Original subtitles

I'm John Woo, and my Chinese name is Ng Yu Sam.

We used to drink tequila in that way.

We put some soda to mix up with the tequila and then cover with a piece of

and hold it up, slam on a table, and we drank with a bubble.

And it will make you feel cool and feel like a man.

It was a very popular drink in Hong Kong.

I got an image from, you know, Sam Peckinpah's movie, The Wild Bunch. When

William Holden, before the final scene, he drank a bottle of tequila.

So I also named my hero Tequila.

Before we shot this movie, while I was doing the research, we were interviewing

a real hard -boiled cop, this young...

aggressive and tough, a man with real guts, and also pretty handsome.

Well, he always gave the bad guy the hard time.

He's very, very tough, and he was quite famous in the political force.

But in the meantime, he's a drummer, like a plant.

He's a hard boy, and also loves music.

For myself, I love jazz.

Very, very much.

When we started making Hot Boiled, we had another script. We're shooting

script, which I was not crazy about. It's about Tony Leung plays a psychopath

who puts poison in babies' milk in the supermarkets and kills babies. But we

have signed the actors or the crew and also the first scene which took place in

the tea house.

It's going to be demolished and we got five days to shoot that scene, the

opening scene. So we went in and shoot that scene anyway.

And then after we finished the scene and John just sat down and he decided to

change the script entirely, but keeping the first opening scene.

I also didn't like the idea for the baby carrying.

It could give the bad influence for the people.

You know, maybe somebody will imitate or learn from the movie.

So that's why I changed the whole idea to become an undercover story.

location to shoot.

Because this tea house was located in a bad area, like, you know, with a bad

neighborhood. So we have to shoot at night.

The gunfire and the sound effect was so strong and noisy, and it makes

the neighbors very angry, you know. They always complain, and complain

to the police, the department, the police.

came every night to try to stop us, to shoot, try to throw us

away. But something funny is that when the police force came to ourselves, when

they saw me, they were very nice to me.

Maybe they are my friend, you know.

And they used to love my movie, and they usually let me to finish the

shoot of the day.

Didn't care about it complaining much.

Film critic Dave Kerr. Every once in a while, every once in a very great while,

a director comes along who's so original and so startlingly new that he seems to

reinvent a genre.

And I think that's what John Woo has done with his films.

This is somebody who really understands the medium and was born to make movies.

I think in every shot of this film you see a cinematic sensibility.

working in a way that I'd say two or three other directors in the world right

now possess.

A man who knows exactly where to put the camera, exactly how to move it for the

effect he wants to get.

I'm Roger Avery. Currently I'm 28 years old. I just directed a movie called

Killing Zoe and co -wrote Pulp Fiction.

with Quentin Tarantino, and am now writing a script for John Woo, which

called Hatchet Man.

The first thing that strikes me about this movie, right off the bat, is the

sense of graphics in it. And this movie instantly sets up so much for you with

the title sequence.

It basically says these guys are in a band, they're together.

They're friends.

Then they basically set up there's a gun problem in Hong Kong. Like before the

credits have ever ended.

Then, boom, you're in the middle of a sting operation.

There are so many setups going on over the course of this.

So much is happening.

This sequence must have taken forever to make.

Use of mixed speeds. Bang! The way he just throws this teapot into the guy's

head. Ow!

What's striking to me is actually...

How this really feels about as confusing as it probably would be to be in this,

like, gun battle.

You're not sure, who is that guy who just stood up? And it's all been kind of

given to you, and on repeated viewings, you know, it's very clear, oh my god,

that guy's a bad guy.

To me, I watched the opening sequence of Hard Boiled, and I see something that

looks like, you know, like, I mean, it had to be planned.

But at the same time, it looks like there was...

a lot of fluidity going on. And I think that's inherent of a lot of Hong Kong

films because there's a lot less restriction on, for instance, squibs.

The Hong Kong audience is more accustomed to a stylized violence. It's

violence that is meant to be taken literally. It's a violence that is known

be very choreographed, very colorful, very abstract. It's a tradition that

back to the Peking Opera and was developed through the martial arts

We had never had a specific idea or a story for the scene,

how we're going to make it.

Usually I will work through the whole set to see what I can use, see what I

do with the location.

When I'm staging a fight scene or trying to create a fight scene, usually I will

spend a day on the set.

or on a location.

I usually put myself into the character, and I used to imagine, if I am the

hero, if I am in the same kind of situation, what will I do?

So I usually will walk through the whole scene by myself.

I would imagine that if I put some of the guy on the second floor, how to

start a fight. So, for example, if I'm rowing, on the ground before i get up i

will set some of the people up on the ceiling or beside the corridor and then

when i get up i can shoot them both very easily and then i run because

i've been attacked by some of the people on my back so i i got to run down the

second floor but at the same time i was stuck by a bunch of people so what

should i do oh And then I will figure out I can slide down by the finish line

and fly and shoot at the same time to get those bad guys.

It's incredible to me to watch, and it doesn't feel so structured. It feels

a lot of it was made up. You know, while they were there, inspiration, a

stuntman maybe said, look, or even Chow Yun -fat, and a lot of times stars in

Hong Kong films do their own stunts to a certain extent, unless it's, like,

really dangerous.

And as a director, John, especially working with so many stunt people all

time, he's got to be fluid about what he does.

Dave Kerr. Well, I think the mistake a lot of people make is in assuming that

there's one kind of violence in movies, and that's very far from the truth.

There are dozens and dozens of different ways of filming violence and treating

violence and thinking about what that can mean in the context of the story.

I think in John's films, violence is immediately very, very physical, very,

I say, very rhythmic, intense. It has that effect of putting you in another

physical place. But at the same time, it's also standing in for the very

emotional relationships between the characters.

Violence becomes a way of these men relating to each other. It's able to

these very intense feelings that...

They would not be able to express in any other way, certainly not verbally,

certainly not physically, but through passionate violence.

John's films are not at all about control. John's films are this kind of

celebration, a kind of breakthrough, and they use this very stylized violence to

achieve that.

So in fact, he came up with a very good idea.

He said, if he got a flower on his face and the blood splattered on his face,

he will make it...

Feel more tragic.

Feel more sad.

At that moment, and I think everybody will go blind.

They don't know exactly what they're doing.

So he killed a guy. It means something.

Takira killed a bad guy. It becomes a little bit personal.

He did it for revenge.

And also, I want to tell this character.

He's not perfect. He do the thing which some people want to do, but they

couldn't do it.

Friedchen was the former inspector, so he got a lot of great experience, and he

actually playing himself.

He used to be a very tough and honest cop.

Somehow he just fed up to being a cop.

And he found out he had another talent, so he changed to become a film director

and actor.

So I'm so glad I can have him as a role.

He's such a great actor.

There are two different kinds of pacing in a movie. There's pacing within the

scene and pacing within the overall context.

of the movie.

And as we've just seen, John Woo is obviously a master at pacing within the

scene, the kind of intense statico rhythms that he's able to produce with

action sequences.

But to provide a contrast to those scenes and provide an overall sense of

to his movie, he has to interject a certain number of quiet, reflective

And we're about to see one come up now, which is the funeral of the cop who has

died. I believe this is the only time in the movie where we see

Tequila in his police uniform. He's part of a social context. He's part of a

unit. And this is an important notion in Hard Boiled in that it's very much a

sense of alienation from that group produced by the accidental death of the

other cop that haunts him.

