Chalk up John Woo as another director who doesn’t like superhero movies, preferring old fashioned movies.
John Woo is probably the greatest executive director of all time. No one can shoot action as kinetic as him, and his style paved the way for everyone from Sam Raimi to The Wachowskis to Chad Stahelski, whose John Wick films are a love letter to the Woo films produced by Chow Yun-Fat. With his comeback movie Silent Night having a good time and hitting theaters 1 DecemberJohn Woo recently sat down with The New Yorker for an extensive, wide-ranging interview about his life and career.
Of course, the magazine couldn’t help but ask Woo his thoughts on superhero movies, with the legendary director coming down firmly on Scorsese’s team, who has been outspoken about his dislike of the genre. “I’ve never been a fan of watching movies with big special effects or anything based on comic books. I prefer Martin Scorsese films, that kind of cinema. I can’t wait to watch “Killers of the Flower Moon.” I like old movies, you know? A real steel film. There aren’t many films like that in recent times.”
It was one of the movies that Woo said he liked Hell or High Watersaying, “I really like “Hell or High Water.” Good performances, good action. It feels like a tragedy. Great cinematography, too. I tried to get the director of photography, Giles Nuttgens, to shoot “Silent Night,” but he was unavailable.
During the interview, Woo noted that his reason for leaving Hollywood was to work in China, where he made the two-part epic. Red Rockthat there were good scripts after the 2003 failure Payroll. “I couldn’t get good scripts after ‘Paycheck,'” he told the New Yorker. “There were a lot of good scripts that I wanted to shoot, but they never came to me. Like a drama about a young kid from a bad neighborhood. Hollywood producers wouldn’t recommend me for that because they felt I wasn’t American, so I wouldn’t understand their way of life.”
One film of Woo’s that failed at the box office was his WW2 drama Windbreakerswhich had the misfortune of opening the same weekend as Scooby-Doo and The Bourne Identity in the summer of 2002. Woo has no hard feelings about that film because he said the studio, MGM, would let him do whatever he wanted. They even took his side over the writers, who wanted less focus on the relationship between the hero, played by Nicolas Cage, and the Native American code breaker, played by Adam Beach, which he must protect and kill. he fell into enemy hands.
“Unfortunately, so many terrible things happened while we were shooting ‘Windtalkers.’ We had bad weather, for example. It rained heavily for over a month while we were there, so we lost a lot of money. I still love that movie, and I tried to make the war scenes as realistic as possible. “
Silent Night coming out 1 December. Look for our review and our own interview with John Woo soon!
