 50th anniversary of his directing career on November 11.
A trademark of Woo’s renowned early work is his aesthetic display of gunfights and depiction of brotherhood and justice. As a child he witnessed two riots, one in 1956 and the other in 1967, in which many Hong Kong civilians were injured or killed. During one of the incidents Woo himself watched as a man soaked in blood died in front of his door. This gruesome scene left a lasting impression on the young Woo and is a recurrent spectacle found throughout his work.
First with A Better Tomorrow and later with