Movies are not individual moments. Movies are an entire pattern of moments

action and repose, of noise and quiet, of intense emotions and of reflective

moments. Many of the elements of the modern action film begin with Howard

Always comes the scene where we examine the worldly remains of a character who

has died, poking through the pocket watch and the wallet and the handful of

change on top of the bar, and that is the way characters are mourned.

John Woo, I believe, has his own versions of those rituals.

In the original script, there was no bartender that's the character.

The bar scene was the last day of shooting.

Sheldon felt that he always wanted me to appear in the scene with him. We are

very good friends, and he wanted to show our friendship on the screen.

So that's why he and me made up this character as his

mentor. We only used one hour to search for my scene. And we made up all the

dialogues and all the story.

Or on a set, you know, we're just speaking out of something and then we

afterwards.

If the film dubbing lingers, well, I would like Robert DeVoe

to dub my voice.

He's the actor which I respect a lot.

For Tony's character, I want to establish he's living in a darker side.

But he also is a dreamer. I just want to treat him like a rock star.

He's driving a sport car in a city.

Seems to be everything under his control.

The whole city, his life, the whole business.

What he's going to do is unknown. But what he knows is he really knows what he

wants.

You know, when I'm shooting, I'm crazy.

I see no one. I don't care.

I don't care about the project. I don't care about is it right or wrong. And I

don't care about the logic.

The logic is usually very boring.

So that's why when I'm shooting, I do what I feel.

I'm free and open. I have never cared about the censorship.

I have never cared about the length of the scene.

I just...

When I feel right, when I feel good, and I will go through the whole scene, and

I will do the whole scene until it satisfies me.

One of the standard narrative practices of films is to present a deceptive

surface and reveal the truth underneath.

It's a very cinematic process because movies are images, movies are surfaces.

And to give those things a dramatic charge, we often discover the surfaces

deceptive, that there is obviously more to characters than meets the eye,

characters and situations.

Now here we see one of the great reveals of all time, a guy turning pages in a

book, striking up a conversation with a fellow across from him.

And now the gun.

An incredibly shocking scene. The quickness of the edits there, which

contradicts those very slow, sinuous camera movements we saw when Tony

the library.

And again, the slowness of his walk away from what he's done.

A great example of the way Wu buries rhythm within scenes.

And that slowness again, which is picked up by Tequila here as he enters the

scene. So we can already see a certain kinship between them is expressed more

terms of rhythm, of body movement, of certain casual approach to life.

A coolness, if you will.

Zhao Yunfei is an unusual cop. So if you want to get the guy, he has to

think and behave like him. Just like me when I'm working on every of my movie.

and I used to put myself into the character.

If I'm shooting a killer and I portray myself as a killer, if I'm shooting a

junkie and I live like a junkie, if I'm shooting a soldier and I live like a

soldier, that's the only way to get the true feeling about the character.

In my mind and in my head, always overlap and dissolving in every

of character.

So that's why I'm using a lot of dissolving freeze -frame technique

on a montage shot.

Well, I must say the freeze -frame, I was learning from Truvo's film.

He was the first one who was using the freeze -frame to tell the emotional.

But for myself, I usually don't care about the theory.

I've never cared about the theory. I've never cared about the right film

language.

I use what I feel like to use.

Roger Avery.

This whole idea that you lose yourself as an undercover cop or as a person in

the law, it's not necessarily a new one, but for some reason, no matter how many

times people do it, it doesn't ever really get tired. It's sort of like

will always be a demand for vampire movies as long as it's a good vampire

And there will always be demands for undercover cops getting lost in

movies, as long as it's a good one.

You know, losing yourself to your dark side, I think, is a common theme. You

know, we as people, the natural thing that we do is to test our extremes

constantly, you know, to see how far we can go into the dark side of our nature

and how far we can go into the good side of our nature and how damaging that can

be in either direction.

And it just applies itself just by the very nature of what it is.

It applies itself to this idea of being an undercover cop because you're dealing

with a criminal element that is far beyond what normal people generally

experience in their daily lives.

And it's somebody who has to put themselves into an environment and be

that they're not.

and either become seduced by it or just completely lost in it. And that's a

common theme, not just for undercover cop movies, but for people in their

lives. And I think that's probably why it's such a popular subgenre.

This is pretty much a boilerplate scene.

This is an obligatory narrative moment.

We have to show the hero receiving his mission, his sense of what he has to

accomplish, and we have to show him with his colleagues.

social setting.

We can see here by the camera placement and the color of the costuming and how

Tequila is kept apart from his colleagues. He's a different person, a

attitude toward his work.

The dark shirt, the closeness to the foreground.

He's the one who gets to move.

The others are locked in the group, much more part of the group than he is. The

feminine symbol of the flowers.

of the woman police chief.

The communications from the double agent, the undercover cop are presented

the terms of love letters.

It's interesting that emotion is expressed most directly in Wu films

ritual, through indirect means, and here we see a direct expression of emotion

is, of course, a complete lie. It's about something else.

About a statue of General Kwan.

He's the god who represents honor, loyalty, and chivalry.

It's said in every police station in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong police, no matter if it's Chinese or British, they all worship

him. But the funny thing is, the gangsters in Hong Kong, they also

same god, General Grant.

This is Teresa Mo, who is one of the best actresses in Hong Kong.

She can be comical and also she can be very serious.

Usually the female in my movie is a little bit weak and only

have a small part sometimes.

But for this time, we want to create a female hero with a strong character

and also feel like...

For Wu, who is often accused of sentimentality in his relationship

To use flowers as a means of communicating between an undercover

police superior seems very ironic, very deliberate.

It's his way of saying, again, surfaces are deceptive, that perhaps a direct

expression of emotion is always a lie, is always something else than what it

seems to be.

Wu takes his time to set up the characters, set up the situation, set up

moral basis for the drama. There's always something.

meaningful at stake.

There's always very strong, very emotional ties between the different

involved in one of his films.

Ties of friendship, ties of betrayal, ties of hatred and revenge, but always

emotions that are incredibly hyper -real, incredibly intense.

That's what makes these films so emotionally vivid, so emotionally

watch.

Wu does not put the same value on maverick individualism as his American.

counterparts do.

He's much more concerned for the welfare of the group, for the health of the

unit, for the sense of belonging to a society. The value is not placed on

for its own sake.

As a situation that's familiar from a lot of American movies, I think from the

Dirty Harry films, is the renegade cop versus the superior who's trying to keep

him in line, keep him under control.

Except that here, the superior is not.

He's taken seriously. He's a representative of a certain

dignity, of restraint.

And I think, if anything, the movie is a bit suspicious of tequila in these

scenes.

Uncle Hui represents the old traditional old -timer.

He's the man with honour and loyalty.

He's loyal to his...

He's loyal to himself.

Even though he's a bad guy, but he also is a man with principles.

It's very different with nowadays, you know. The gang nowadays, they don't care

about honor.

They don't care about the moral.

They don't care about the variety in their own society.

He doesn't want to leave Hong Kong because he needs to take care of his own

Uncle heard that he really loved his

man. He treated everybody like his children, like his own children.

