John Woo is a director’s director, often causing other practitioners of the trade to gape and wonder “How on earth did he do that?” When they hear that a technically audacious movie like Hard Boiled cost only four million dollars to make, their amazement deepens. And when they learn that the film took 123 days to shoot, longer than most Hollywood extravaganzas, they begin to understand the amount of work, preparation, and creativity that goes into crafting such a picture.
David Bordwell, writing in Planet Hong Kong, describes how
Many of Woo’s visual tics, like freeze-frames and slow-motion walks and glances, were already passé in the West, but the “heroes” cycle allowed him to integrate them with MTV dissolving musical segues, an endlessly arcing camera, wistful silhouettes against saturated landscapes, and glamorous, anguished players. The result was a glossy synthesis of Italian Westerns, swordplay, film noir, and romantic melodrama new to both Hong Kong and the West.
“We are all learning from and imitating each other,” is Woo’s own way of explaining it. “Hong Kong in the old days got a lot of influence from American movies, especially technique. We got a lot of inspiration from the West. We used Western techniques to tell a Chinese story. We just combined elements to create a new cinematic language. Now it’s the West that is borrowing back. It comes full circle. We are all in the same film family. It is a good thing, I think.”
Yet making a movie like Hard Boiled takes more than coming up with new ways to shoot a gun or blow up a building — it’s an intricate fusion of style, technique, and emotion, all geared towards expressing a thematic worldview. “Woo does not protract his films’ shootouts for fun,” says Michael Bliss in his book about Woo’s spiritualism, Between the Bullets. “The excess in such scenes represents the director’s attempt to bring the action up to a level of intensity that would suggest cataclysm on a grand, operatic scale. These cataclysms are also meant to represent a concretization of the powerful forces in the characters that are unleashed by betrayal, frustration, anger, and guilt. Woo’s violent scenes are his way of graphically depicting the perennial clash between good and evil, a conflict that must always strike sparks.”
When struggling to find words to describe the kind of movie Hard Boiled is, I’m tempted to borrow Simone Weil’s famous description of The Iliad: “The Poem of Force.” Like that ever-famous “conflict that must always strike sparks,” Woo’s characters engage in outsized heroics reminiscent of an Argive champion plunging into battle like (in the words of the late, great Iliad translator Robert Fagles) “a lion leaping into the fold. . . piling corpse on corpse. . . cutting the legs from under squads of good brave men.” When we see Chow Yun-fat tearing through legions of gangsters in Hard Boiled, nary a scratch on him as he slices through their ranks like a hot knife through butter, is it any less fantastic than Diomedes or Achilles doing the same thing in a three-thousand-year-old tale? Woo is using cinema not just to entertain or thrill, but to mythologize.
Other critics have noticed this in Woo’s work, as when Kenneth Hall describes Hard Boiled‘s memorable one-eyed villain Mad Dog as “rather like Cerberus in Hades” as he haunts the bowels of the hospital that features so prominently at the end of the film. Woo puts the virtues and vices espoused by the ancients — their rages, underworlds, betrayals, and triumphs — in modern guises. I see little essential difference between the two, and those people who feel Woo’s hyper-violence and enormous body counts are far too over-the-top have perhaps forgotten who we really are under the sheen of modern civilization. What looks impossible in reality is all-too-realistic in spirit, and the impossible can stimulate and inspire the world of the real, as the Greeks well knew.
Woo is actually given more credit for this in the East than in America, much as we like him on this side of the pond. By Hong Kong standards Woo’s action (if not his violence) isn’t very outrageous — instead, he is seen as an expert at using action to emphasize emotion. “For Woo,” writes Michael Bliss, “external action is almost always interior action, in the sense that it expresses states of mind and emotion.” Unlike so many action films, where the various set-pieces all bleed and blend together into one long mash-up of noise and thunder, Woo’s cataclysms are striking in their individuality, with each leading up to a profound emotional climax that drives the story. When you think Hard Boiled, you think Teahouse. Warehouse. Hospital. Each dazzlingly complex set-piece is brought to life, and then to destruction, with the precision of a watchmaker, and with crescendos of feeling that mimic the powers of a Stokowski or an Ormandy.
The great shots of Hard Boiled rival the best of any action movie ever made: Tequila’s face, covered in flower, blasted red as he shoots his enemy in a rage; his balletic entry into the warehouse, swinging from a wire with gun blazing; his double-gun standoff with Tony the undercover cop, each man one false move away from death; Tequila preparing to hit a bullet with a bullet to escape the basement of a hospital as filled with exotic villainy as any Bond villain’s sanctum; Tequila evading a veritable symphony of explosions as he saves a lone baby from the hospital. Great, great stuff, and all crammed into a single relentlessly entertaining movie.
