John Woo
John Woo was born in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China on May 1st, 1946 and is the Director. At the age of 77, John Woo biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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Born 1 May 1946, John Woo SBS (Chinese: ) is a Chinese-born Hong Konger filmmaker, writer, and actor.
Woo has produced several notable action films in his adopted homeland, including A Better Tomorrow (1989), Hard Boiled (1992), and Red Cliff (2008/2009), among others. He is known for his tumultuous action sequences, stylized images, Mexican standoffs, frequent use of slow motion, neo-noir, wuxia, and Western cinema.
He is a recipient of the Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Picture, as well as a Golden Horse Award, an Asia Pacific Screen Award, and a Saturn Award. Woo's Hollywood films include the action thrillers Hard Target (1993) and Broken Arrow (1996), the sci-fi action thriller Face/Off (1997), and Mission: Impossible 2 (2000).
He created the comic book Seven Brothers, which was also published by Virgin Comics.
As David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samoura, he cites his three favorite films as his three favorites.
He is the founder and chairman of Lion Rock Productions.
Early life
Woo was born in Guangzhou, China, on September 22, 1946, as part of the tumultuous Chinese Civil War. His father moved his birth date to 22 September 1948, which is what remains on his passport, due to school age limitations. During Mao Zedong's early anti-bourgeois persecutions, the Woo family, who were Protestant Christians, was threatened, and he fled to Hong Kong when he was five years old.: xv, 3
The Woo family, who was impoverished, lived in Shek Kip Mei's slums. His father was a teacher but was forced to work due to tuberculosis, and his mother was a manual laborer on construction sites. The family was made homeless by the 1953 Shek Kip Mei Fire. The family was able to relocate thanks to generous donations from disaster relief efforts; however, violent crime had by then become commonplace in Hong Kong housing projects. He was diagnosed with a severe medical disorder at age three. He was unable to walk properly until eight years old after spine surgery, and as a result, his right leg is shorter than his left leg.
In his films, his Christian upbringing influenced him. Woo wanted to be a Christian minister as a young child. Jean-Pierre Melville, for example, discovered a passion for movies after being inspired by the French New Wave. Woo says he was shy and had trouble speaking, but he found that watching movies would help him discover his feelings and thoughts, and that "using movies as a language" would be a means to explore his emotions and thoughts.
In Bob Dylan and American Westerns, Woo found a sense of calm. He has mentioned that the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made a lasting impression on him in his youth: the combination of two comrades, each of whom fire pistols from each hand, is a regular feature in his own lifetime.
Personal life
Since 1976, Woo has been married to Annie Woo Ngau Chun-lung. Kimberley Woo, Angeles Woo, and Frank Woo are their two children, as well as a son Frank Woo. In an interview with BBC, he believes in God and has utmost respect for Jesus, whom he describes as a "great philosopher."
As David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samoura, he cites three of his favorite films as his three favorites.
Career
Woo was recruited as a script supervisor at Cathay Studios in 1969. He began as an assistant director at Shaw Studios in 1971. Bruce Lee's The Big Boss, a year ago, left a strong impression on him due to how different it was from earlier martial arts films. Lee's films were inspired by his own action films. The Young Dragons was his directorial debut in 1974 (Ti hàn róu qvng). It was choreographed by Jackie Chan, and it featured dynamic camerawork and elaborate action scenes in the kung fu film style. Golden Harvest Studio, where he went on to produce more martial arts films, was picked up the film. With Money Crazy (F qián hàn) (1977), starring Hong Kong comedian Ricky Hui and Richard Ng, he had success as a comedy writer.
Woo was experiencing occupational burnout by the mid-1980s. Several of his films were commercial failures, and he felt a distinct lack of creative control. The director/producer Tsui Hark provided the funds for Woo to film A Better Tomorrow (1986), during this period of self-imposed exile. Both brothers' tales, one a law enforcement officer, the other a criminal, was a financial blockbuster. A Better Tomorrow was a pivotal achievement in Hong Kong's action film for its combination of emotional drama, slow-motion gunplay, and gritty atmospherics. Its distinctive visual device, a two-handed, two-gunned shootouts within confined quarters, was a novel, and its diametrical inversion of the "good guys" formula in its description would influence later American films.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Woo would produce several more Heroic Bloodshed films, nearly all starring Chow Yun-Fat. These tense gangster dramas typically focus on men bound by honor and love, which are at odds with modern ideals of impermanence and expediency. Therefore, the protagonists of these films may have a common lineage with the Chinese literary tradition of loyalty among generals depicted in classics such as "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" ().
Woo gained international recognition with the introduction of The Killer, the most popular Hong Kong film since Bruce Lee's 1969 film Enter the Dragon (1973), which also earned Woo an American cult following. Bullet in the Head came a year later, but the network was unable to find an audience that understood its political undertones and was unable to recover its massive budget.