Without being able to control it, Tony has become part of this family.

Morality is quite a bit different from those who surround them. There are bonds

of comradeship, of work, of shared obligations, and

particularly a bond with the chief who functions to him as a father figure,

giving advice, listening to his troubles.

As an undercover policeman, you must ultimately betray.

So not only do you have to be likable, you have to be a betrayer. And that's

painful element.

That's one of the themes, one of those moral themes that I find in his films,

constantly running through it, is the sad need to betray.

I think it's Joseph Campbell that says that good and evil, right and wrong,

bad and good, are only apparitions. The only true thing that there is is the

center. And I think that's the strongest, most inherent theme in all of

Woo's films, is that it's really...

the center and the convergence, and that we are all capable of good and evil.

Anthony Wong is also a good actor.

He has so much admire of Al Pacino, Robert De

Niro, and he always likes to imitate him.

Well, but I must say he also has his own style.

In this film, he represents the new kind of force, the new kind of...

The new generation, which is more ruthless,

cool.

And he also represents evil.

This here is Philip Kwok. Philip Kwok is a good example of a man. He's a hitman.

He's an assassin.

He kills people.

But he has a moral side to him.

And what he does, he does because that's what he does. That's the kind of person

that he is. But that doesn't necessarily make him a bad man.

You know, he doesn't shoot nurses and he doesn't kill babies.

And he stands up for things when they feel morally wrong to him. All these

people have moral guidelines.

Well, most of the people, except for this other guy, this other mob guy.

go way too far.

The gangster, you know, they throw bomb into the police station and they see the

police force, nothing.

And the gangster in Hong Kong, they hide the gunman from China, from Philippines

or anywhere to do the killing job or robbing the bank.

They were using the AK -47, the heavy weapon to robbing the bank and shooting

the people crazy on the street.

And the police force seems to be hard to do anything with that.

You know, I think the Hong Kong police is one of the best police force in the

world. But, you know, it's just that the robbers, since they got a China

connection, I mean, they became so powerful. I mean, they're so ruthless.

It's really scary, you know, living in a city like that. I disagree with John

when he'd say that, you know, the police are useless.

That's not true. I think the behavior of those people... It's certainly

reflective of what's going to happen in 1997. They just want to make a fast

buck, whatever means they can, you know, to get out.

Or, you know, they see it as an opportunity for them to think when they

you know, those killers from China, you know, they can kill somebody or rob a

bank, rob a jewelry store, and they can go back to China, and there's no way

that Hong Kong police can go after them.

I just want to send a message to the police, to the Hong Kong people.

and tell them, even though the world turned upside down, that we still can

So I tried to create a new kind of hero, like the Hong Kong Daddy

Harry. It's the man who can stand up and fight for justice, righteousness.

And the man stands for honor and loyalty to the people, loyalty to his country,

and also fight for their ideals.

Sooner.

Dave Kerr.

This is one of the oldest and most distinguished genre in American and now

worldwide film. The detective thriller, the police thriller, goes back to the

teens. And the rules have remained remarkably constant over the years. Very

often that sense of parallelism between.

the hunter and the hunted, a bond that's created through rivalry, through

violence, and always that underlying suggestion that they have more in common

than anyone would care to admit.

One of the great themes of film noir is that it's ultimately impossible to tell

the difference between the lawman and the outlaw.

And in this sort of neutral territory, Wu introduces...

the informer, Foxy, who obviously shares a great deal with Tony and Tequila, but

yet is portrayed in much more negative terms. He's a betrayer, not a man who

acts out of honor, but a man who acts for selfish interests, for profit

who is not letting either Tony or Tequila off the hook for the

kind of betrayals they have to perform in the course of their...

And this character is here to remind us of the moral cost of that kind of

deception.

Director John Woo.

Well, this is Foxy and played by Dong Wei.

In his Chinese nickname, we call him Corporal. It means that this kind of

character is very untouchable as the fox.

So when we translate to English, we call him Foxy.

By setting up this kind of moral conflict that Wu really developed the

of his vision. This is not a superficial world of shoot -em -ups.

These are characters with a rich interior life, with something at stake,

moral point of view on the world.

And this obviously improves the film's effectiveness as entertainment because

draws us in much more tightly with the characters. We're able to identify with

their thoughts, their inner conflicts, much more vividly than we would

otherwise.

I don't know if every spectator who sees this film is going to come away with

the sense that it's a work of moral philosophy. I'm not sure that it is

It's part of the meaning, part of the texture of the work.

It works as entertainment and it works as art because it is expressing a

particular and very distinctive view of the world.

Hard Boiled is probably a bit less morally complex than Bullet in the Head,

which is Wu's masterpiece to date, I think.

a very complex film about friendship and betrayal over a period of many years.

Hard Boiled gives you a lot of the essential Wu in very stripped -down,

direct ways, just as direct as the parallel between the cop and the

It's not an ambiguous portrait the way it can be in other Wu films, but it's

very strong and very clear and very moving.

Hard -Boiled is a very linear film. It all takes place within a few days. The

sense of forward movement is very consistent from scene to scene.

Hard -Boiled is a very clean, very mathematical movie from a director who

also capable of working in a very different register, something more

something more indirect, as he does in Bullet in the Head. This is one side of

John Woo. He would be a monotonous filmmaker if he weren't capable of

several different rhythms and several different...

points of view on his subject.

He'll really get into a scene in a way that few filmmakers allow themselves to.

You can feel him being very much a part of the action as it unfolds. I think

that's one of the meanings of that camera that just keeps pushing in and

in and pushing in. He really wants to be in there kind of playing along with the

characters.

And there are scenes such as this one where it feels, watching it, that he

perhaps has lost his... Sense of control, just a little bit. Things are

his sense of proportion. Things have gotten a little out of hand.

And instead of unbalancing the film, I think it makes it more personal. It

it more exciting. It's a moment of revelation.

You can feel his pleasure in what he does, which is a very rare thing and

very beautiful when it happens.

Terrence Chang.

He's very good at creating the mood of the tempo, of the pace of the entire

film. For instance, he also likes to shoot in sequence.

When he did the first scene, that sets up the mood of the entire film.

When I'm shooting, I usually do the first scene first.

You know, I mean, start from the beginning.

After I did the first action scene, I always try to make it better than that

the other scenes.

The first scene really establishes the mood of the entire film.

But for Hot Boil, there are three major set pieces, action set pieces.

So when he's doing the warehouse scene, he's always trying to top the tea house

scene. How can he do it? So he's got to force himself to create a lot of

spectacular action sequences.

And then after he did that, it comes to the hospital scene, and he wants to

think of a way to top that, top the warehouse scene. So the tension builds

I usually have the whole scene in my mind before I start shooting.

The exact function of the camera angle.

It's a talent he has, you know, even from the very first film.

While we were shooting the warehouse scenes, the scriptwriter, Barry Wong, he

died. And he had not finished the script.

One night when we were shooting the warehouse scenes, my assistant came to

and said, Barry's died.

In the first beginning, I thought they said his friend.

And I couldn't speak a word during the whole night.

I was very sad.

Because for Barry, besides he's a good friend of mine, we have over 15 years

friendship. And even though we haven't been working together for over 15 years,

It was a true talent which I really admired.

Roger Avery.

