Hard Boiled is a film that serves as not just a great movie in its own right, but as a fitting capstone to a complete body of work. The highly-charged stories, emotional spectrum, visual magnificence, and moral subtext of John Woo’s “heroic bloodshed” canon owes everything to the circumstances of the man’s early years. His is a directorial mind forged in the crucible of a hard but spiritual life.
He came into the world as Wu Yu-Sheng in October, 1946. Originally hailing from Guangzhou (Canton), in the south of China, his family fled to British-controlled Hong Kong in 1950 to escape the newly organized Communist government. Woo and his parents lived in a shantytown slum until a terrible fire destroyed the whole works in 1953, then survived on the streets for a year before finally settling in government housing. “The neighborhood had lots of drug dealers and gangsters,” Woo says, “There was gambling and prostitution. Every day I had to deal with a gang. I used to get beat up by a gang and I used to fight back very hard. I got in lots of fights. But I had great parents who taught me to go straight and to live with dignity and be a decent man.” His father soon contracted tuberculosis, and would die from the disease while Woo was in his teens. “Because we were poor,” Woo says, “I always thought we were living in hell.”
Throughout those grim years, only two things kept Woo’s spirit intact. The first was an event he now sees as miraculous: he became the beneficiary of an anonymous donation from an American family intended to send destitute Chinese kids to school. “I was deeply impressed,” he says, “with the altruism of the American family who paid for my education that my family valued but was simply unable to supply.” Soon Woo was in a Lutheran school and attending church, with the goal of both to “make decent young men and women out of us slum-dwellers. And, I must say, the school achieved its aim.”
When his teachers complained that his Chinese name was too hard for them to pronounce, he chose a solid Christian name, John, as a substitute. Soon, he considered himself “a fervent Christian,” going so far as to flirt with becoming a minister so that he might somehow repay the kindnesses laden on him by the church. He attended a Catholic high school, and made his first money doing work at various churches. “All of these things,” Woo says, “made me learn what dignity is, what honor is, and gave me a lot of hope.” Even after his father died, he remained unbowed and refused to join a gang, do drugs, or succumb to any of the other pitfalls of life in the slums. When asked how he managed to keep on the straight and narrow in such trying circumstances, his response is simple: “I had a great mother, and I was devoted to the church.”
The other thing that transformed Woo’s life in those years was cinema. “My mother was a huge fan of American classics,” Woo says, “so she often took me to the movies. They were free for kids. Because we lived in the slums I loved movies so much for helping me escape from that hell. There was so much beauty in movies.” It got to the point where Woo found himself cutting classes in order to sneak away to see all the latest pictures. By the time he graduated high school his mind was filled with filmic lessons learned from classic American movies, the French New Wave, the gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville, the samurai films of Kurosawa, and much else.
He began making short experimental films of his own in an attempt to mimic the beauty he saw on screen, funding them by working as a ballroom dance instructor at yet another church. “I wasn’t a great dancer,” he admits, “I just knew the moves and taught people. But that made me learn the ability of the body to move, and to see the romance in physical action.” In hindsight, this peripheral education would have the same brilliant effect on his future filmmaking career that military drill training had on the career of legendary Hollywood dance choreographer Busby Berkeley. “As I’m shooting sometimes,” Woo says, “or when I choreograph action, I feel like I’m dancing. When I have my hero diving in the air, or shooting with two guns, it’s pretty much like ballet.”
Film school was not only beyond his reach economically — no such institution existed at all in 1960s Hong Kong. So after high school, he finagled his way into a job as a production assistant at Cathay Studios, and over a period of many years managed to work his way up the food chain, hopping from Shaw Brothers to Golden Harvest to Golden Princess. Eventually he became a director of formula martial arts flicks (one starring a very young Jackie Chan) and goofy comedies, but his heart still lay with those Melville pictures seen as a kid, with action and visuals filtered through a fertile mind’s eye chock-full of Christian imagery and iconography. “I tried to convince the studio to let me make a gangster film,” Woo remembers, “but they didn’t want me to.” As the comedies and martial arts flicks he made began to draw less and less at the box office, his rising star dimmed, and he found himself a has-been at the box-office before he had even the chance to do a single film with full creative control. “I was so very frustrated,” Woo says about the long doldrums of his early directorial career. “Some people even said I should go back to film school or just watch tapes and learn about film, which hurt me. You know, I do have my dignity. I’ve always believed I am a good director.”
Finally, in 1985 he got a break thanks to his friendship with director/producer Tsui Hark. Woo had previously helped Tsui through some particularly rough patches and lean years, so when in the mid-1980s Tsui was getting his own production company off the ground, one dedicated to the improvement and modernization of Hong Kong films, he gave Woo a chance to finally direct the kind of movie he wanted, a “homage to Jean-Pierre Melville, or Martin Scorsese, or Sam Peckinpah.” But this movie wouldn’t just be a copycat production, it would reflect Woo’s own outlook on life. “I wanted to make a film that would emphasize traditional values: loyalty, honesty, passion for justice, commitment to your family. Things I felt were being lost. . . .These are the values that I put in my films. My kind of hero fights for justice, for what is right.”
The result was A Better Tomorrow (1986 — the film’s original Chinese name directly translates to “True Colors of Valor” or “The Essence of Heroes”), a movie filled to the brim with guns, cool Armani clothes fluttering in the wind, male bonding, honor-killing, and Christian-inspired notions of sacrifice and redemption. And did I mention the guns? The movie was a smash hit and a cultural touchstone for a generation of Hong Kong filmgoers.
After fifteen long years, Woo had finally found his métier and become a bonafide auteur. He had also found an actor capable of epitomizing the noble yet conflicted spirit of the heroes populating his brutal, balletic action films: Chow Yun-fat.
Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, the ascension of Chow Yun-fat from ex-soap-opera star and “box-office poison” to Hong Kong’s answer to Steve McQueen.
Previous posts in the series “John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, and Hard Boiled“
FURTHER READING and VIEWING
John Woo at Netflix. You can rent quite a few Woo items here, but alas, no A Better Tomorrow (1986) or A Better Tomorrow II (1987) quite yet. Still, what’s left on the menu is a rich list. From his early years, you’ve got Hand of Death (1976) and Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979). From his Hong Kong gangster prime there’s his masterpiece The Killer (1989), the gritty Bullet in the Head (1990), the lighthearted and playful Once a Thief (1991), and of course Hard Boiled (1992). Then you’ve got his Hollywood oeuvre: Hard Target (1993), Broken Arrow (1996), Face/Off (1997), Mission: Impossible II (2000), Windtalkers (2002), and Paycheck (2003). Finally, you have his latest triumph, the Chinese historical epic Red Cliff (2008), Woo’s attempt to make a film with the sweep and grandeur of Lawrence of Arabia. Have fun.
A John Woo tribute at YouTube. Courtesy of creator Ernest M. Whiteman III, here is a visual primer on why John Woo is held in such regard by fans as both an action director and as a filmmaker who possesses great emotional and thematic depth:
[youtube 0pzOAJ-XiMk — click here to watch in full-screen]
Crossings: John Woo Documentary. If you can stand the strangely compressed aspect ratio of this video at YouTube, here is a five-part overview of Woo’s life and career.
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