“Action is the major part of a Hong Kong film,” Woo says. “The production spends more time and money on that than anything, so we could shoot or re-shoot or get more money and time to make the action right. In America, there’s never enough time to do a perfect action scene.” Giving Chow Yun-fat’s character so much to do and making him look so good doing it is a big reason why, when the British film magazine Empire commissioned a poll to determine “The 100 Greatest Movie Characters” of all time, Chow’s portrayal of Tequila in Hard Boiled came in at a respectable #33.
The famous climactic hospital scene from Hard Boiled, which lasts a full forty-five minutes, took over a month to shoot all by itself. It contains the movie’s single most famous shot, of a kind only achieved a handful of times of celluloid before by directors with names like Welles and Scorsese. It’s an expertly choreographed, nearly three-minute long handheld journey through the hospital, following Tequila and Tony as they maneuver through the maze-like hallways, clearing them of gangsters with workmanlike action-movie determination, and every bullet and explosion and action beat executed by the dozens of participants without any cutting away to different angles.
“For that shot,” Woo says, “we took two days to build the set, and then we rehearsed several hundred times. Then we took two more days to try and shoot the shot. But always we failed. The timing is wrong, or the special effect doesn’t go that well. I almost give up, but the crew and the stunt group and the actor, they all want to try it again. At last we got it done.” Well, almost done — in the end, Woo had to link two disparate takes together with a quick, almost imperceptible dissolve. But it remains one of the all-time great long takes in cinema history, and twenty years later it still leaves directors mumbling, “How did he do that?”
[youtube 3bozxgVQ9m0 — click here to watch in full-screen HD]
Of course, with Woo planning to make the jump to America, that reaction was exactly what he wanted to hear from Hollywood. He knew that Hard Boiled was the coda to his Hong Kong career, so he crafted it into a calling card that he could take to California. Perhaps that’s why he gave the story a happy ending of a sort. As he tells the story:
In my version of Hard Boiled, Tony Leung [who played the undercover cop] was dead. He sacrificed himself. It was a dark message and he was a dark character. But after I shot the ending, the crew and the actors were not happy. They were insisting that I keep him alive. Some of my assistants even cried. I could understand why. All that had happened in Beijing [during the Tienanmen Square protests] gave the people in Hong Kong a lot of sadness. It made them feel like the good person should stay alive. So we added another ending.
In this newly conceived finish, the shot of Tony lying on the pavement, seemingly mortally wounded, gives way to an image of him sailing his boat, living the dream he had earlier stated to Tequila. Some have claimed that this is merely Tony in heaven, but the bandage on his head seals the deal. “Tony lives,” Woo says, “and it gives people hope. Also, it was good for Chow Yun-fat’s character, it was a great metaphor that he never lost his friend. It really touched my heart that people felt so strongly about this Tony’s character.”
When Tony’s ghostly image sails away at the end of Hard Boiled, he may as well be John Woo sailing away from Hong Kong, that exciting city filled with the “perennial conflict” of light and darkness, his sails tacked straight for Hollywood. It’s sad that the Hong Kong industry crested and then largely withered after the 1997 takeover of the city by the mainland Communists. It’s always bittersweet to see a Golden Age end. But for the Hong Kong career of John Woo, Hard Boiled was one hell of a swan song. “Strong visuals, original action, sympathetic heroes and villains, and a story which forces these elements to the hilt combine to create emotionally powerful situations. This is what I look for and create. A film should bring out your emotions, whether it’s happiness or pain. I hope my movies will fill people’s lives and, through their expanded feelings, teach them love and honor.”
Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at Hard Boiled by meditating on John Woo’s Christianized notions of heroism, villainy, and moral codes in a war-torn, blood-soaked world.
Previous posts in the series “John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, and Hard Boiled“
FURTHER READING and VIEWING
“The New Cult Canon: Hard Boiled“ by Scott Tobias. A nice look back at the film and how it holds up in the face of today’s CGI onslaught.
“A Sequel to John Woo’s Hard Boiled is in Development” by Peter Sciretta. This little item, published in March 2009, discusses the self-explanatory news given in the article’s title. And check out this follow-up with more information.
“The Films of John Woo and the Art of Heroic Bloodshed” by Anthony Leong. A long web article covering all of Woo’s major films through Face/Off. Lots of interesting ideas and thoughts on each movie.
“Hard Boiled Memories: Visiting the set of a John Woo classic” by Bey Logan. The author describes his visit to the set of Hard Boiled in 1992 and his conversations with the film’s director and stars.
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