John Woo does action sequences unlike anybody I've ever seen do them before

because they don't feel to me like they've been storyboarded and planned

structured so long in advance.

They are always so much fun for making an action scene.

I have so much joy when I'm making it.

Fortunately, I never run out of ideas.

And with my stuntmen, I can do almost anything.

We just create as we go.

In fact, I've always heard that the stuntmen are treated like kings.

They're paid all year long.

It's not on a stunt -by -stunt basis, and it's not on a movie -by -movie

They're like the stuntmen, these ten guys.

are the stuntmen, and they do the stunts, and they're paid all year long,

they're treated like kings.

But come that day when John Woo points at you and says, okay, you're up, fall

off of this building and land on your head right here, you know, they've got

like, do it.

And, you know, I think they're just a lot more bold about what they do.

We wanted to create certain spectacular stunts for them to showcase their

talents, but they're safe, you know.

Aided by his camera work, you know, the stunts would come out very spectacular.

And he feels that the stunt guy should be appreciated for what they can do.

Usually I decide all the camera angles by myself.

But sometimes I also give the freedom for the cameraman and the stunt

coordinator to let them choose their own camera angles.

There were two kinds of stunt groups in Hong Kong. One only do for the fight

scene. The other one only do the car stunt.

Philip Kwok and those people, they were trained in Peking opera, you know. So

they're very good in choreographing, fighting and so forth. But the other

they are really car guys, you know. They specialize in cars and motorcycles.

Philip Kwok was also a stunt coordinator in the film.

He's one of the best.

Stan got it in Hong Kong, so he had been trained by the Peking Opera.

He's a crazy guy, but he's so dedicated and focused.

I want to add that, you know, Philip was an action star in the early 70s. He

made a lot of martial arts pictures.

And he had been in Zhang Jie's several films. He loved acting, and he acted

good.

My stunt group, they always say one word to me. They said, if you can imagine

it, you can do it.

I always try to use something which I have never used before or which we

seen it before in a Hong Kong film.

Usually I will let them know what I need, what I'm going to do with the

For the big action stuff, because it needs a lot of preparation and

so that's why I will let them know.

two or three days before shooting.

Actually, all the stunt guys, they have never taken any rehearsal.

All the incredible action, they just did it for one time. Because they are so

much professional and so calculated.

In the original script, there were no Mad Doctor characters.

So while we were shooting, we found we need a very strong image in the game.

And I found an actor, Anthony Wong.

He's a good actor, but his image is so weak. So we need a much stronger guy to

stand by him to gain more pressure, feeling.

So we add this character, Mad Dog, into the scene.

And I wanted to try to make it different with Andy Wong's character. I mean, try

to establish the people like Mad Dog. He still have a coat of honor.

That will make his different with...

Anthony Wong.

Philip Cork has a powerful presence.

That's made me add more scenes for him.

All the time I try to explain to the actors and the crew how I feel about

certain setups.

If they don't get it, I will try to act out the scene myself.

Or humming a certain kind of music mood to them.

But if they still don't get it, I will get very upset and angry.

And I would give the mood and the rhythm to myself.

And not trying to explain.

And only when I put together a rough cut, they would then know what I was

to achieve in that setup.

Sometimes the timing is a little bit off, you know, like Uncle Hoi and his

people coming up in several cars and Mad Dog, he shoots at them and it's a car

crash and explosion and so forth.

The first time we did it, it's NG, but it takes like four hours to set up that

shot, you know, so what can we do? So John just saved it by cutting, by

We shot three takes, but there were none of the takes that I satisfied.

But we didn't have much time to do it again, so I cut with an NG shot, and I

used them all to combine together.

Even though John's movies deals a lot with the triads, the gangsters, but he's

not really interested in their lives, their rituals, or their organization.

only using gangsters because, you know, they are colorful people.

He wants to use these characters to expand on his themes, which are

loyalty, and so forth.

And John got criticized for glamorizing the gangsters, and he didn't like that.

He said, I'm not, you know, making films about gangsters, but the audience

couldn't understand, you know. So John felt that he should make the characters

more positive, you know.

He wants to make them cops, you know, they represent justice and so forth.

really very...

when you talk about a person, a killer, who kills for money and he's an honest

and loyal and righteous person. I mean, there's a certain ambiguity in there.

Uncle Hoi is an honorable figure in underworld.

And there is no moral standard in the underworld.

He represents some good old traditional cult which doesn't exist nowadays

anymore.

But in his world, he seems to be the only one left who has a coat of honour

loyalty.

That makes it different with Anthony Wong's character.

In the old traditional morality valley, the people still know how to care about

each other, which is hard to find from nowadays.

And this kind of spiritual thing always happens in all of my movies.

Johnny!

But surely you don't have to kill all my boys.

Dave Kerr. Well, here's an example of two male brotherhoods coming into

conflict. And for Wu, this is a classic dilemma of loyalty, of commitment.

Male associations are very, very strong in Chinese society.

These are associations based on years of intimacy in business relations, in

training relationships.

I think Tony Leung's performance was great. He really can capture the

and he really put himself into the character.

The scenes make him feel like he's killing his own father.

When he turned, some people suggest that Tony shouldn't have tears in his eyes.

Since he's undercover, he shouldn't show any emotional feeling in front of

his enemy.

But in Thief, Tony has tears.

because at that moment we shouldn't care about the logic or any

rules, you know. I always like to let the actors or myself

to expose whatever we can expose.

I mean, when we have that kind of feeling, then just let it go.

When a character needs to cry or do any emotional thing,

I usually let them go ahead to do it. And I used the slow motion to emphasize

that kind of feeling.

And it worked very well.

We shot two versions, one with no tears, one with tears.

But at last, I chose the one Tony got the tears.

This scene is set up as if it could be the end of the film. It peaks at this

moment. You've just been given a huge action sequence, and then you're

This moment, you know, this moment of betrayal.

And then he just goes for broke.

I mean, he knows he's sold himself out, and he knows he has to do it.

Tony killed all the boys just to try to convince Anthony Wong that he really

wanted to work with Anthony Wong.

Since you're the undercover, you have no choice.

Well, I think what Wu finds most beautiful in an action sequence is the

between order and chaos.

The beauty of it is in walking that thin line in presenting the chaos and the

violence in such a way that it has an internal rhythm, that it has a plastic

beauty, that it moves you to another place.

I think one of the first comparisons you make with Wu is to Jackson Pollock in

that tradition of action painting.

It's the gesture that's important.

It's the movement of the artist as reflected in the end result. It's all

toward an extreme of disorganization, of chaos.

And here it is filmed in this great deal of precision, trying to organize

experience into something intelligible, trying to make sense out of what is

essentially senseless, which is also the quest of the heroes.

It's an amazing accomplishment.

I think what kills a lot of action films is that excessive storyboarding, where

every shot, every special effect is planned out, and by the time they're

executed, they just have no life left in them. With Wu, you never have that

sense of sketches and comic strip -like panels underlying a scene. It always

feels very vivid, very immediate.

I think because he is able to give it that extra push on the set, he is able

project himself into the action so completely and so unselfconsciously.

Woo is not letting either Tony or Tequila off the hook for the kind of

betrayals they have to perform in the course of their duties.

Well, the first John Woo film I remember seeing was at the Toronto Film Festival

when A Better Tomorrow was shown as a part of a...