Hard Boiled (1992), his last Hong Kong film before emigrating to the United States, was the antithesis of his earlier gangster glorification. A 30-minute climax set within a hospital is the most notable of the film's numerous action scenes. For exactly 2 minutes and 42 seconds as they battle their way between hospital floors, one of two characters follows them for two minutes and 42 seconds. This chapter is referred to as "2 minutes, 42 seconds" on the Criterion DVD and laserdisc. The film was much darker than any of Woo's previous films, depicting a cop practically helpless to reduce the influx of gangsters in the area and the senseless murder of innocents. As a result, it did not have the success of his other films, but it did receive critical praise and became one of his most popular films in later years.
The year 1968 to 1990 was a period of uncertainty for Woo's 36-page interview. It includes Woo's early years in filmmaking, his work on kung fu films (during which time he gave Jackie Chan one of his first major film roles), and more recently, his gunpowder morality in Hong Kong.
When hired by Universal Studios to film Jean-Claude Van Damme in Hard Target, an émigré from 1993, the director had trouble with cultural change. Woo was unaccustomed to persistent leadership questions regarding topics such as violence limits and completion dates, as well as other international film directors confronted with the Hollywood environment. When initial cuts didn't result in a "R" rated film, the studio took over the initiative and edited footage to produce a cut "suitable for American audiences." A "rough cut" of the film, which is reportedly the original unrated version, is still popular among his followers.
Woo's next director, John Travolta and Christian Slater, was born in Broken Arrow after a three-year absence. The director was once more delayed by studio production and editorial issues in this tumultuous chase-themed film. Despite a larger budget than his previous Hard Target, the final feature did not have the same Woo look. The public reception was met with modest financial results.
The director hesitant to pursue ventures that would inevitably involve front-office involvement, the director cautiously rejected Face/Off's script several times before it was rewritten to suit him. (The futuristic setting was changed to a modern one.) The director was also given a wide variety of freedoms to pursue his speciality: emotional characterisation and elaborate steps. A complex tale of adversaries—each of whom surgically alters their identities —law enforcement agent John Travolta and terrorist Nicolas Cage play a game of cat and mouse, trapped in each other's outward appearance. Face/Off was launched in 1997 with critical praise and a large audience. In the United States, gross revenues of more than $100 million were above $100 million. At the 70th Academy Awards, Face/Off was also nominated for an Academy Award in the category Sound Effects Editing (Mark Stoeckinger).
Woo produced Lost in Space, a television series based on the 1960s television series Lost in Space. The pilot was not purchased, but bootleg copies have been made available by enthusiasts.
Mission: Impossible 2 Windtalkers and Paycheck are two more films in Hollywood by John Woo. Despite receiving mixed feedback, Mission: Impossible 2 was America's highest-grossing film in 2000. Windtalkers and Paycheck fared poorly at the box office and were generally dismissed by critics. The Stranglehold video game, which is a sequel to his 1992 film, Hard Boiled, is directed and produced by Woo. Woo is a multiplayer playable character in the game. Appleseed: Ex Machina, the sequel to Shinji Aramaki's 2004 film Appleseed, was released in the same year.
Woo returned to Asian cinema in 2008 with the completion of the two-part epic war film Red Cliff, based on a historical battle from Records of the Three Kingdoms. It's his first film in China after he emigrated from Hong Kong to the United States in 1993. Part 1 of the film was distributed in Asia in July 2008, receiving generally favorable reviews and good attendance. In January 2009, Part 2 was released in China.
In 2010, John Woo was given a Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival.
In 2014 and 2015, he followed Red Cliff in another two-part film, The Crossing. The four-hour epic, starring an all-star cast, tells the parallel lives of several characters who will all be passengers on the doomed Taiping steamer, which sank in 1949 en route from mainland China to Taiwan and has been described as "China's Titanic."
Lion Rock Productions was disbanded following The Crossing, Woo, producer Terence Chang's death in the box office.
Woo revealed in Cannes in May 2008 that his next film, which would take place in China and Taiwan, would be 1949, an epic love story set between World War II and Chinese Civil War to the founding of the People's Republic of China. Its production was expected to begin by the end of 2008, with a theatrical release planned in December 2009. However, the film was canceled in early April 2009 due to script integrity problems. According to reports, Woo is working on another World War II film, this time about the American Volunteer Group or the Flying Tigers. The film was tentatively titled "Flying Tiger Heroes" and Woo's listing says it would have "The most spectacular aerial battle scenes ever seen in Chinese cinema." It was not clear if Woo would not be directing the older war film or if it was put on hold. Woo has said that Flying Tiger Heroes would be a "highly important undertaking" and that "emphasise US-Chinese cooperation and the Yunnan people's contributions during the war of resistance." Woo has confirmed that he would film the Flying Tigers project using IMAX cameras. "It has always been a dream of mine to shoot with IMAX cameras and to film in IMAX," this film's strong visual element is incredibly relevant to cinemagoers today. [...] Using IMAX will give viewers a new experience, and I think it will be another breakthrough for Chinese films."
Woo will return to Hollywood in October 2021 to direct Silent Night, where a normal father goes into the underworld to venge his teenage son's death. Joel Kinnaman will appear in the film, which will be entirely without dialogue, and will be directed by Basil Iwanyk.