Director John Woo talks films and ‘A Better Tomorrow'
PINGYAO, China: Hong Kong director John Woo’s ‘A Better Tomorrow’ is still making waves more than three decades after it was made.
At the first Pingyao International Film Festival, all the tickets for ‘A Better Tomorrow’ were sold out, even if it has been 31 years since the premiere of this crime film, a milestone work by Woo.
“That’s the only film I want to see at the festival,” a taxi driver, a man in his 40s, says. “I have not seen it on the big screen.”
No one can figure out how many pirate videos of the film were once circulated in China’s small cities and counties in the 1990s.
However, an indisputable legacy is: While filmgoers in China’s metropolises have developed diverse tastes, oldstyle Hong Kong films, starring Chow Yun-fat, an actor in ‘A Better Tomorrow’, still dominate county cinemas.
“Don’t call me a master. I’m only a lover of films.” That is how 71-year-old Woo began his so-called “film master class” in Pingyao at the film festival.
“What I wanted to create (when making ‘A Better Tomorrow’) was merely fresh gunshot scenes,” he says. “But I got very deeply immersed in preparing for the scenes, which startled my wife.”
Woo finally created a classic scene in film history where Chow carries two pistols to a restaurant. The scene was later copied by many filmmakers.
Speaking about the film, he says: “A hero cannot take a machine gun. If so, the fighting will finish too soon.”
Woo compares his films to wuxia, or kung fu, a Chinese literature and film genre, which refers to martial chivalry.
“In my films, a pistol is like a sword for the heroes,” he says.
“My action scenes are just like dancing. They are influenced by musical films, which emphasise rhythm. If the rhythm is right, repetition of the same action can create an extraordinary effect.”
After he made them, Woo’s ‘A Better Tomorrow’ and ‘The Killer’ (1989), also starring Chow, attracted attention among filmmakers in the West.
And Woo was then invited to Hollywood.
Since ‘Broken Arrow’ (1996) and ‘Face/Off’ (1997), both starring John Travolta, his resume also includes Hollywood blockbusters.
Speaking about his tryst with Hollywood, he says: “The facades are in the West, but the techniques and spirits are rooted in the East. You see, Travolta is just like Chow Yun-fat in the films.”
Referring to his experiences abroad, he says: “At first, I made the lead roles in these films die in the end. But, I was forced to change the scripts.
“This was because in wuxia films, Chinese heroes are not afraid to sacrifice their lives if necessary, although they do value life. However, heroes in Hollywood films always struggle on to survive.”
Explaining his success, he partly attributes humour and romanticism as to why his films travel beyond cultural and language barriers.
As for the kinds of films he likes to make, Woo says he prefers to focus on humanity and keep his distance from sci-fi and superhero films.
Woo is not someone who follows fads. When he first began doing action films in Hong Kong in the mid-1980s, the industry was dominated by comedies, which were considered the only way to make money then.
Woo’s experiments were not expected to be successful. Also, in the past decade, his productions like ‘Red Cliff’ and ‘The Crossing’, both with huge budgets, have been failures at the box office.
Commenting on his propensity to go against the grain, Woo says: “Nowadays, overwhelming studies about filmgoers’ habits actually harm the industry.
“Whether a film is good or not should be decided by what people say online,” he says.
Despite his successes globally, Woo in Pingyao - a UNESCO World Heritage site - is a modest student paying homage to other filmmakers. For instance, he says his inspiration for ‘The Killer’ came from ‘The Godson’ (1967), a movie made by French crime film guru Jean-Pierre Melville.
Besides, he says many scenes in his films are a tribute to American director Martin Scorsese.
Speaking about his regrets, Woo says he never got a chance to work with Japanese actor Ken Takakura, who died in 2014.
So, could Woo’s upcoming ‘Manhunt’, about a framed procurator who wants to clear his name, be a way to make up for a missed opportunity?
The original Japanese film, starring Takakura, was released in China in the late 1970s.
Then, it was very popular. Asked if his version of this familiar story will feature typical “Woo’s scenes”, like flying pigeons and heroes carrying two pistols, he smiles, saying: “Why not? These are my trade marks.”
Don’t call me a master. I’m only a lover of films. What I wanted to create (when making ‘A Better Tomorrow’) was merely fresh gunshot scenes. But I got very deeply immersed in preparing for the scenes. John Woo