A sidebar on Asian films, and it was quite a revelation, a movie that was

completely unlike anything else we'd ever seen from that part of the world.

I think John had really found a very fresh combination of Eastern and Western

action archetypes.

It was startling, the kind of thing that just keeps you high for days after

you've seen it and really couldn't think about anything else, couldn't talk

about anything else. When you're in the presence of something that original, it

really shakes you up.

and here clearly was a major artist who had just burst, as far as I knew,

completely full -blown. As it turned out, of course, he'd made other films

before that, but that was the first one that we knew of.

He, of course, began as a director of comedy, and his films retain that vivid

sense of timing, which is, of course, a key component of comedy.

One can't say they have all that many comic scenes in them.

And certainly without a script, I wonder how much storyboarding he's able to do.

A scene like this doesn't seem like any.

storyboarding at all. I just have the sense of somebody out there with a

and a crew just urging this on.

Well, you have the huge interior space here that suggests a naked soundstage.

And all the scaffolding that suggests lighting rigs. It does seem in some ways

like a naked expression of Woo on the set of what it's like to be in a Woo

with all the fictional traffic sort of dropping away.

What you see here is the act of filming, which is...

In this case, equivalent to the act of massive violence.

This is actually two scenes in one.

The first scene would be the conflict in between the undercover cop and the

gang. The second scene was supposed to take place on a cliff outside a

warehouse. It was a conflict in between the killer and the undercover cop.

But somehow we couldn't find the right...

location for the cliff.

The original idea for the cliff scene was during the fight, somehow the killer

was almost far from the cliff, and Tony Leung reached out his hand to grab him

with a safe stone in front.

But it's hard to find the perfect cliff to do the scene, so I changed my mind

and put the scene into the warehouse to keep the conflict element.

And also I have plenty of time to shoot a scene.

So when they're using the gun, they point to each other.

The original design was when the killer, he almost fall off the cliff and

he grab an edge.

Tony Leung, the undercover cop, he used the gun, point to his head.

It seems like the undercover cop can kill him in any minute.

But somehow Tony Leung, he saved the bullet, throw the gun away and...

reaching out his hand to grab Tequila's hand to pull him back to save him.

Well, from that point, it makes Tequila thought he's really an unusual guy.

He must have a story behind him.

The images of the paper cranes recall the opening sequence.

It's a return to the bird imagery that the film began with. We've been through

the most intense kind of physical activity imaginable, the physical

light and color and sound, and now the world around us seems much more

much more quiet. We've achieved a new kind of understanding, a new kind of

perspective, as has Tony, as has, to a different degree, Tequila.

I think if you get...

One thing out of this film is that it is not a fantasy of anger, of hostility.

It's a search for something small and quiet and peaceful, finally. After

experiencing the worst that life has to offer, the most violent emotions we can

feel, there is this sense at the end that the world is finally a benign,

place.

And there's a tremendous beauty in that.

Using the bird.

For Zhou Yunfei, the tea house and paper crane for Tony Leung was by

coincidence. And it didn't plan it that way.

We're going back to an office that we've seen before. Now the lighting has

changed. It's much darker.

There's no more action in the background.

It's a more somber, more serious visual.

The stakes are getting higher. The action is intensified.

The relationships are more serious now.

There's more at stake.

And again, it shows Wu's inventiveness as a director that he will never

the same scene in the same way. Very likely, these two scenes are both shot

the same day on the same set within minutes of each other, and yet they both

have a completely different look and emotional feel to them.

One of the skills of film directing is being able to know

how to shift that tone and know exactly where the scenes are going to fit into

the overall pattern of the movie, particularly when you're shooting out of

sequence, which is a constant in this kind of filmmaking.

Wu

may

be the master of a certain degree of ultra -violence, but that does not mean

that he endorses.

widespread, violent, irresponsible behavior the way a lot of directors who

sort of imitated his work have.

He is very much concerned with the traditional role of the hero,

the person who maintains the moral values of the community, who preserves

ways of life that are worth preserving.

Again, always in the context of a group. He's not a mad individualist.

One of the ways the hero is defined is by symbolic wounds that he may suffer.

Here you see Zhao Yun -Fat with the band -aid over his eye, which is a

sign of moral combat and survival.

Wu is not a filmmaker who denies himself much out of the vocabulary that's

offered to him.

The use of slow motion, the use of these dramatic wipes, the use of this almost

constant camera movement, this is not a restrained, aesthetic approach to

cinema. This is someone who enjoys the process, someone who takes advantage of

the many different techniques, different toys that it has to offer. I think it's

a mark of Wu's...

maturity as a filmmaker, that he's able to use so many devices that in lesser

directors' hands would be self -conscious, would be gimmicky, would be

distracting from the story in such a direct and expressive way that you're

all that aware of them. You sense a skill, you sense underlying rhythms, you

sense movement being carried forward in ways that you're not entirely aware of,

but he never intrudes on the action the way many directors do.

Characters always come first.

It's your identification of the characters always comes first, far more

your identification with the director.

Roger Avery.

To John, you know, it's all about movies. He could care less about

parties or agents or executives or any of that stuff. He is truly someone who

loves film. He just loves just touching the actual film. He edits most of his

movies. I called him up.

you know, the other night, and I got his answering machine, and it was the music

from Lawrence of Arabia playing, like, in the background on the machine. And it

just struck me that, you know, I know he loves Lawrence of Arabia.

It's so nice to see somebody who comes from a position of passion, and all they

care about is just the work and just making movies and making movies for

audiences, and that's really what the experience is about.

Well, I think Wu, in his technical mastery and his pleasure in the medium,

become probably the most imitated director since Orson Welles, who

similar kind of film buff appreciation.

A lot of what's been done in his name is far more self -conscious, far more

technically fixated than what Wu does. For Wu, technique is a way of getting to

the characters. For a lot of his imitators, technique is an end in

who is a classical Hollywood filmmaker to the degree that he is self -effacing.

It's not an invisible style the way John Ford or Howard Hawks worked, but it is

a style that always puts the situation first, always puts the character first.

Technique is always in the service of the story, which is the sign of the real

master.

I think I talked about this before, but John is really very good with actors.

Some actors who are not usually good actors can be very, very good in his

Director John Woo.

Before we start shooting, and I used to make friends with my actors, and I used

to go out with them and talk with them and see how they feel in their actual

life and what they're thinking, or even how they feel about the world, about the

people. about the philosophy or anything.

While we are talking to each other, I usually notice on their eyes, their

and also looking for the good camera angle for my actors.

And I watch them very carefully, and I'm also thinking of a lot of technique or

camera movement, how to bring out their goodness on the screen.

Because the actor, to me, is very important.

They are the soul of the movie.

They are not a tool.

in the movie.

You know, John's characters are very colorful, very complicated, and multi

-layered. I disagree with a lot of people who regard John just as an action

director. I mean, his stunts, his action is fantastic, but his characters are a

lot more, as you can see in this film. People are usually not what they seemed

to be when they first appeared.

discover slowly, scene by scene, there's something more and more behind them.

That's why it's fascinating to watch.

Film critic Dave Kerr. I think I do prefer The Killer to Hard Boiled because

relationship between the two men is much more vivid and pushed much further.

And you also have the medium of the woman between them.

