Woo-ing the audience

Sarah Keenlyside talks to legendary director John Woo about faith, the death on the Red Cliff set, and his next pet project.

The sound of a thundering drumbeat quickly followed by the roar of a thousand men charging into battle fills the small room in an office block
in Dashanzi. Then the same three seconds of noise plays again. And again.To some, this is the sound of a genius at work; to John Woo, it's the sound of too much work.

‘We’re still have about 600 CGI effects to do on the second half of the movie,’ he says of Red Cliff Part two’s progress.
‘Six hundred!?’ I balk. ‘Ha,yeah,’ he chuckles.

Despite his workload, Woo seems relaxed; much more relaxed than he was two months ago when he declined an interview with this magazine after a stuntman died and six others were injured in a fire on set. Since then, the huge box office success of Red Cliff  an ambitious, sprawling two-part epic that marks his triumphant return to Chinese cinema after 15 years in Hollywood – has been of great comfort to Woo.

‘[The death] made everybody so sad,’ he confides after enjoying a well-deserved cigarette. ‘At the time I just wanted to keep everyone’s morale up, to try to encourage them, but it was hard. We won’t forget the people who died and were injured, but the public’s] reaction to the movie made us very happy, because it made us feel as though it was a film worth making.’

It’s clear that Red Cliff – an accurate portrayal of one of Chinese history’s defining battles – is a pet project of Woo’s; a film he’s been trying to get made for years. It was also the film he no doubt hoped would silence the critics who have been whispering that he had lost his mojo. After going Stateside in 1993 and making a string of successful Hollywood actioners including Face/Off and Mission Impossible 2, by the time Windtalkers came around his fans were claiming he hadn’t made a good film in years.

What’s perhaps sad about that is he fact that when you meet Woo, it’s clear that he is a kindly, sensitive soul. When one of his previous babies, the highly personal and political morality tale Bullet in the Head, was badly received, he was said to be crushed. Just as well, then, that Red Cliff has made over 300 million RMB to date, and can now stand tall as the biggest grossing film of all time in China.

‘I could have continued working  in Hollywood,’ he says, ‘because I did pretty well in Hollywood. But I learned so much from working in the US that I felt I should give something back to China, to the young people here.’

The idea, he says, was not only for the film’s US contingent to understand Asia better, but to give the Mainland’s budding directors and producers a chance to work with Americans, and to be inspired by their methods.

And if anyone understands the importance of giving young people opportunities, it’s Woo. After his family fled China for Hong Kong in the ’50s, his childhood became characterised by gang violence and extreme hardship. ‘I was attacked a lot and had to fight back,’ he says with a hint of retrospective pride. ‘I was always bleeding, but I had to fight to survive, you know?’

Finding shelter in either the church (Woo is still a practicing Catholic) or the movie theatre after those fights was what prevented him losing hope, he says candidly. ‘The church took care of me and put me through school.’ His next film, Calibre (as in Excalibre), will be a Western in partnership with Johnny Depp’s production company Infinitum Nihil, and is based on a comic novel.Arthur and his nights retold in the American West seems a perfect fit for a gun loving Americanophile like Woo. So much so it’s a wonder it’s taken him this long…

‘For me to make a Western or a musical has been one of my dreams for years,’ he admits. Er, hang on a cotton picking minute, a musical?!
‘Oh I already have a script,’ he responds, becoming animated. Where will it be filmed, in China?

‘Hollywood’. And the name? ‘The Dancer’. ‘I’ve been working on that script for almost eight years because it’s so hard to get the studio to take a risk. But I think this project will work because it’s my type of movie.’

The look on my face must let on that I’m struggling to make the connection between the musical lover and the man who likes to drench his actors in blood onscreen.

‘When I was younger, the first colour movie I saw was a musical,’ he elaborates. ‘In a musical I found the beauty and joy of life, I found happiness. They reminded me that there was still a lot of good people and beautiful people in the world.’‘It’s hard to get people to believe in
me,’ he adds poignantly.

‘Some people say “oh John, John’s just an action director”. But I just love human stories.’

   发一篇Feature在这里也帮她宣传宣传Timeout的影响力...算是在辞职前做一点能做的慈善事业。什么时候也能让我掺和掺和采访？

    咱不要吴宇森，李雨春就成。