It's a more satisfying triangle and a more dramatic story.

The Killer came out first of the Wu films in America, although it certainly

wasn't the first one we saw in festivals.

And it was sold as a kind of campy, excessive, fun movie, an impression that

helped by the really amateurish subtitles that the film had in its first

I think it looked more like a novelty than it was, something exotic and crazy

and goofy.

from another world that had nothing to do with us.

And I was at the Sundance Film Festival in 92 when this film was shown at a

midnight show.

Probably the first time that kind of hip professional audience had been exposed

to Wu.

And the anticipation was very intense, largely because people like Quentin

Tarantino had been talking it up.

And everyone was expecting something crazy, something wild, you know, to

break up the sort of...

Excessively sober, excessively well -meaning films that tend to make up the

Sundance Film Festival.

And certainly the audience came to laugh, came to laugh and hoot. And the

half an hour or so, they were laughing at the mistakes in grammar in the

subtitles and laughing at the excessiveness of the sentimentality,

some of the more sentimental moments.

But as the film progressed, they became more and more quiet and more and more

caught up in what they were seeing.

I think that movie probably changed a lot of minds there. This was not a

act. This was something to say, someone with a profound point of view.

The director is going to be around for years to come, not just the latest

fashion and violence.

One of the great strengths of the Hong Kong cinema as we started to see it in

the early 90s was that it was a sincere cinema. It didn't have any second

degree. It was not campy. It was not self -conscious.

It was still being made very much by people who believed in these patterns,

believed in these archetypes.

Very refreshing to see how these old patterns can still work, how they can

be expressive when they weren't treated with contempt and they weren't treated

as kitsch.

It's easy to make fun of the excessiveness of this stuff. It's not

looks campy. It looks extravagant.

But it's far more satisfying to feel that personal value, to feel the kind of

statements being made, to feel the kind of world that's being portrayed.

As easy as they are to enjoy as camp, they are far more satisfying and far

profound films than that.

You can see beneath the somewhat exaggerated surfaces, there's a great

that's going on, a great deal of it very, very subtle.

Roger Avery.

Another interesting thing to me about a lot of Hong Kong cinema is that it is so

derivative of other world cinema.

And that means a lot to me because I grew up in what I call the video store

generation.

A generation of filmmakers who, and this has never been the case before, a

generation of filmmakers who have had a database of 10 ,000 titles on videotape

that at any one moment, if you have an argument about a film, you can pop it on

and prove or disprove your point. And so the films that are going to be starting

coming out now and the films that are coming out in the future, to me, will be

films that are amalgamations of many other movies.

And I see that a lot in a lot of the Hong Kong films.

because they're a little shameless about it or they're a little less shameful

about it. But, you know, obviously you look at a lot of the films that are

coming, you look at the work of the Coen brothers or you look at, you know, even

my film or Quentin's work or most of the young filmmakers now.

And it's just a different kind of filmmaking because we've had a different

of education. I mean, it used to be that filmmakers would have to go out.

and wait for a film to come into a revival house. They would talk about

sequences from Citizen Kane and the 400 Blows and movies like this, like they

were myth.

And you'd have to remember all of it or use stills from it, which often weren't

true to the... They were actually production stills, not really frames

film. It's a very exciting time for me. I think it's a very exciting time.

And it's very interesting to me to think that the next filmmaker is probably

some four -year -old who's sitting on a multimedia computer right now.

the media literacy that the next generation of filmmakers will have is

be unbelievable because it's not just going to be cross -references of the

other films, like the many other films in a video store. It's going to be cross

-references to video games and informational ideas and this information

superhighway that everybody's been using, this term that everybody's been

A problem a lot of younger directors face.

is on the one hand possessing this tremendous technical mastery, being able

study these films on tape over and over again and really know how a sequence is

put together,

being able to go to these excellent film schools and work with first -class

equipment and first -class teachers, and on the other hand really not having

much artistic motivation at all, not having much to say, not coming from a

background where these issues were very present, very real, but existed really

only in movies as they were passed along.

I think a director like Quentin Tarantino is able to make those issues

because he believes in them so intensely, and he believes in his

intensely, whereas a lot of other directors just are not, and their films

come across as very empty, very cold, and the kind of violence that I find

grinding and ultimately offensive.

When there's no moral basis, it just turns into sadism.

Here's a little sadism here for you.

Whoa.

An ugly scene, and this is the sort of thing that an American film would

probably revel in a lot more.

We're pulling back a little bit here, and we're seeing some of Tony's moral

dilemma in having to sit around and witness this kind of thing and then

participate in it.

It's part of his job, both as a member of the gang and as an undercover cop.

That got us again to the truly psychotic mad dog.

And there we have the ultimate act of betrayal, of

moral abandonment.

And that still frame that Wu uses to register that sense that he's finally

crossed a line.

A moral line of which there probably is no return.

He is a killer now.

He has killed a man who's not quite a colleague, but certainly on the same

as the struggle that he is.

Terrence Chang.

Actually, 70 % of the film was shot in one set.

I mean, it's an abandoned Coca -Cola plant.

And we turn it into, you know, this warehouse and a hospital and whatever,

morgue.

The effects turned out to be very, very helpful because, you know, after the

writer died and the final hospital, the whole final hospital scene...

John has to make them up day by day.

There's no script.

And we didn't know what he was going to do the next day. Different parts of the

building turned into different sets.

John likes to improvise for his other films, even though there's a completed

script, but John would still like to change things because he got

on location. He might want to make things better. I mean, he has every

do so.

So that's why I always over budget in every other Hong Kong film.

He likes to brag about it, but I think he stays pretty much within budget on

this one.

I used to like to wide -angle master shots to introduce the whole set.

I achieved that by having the camera follow the killer going to the hospital.

When the action starts, the viewers are not distracted.

They can relax and go with the actions because the setting is already familiar.

Actually, for the hospital set, it's a very simple set. We only got the

corridor, three rooms, and two separate sections.

There's very little doubt that John Woo is someone we would call an auteur. He's

a director who expresses himself very immediately, very directly through his

films.

It's ironic that at a time when directors have more power than they've

in Hollywood, films are less personal, less interesting, less complex than

they've ever been before. Probably because directors don't have that

tension, don't have that relationship with the studio, with the genres they're

working in.

There's no more creative excitement.

Wu, I think, is able to find some of that.

He follows genres to see what they give him. He fights them sometimes. He goes

along with them at other times.

But he's always engaged very much in this dialogue with the past, with

tradition, as I represented in the genre pattern, genre framework.

Someone like James Cameron having far more power than Don Siegel could ever

dream of having, and yet I feel he is less free in a way.

His films aren't quite as rich because he isn't operating in as rich a context

as Siegel did.

It's a context of a genre. It's a context of a studio culture. It's a

an interchange between an audience and a genre that happens over and over again

many times a year.

In the 40s or 50s, you would have seen 15, 20 detective thrillers in one year.

And those films are responding to what you want to see.

Films that are successful are imitated.

The meetings late in those films are developed into different films.

It's a very dynamic process.

And a director was making four or five films a year in many cases.

Now a director makes one film every two or three years.

That rhythm is broken. The relationship with the audience is broken.

It's a lonely position.

Perfect freedom is perfect isolation in many cases.

I mean, he's done an enormous amount of movies. I think John has done about 25

movies, and many of them are unavailable.

I mean, a lot of the movies, not just in Hong Kong or China, but a lot of movies

around the world are just made just for that first weekend or those couple of

weeks. And it's important to realize that making movies is only partially

commerce. It's also art.

just make movies just for an initial release. And it's probably because the

video stores take things for granted now. You know, they see this mass of

and it just seems like there's so much. But the truth is, there's so little, and

it all should be protected.

If you have more time, and I think I can make Hard Boy much more better. I mean,

if I have a little more time to edit the film, and it could work much better.

Like the hospital scene, and I think it is a little bit too long, and I just

wanted to shorten it a little bit. In the tunnel scene, the two heroes, they

have been captured in the tunnel.

The scene is very important.

Because this is all about their relationship.

They are from misunderstood to getting more understanding each other.

It's a very important and it's a very emotional conflict

scene. And I wish that scene can stay a little longer.

I mean, and to let the both actors to show more about their relationship.

Because usually I have no thinking of...

This kind of movie, the pacing should be to go faster or give more action or

something like that. I just wanted the film to keep the tempo even.

You know, John is a perfectionist. He's always very, very critical of his own

work. There are certain things that he sees in his film, for instance in Hard

Boiled, as not 100 % perfect.

But for other people, you know...

watching his film, maybe for the first time, you know, there are certain things

they like, there are certain things they don't like, and, you know, for him, he

would take them as an encouragement.

I mean, it doesn't make any difference to him.

I have never got the feeling of successful because I have never

all my films.

After I made a movie, I watch it, I always find something wrong in the film.

that's why I keep...

Working very hard for every year of my movie, just try to make it more perfect.

It encouraged me to more focus on making a good film, so I've never satisfied my

work.

See, the beauty of the hospital setting here is its pristine, clean, white,

angular quality, which will very quickly be smeared up with a lot of red blood

and bullet holes.

It's the blank canvas that he is going to paint on.

The old analogy in John Woo between the splattering of the blood and an action

painting, it has some validity.

Again, as in Jackson Pollock, the beauty was in the gesture, and the gesture

here is one of extreme emotion, of agitation, of trying to break through to

something else to achieve a moral and spiritual goal.

The kind of strong angularity of these scenes is, again, a constant of film

noir.

probably most famously in the films of Fritz Lang.

It's a world that's against order and restraint.

But again, it's one of those deceptive surfaces.

The idea of the hospital is conceived by myself and the writer Barry Wong.

I use the hospital as a microcosm for our society, especially

the Hong Kong society.

The patients are like... Innocent and helpless citizens.

They are locked up, full of fear and worry.

Seems like they have no future.

Certainly the shadows of 1997 is looming.

It's a theme that I often think about. I often do think about it, what it must

be like to be trapped in Hong Kong, knowing that your time could be coming

any moment. I mean, all of these themes, all these images.

have found their way into the work of John Woo.

And this whole notion of ultimately being betrayed and that you know that

being given up at a later date, that you're living really an illusion.

I mean, the Cheyenne fat character in the beginning, when he has the powder

thrown on him and he looks like a ghost, he's living an illusion. All of these

characters are living illusions.

Well, this is a film that takes place in a pretty distinct historical context,

which is the end of Hong Kong as a British crown colony and its beginnings

part of mainland China.

I think any film made during a period like this is going to reflect a lot of

concerns in the culture.

You could say that the hospital here is a little microcosm. It's a little world

unto itself, as Hong Kong is, surrounded by darkness and chaos, and now that

chaos has come.

I don't sense that much political force in John Woo's films. To some degree,

these movies all take place in John Woo land and not in a literal place. It has

politics and populations and people to be governed and worried about.

You know, John's nickname in Hong Kong was Headmaster.

You know, he was named by the crew when he was shooting bull in the head because

he's always very stern. You know, he's always...

Very serious.

Because I used to like to teach them everything.

While we were shooting Hard Boy, they called me Old Headmaster.

He never smiled when he was making that film.

Once in a while, they called me the Blackface God, you know, because maybe

too serious in some way.

People were afraid of him.

You know, sometimes I ask the AD, you know, what's John doing now? Which shot

he doing now? He said, I don't know.

I said, why don't you go and ask him? He said, no, no, no, I don't want to

disturb him.

You know, the crew in Hong Kong are, some of them are really inexperienced,

especially, you know, working on a film of this scale, and John got to teach

them a lot during production.

So the whole group seems to be like the student, you know.

It's also a learning process to me, too.

took a lot of good reference from the American film. I mean, to ask the whole

crew to watch it and learn from it. And I try to do it that way in every of my

movies. And we also learn from that experience.

We just keep learning and influence to each other. So that's why they call me

Headmasters.

He was just telling me that in cartoons, you know, the cartoon characters can do

anything that defies logic.

A motorbike can run into a wall and becomes flat and something like that. He

thought if it's a real -life action, that would be fantastic, you know, to

translate that kind of action onto film.

Yeah, Bus Bunny, Take Aid Me, and the... Roadrunner.

I appreciate every filmmaker and I understand the whole process and I

what the talent is. So when I'm watching a movie, I sometimes try to feel or try

to get something from that movie.

Usually I'm not using the critic's point of view to watch a movie.

When I'm looking at Van Gogh's painting or when I'm looking

at... Bugs Bunny, I also can get a certain kind of feeling from them.

So when I'm watching it, I'm never saying, oh, Bugs Bunny

is shit, you know, it's not worth watching.

I just try to get something from everything.

All action films are a moral journey to one degree or another.

Sometimes the heroes discover resources within themselves that allow them to

transcend their limitations, allow them to see a new responsibility in regard to

other people.

Sometimes in the more pessimistic films, the film noir, they discover these

links aren't there, that they are alone, they're isolated, they're helpless in

the world.

Woo, I think.

combines those two themes.

He is interested in the individual spiritual state of the heroes, as we see

the beginning of Hard Boiled. It's a story of two men who have both failed in

different ways.

They're out of step with the groups they belong to.

They're looking to rejoin those groups. They're looking to reestablish emotional

connections that have been lost to them.

And they do this by...

remarkable individual heroic acts that allow them to transcend their own

limitations, that allow them to become agents of positive change, who are able

to reintegrate fragmented societies, step back into a world that has been

shattered, and find their own place in it again.

I think in the case of Hard Boiled, it's more of one man against the world than

it is one man relating to another.

This is a character who's let himself down, let his friend down, has suffered

incredible wound that he has to spend the rest of the film trying to repair.

And it's his rage being expressed, I think, at himself primarily.

Through that kind of intense interaction, he is able to restore his

the police department.

In relation to the other officers, he becomes more a member of the team again

the end when he walks out of the building with the baby.

He has earned his honor back that he lost in the opening sequence.

In the opening sequence, he kills another policeman by accident, and in

case, he loses his honor, his sense of his...

Professional pride, and I think it's a betrayal of a friendship, of a male bond

between the members of the police department.

He's then out of phase with his friends, with his colleagues for the rest of the

film and has to find a way of reintegrating himself.

And he does this by passing through the most terrible kind of proof of

individualism. He basically takes on an army of 200 people and destroys them,

proving his own heroism, proving his own integrity by being this one -man army.

I think Chow Yun -Fat has some of that openness and naturalness in front of the

camera that Harrison Ford had.

But he is a more romantic figure. He has more of a darker

undertone.

There's something always gnawing at Chow in ways that Harrison Ford doesn't seem

to have.

Chow Yun -Fat is like a

Chinese version of Alain Delon. If you watch...

John's films, they feel like Jean -Pierre Melville films.

The way men hold guns, the way they hold themselves.

And he is Alain Delon.

And he's like almost extracted out of all those Melville films.

I think what Wu has in common with a lot of the New Wave directors is the sense

of the director as star, as a personality.

And while his technique never interferes with his storytelling, we always sense

a strong personality behind the film.

He inspires viewers in a way that few directors have since Orson Welles,

since Jean -Luc Godard, since François Truffaut.

He's a model to film students in this way that we haven't had in a long time.

I think Quentin Tarantino walks right into that same tradition, same sense.

It's exciting to feel the personality behind a film for a change.

And it's exciting to know that there are still things to be done and still new

things to be discovered, new meanings to be found in this very traditional

historic material.

In that sense, the director becomes a hero, if not the hero of the film.

tunnel sequence because i wanted to put the two main characters in enclosed

surroundings that would allow them time to get to know each other better and to

build up their relationship and friendship in the first half of the

only met two or three times and there wasn't enough room for me to talk about

their friendship or relationship and i also wanted to design the Bull's -Eyes

gag for Tequila.

This gag was inspired by a similar set -up in Melville's The Red Circle.

I tried to steer in jewels.

And it needs Yves Montand to using a long rifle to shoot at the keyhole in

a long distance.

So he set the rifle on a tripod very steadily and also using the telescope.

Then... After he set the gun, he can shoot the keyhole without looking at it.

But he suddenly take the gun off the tripod and just fire it without looking

it.

So it was so amazing.

I wanted Joe to shake his hand before firing because I wanted to create more

suspense.

I also wanted his character to be more interesting.

Here I have established him to be a sharp shooter.

So in the final scene when he's shot, Anthony Wong's eye is credible.

A lot of what draws me in to this film is how John Woo thinks cinematically.

The idea of after he's killed the boss, that he knows he has to kill all the

other men.

I mean, essentially, he's got to get to the bottom of the well before he can

climb out. He has to reach the zenith of the mountain before he can cross over

to the other side.

This whole idea that policemen...

Undercover policemen are constantly having to gain people's trust by doing

negative acts or things that are morally horrible to them, and then

only to later betray the people that they've gained trust from, and that they

constantly have to be undergoing this pattern constantly repeats itself.

And definitely we as people are constantly repeating certain patterns.

Film critic Dave Kerr.

Well, the good ones always know how to set up the rules. There's almost always

an action scene right at the beginning where we find out just how sacred is

human life going to be held in this movie?

What degree of heroics are we going to find permissible?

What incredible acrobatic skills or skills of marksmanship are going to be

defined as real?

And those are the benchmarks that are set for the rest of the film. We always

feel betrayed if those standards change.

at some later point in the movie. And obviously those markers are pretty high.

Roger Avery.

Man, I tell you, I will never do another movie with guns because whenever you

fire a gun on a movie set, boom, three hours go out of your day. And that's

three hours that you could have spent working with an actor. And that's the

part of directing a movie is working with the actors. You forget the king of

action shit.

Who wants to, like, direct cars crashing into each other or somebody firing a

gun? That's not fun.

You know, it's actually really miserable.

I think it may be a little bit more fun, put quotes around that fun, in Hong

Kong, because there's a lot less concern for safety.

Terence Chang.

All the guns come from London.

We rented from a company who got a special license from the police

and they just ship all the guns from London.

Most of them are real.

John Wu.

And he had been examined by the Hong Kong Police Department.

And also, for every day's shooting, we had to report to them how much gun we

need for a day, what kind of gun.

They need the full report.

Dave Kerr.

John Woo began as a director of traditional martial arts films, costume

swordplay films, in which this sort of material was still costumed and

much as it would be in the Peking Opera.

the same sort of subjects in the same kind of approach through rhythm, sound,

movement. You know, the clanging of the Chinese instruments during the Peking

opera becomes the firing of the guns in a John Woo film. It's very percussive,

very rhythmic. It's the kind of pounding intensity that quickens the blood, that

changes perceptions, that makes the world seem to move more quickly and more

intensely. And this is all created through...

The rhythm of the soundtrack, the gunshots in the soundtrack, the editing

the scene, the movements of the actors in relation to one another, the way he

emphasizes those movements with camera movements that follow the actors along.

It all becomes a very intense, very rhythmic, very, I think, immediately

physical and at the same time very abstract experience.

These are movies that exist for the Chinese audience within a very

strict system of codes and expectations, a system that's in many ways parallel

to our understanding of the action film, except that we do tend to take things a

little more naturalistically.

We'll recognize these characters. We'll recognize many of the situations that

they find themselves in.

But what we won't recognize is the extremity with which Wu handles those

feelings, the physical intensity with which he...

films the violence, which is the extension of those feelings into a

visual arena. We will not recognize the depth of passion that he's able to put

into these people.

One has a feeling with Wu of a life -and -death cinema. This is the most

important thing that he can think of. This is cutting to the quick of life as

knows it.

And yet, you know, obviously, this is not an image of daily life that any one

us would recognize, and certainly no policeman would recognize as anything

his daily routine, but it's an expression of something inside, a

yearning, a moral imperative, a need to release these kind of intense,

passionate feelings.

And they erupt into the world in this form of stylized violence.

For the original idea, it was poison gas.

We were trying to think they get out of the tunnel as soon as possible. But we

shoot the whole final scene without any script.

So when I got to indicate what was happening in the hospital, we

find...

They have been staying there for quite a long time. If it's a poison gas,

they'll die already.

So I changed the idea. He just put the fire extinguishers.

When a hospital is under siege, it's like people are oppressed by

governments.

People lose their freedom as well as their own nature.

When a patient is killed, it's like innocent people are getting killed in a

I hate totalitarianism and ugly politics in general.

I have no intention to talk about politics in my films. I'm not interested

in politics.

And there's no political system that's perfect.

People are always trying to use politics to obtain certain power for themselves.

Subconsciously, I can't help putting my own personal feelings towards some

politics into the film.

For instance, I don't have very strong feelings towards 1997.

The baby's satisfied purity and hope.

Even though the world is filled with ugliness, hatred and crisis,

I still think there's a hope for the future.

We should cherish and protect these new lives.

The temptation with this kind of scene is just to become so caught up in it, to

lose any sense of perspective, just to keep giving more and more and more and

losing that formal control and formal distance.

And you certainly see that in a lot of movies that are made in John Woo's

shadow. When a movie just runs off the rails, it's just not fun anymore.

There's no rhythm, there's no shape to it. It's just bang, bang, bang, bang,

bang, bang, bang. It's like pounding your head against the wall.

No pleasure at all.

It's much more difficult to make a film with this kind of exhilaration and

release than it is just to fire a bunch of guns in front of a camera. That's the

least of it. Create those rhythms, have to create those characters, have to

create that sense of inner dynamics of attention and release.

All release is dull.

Terence Chang.

Gangsters everywhere.

I mean, even in communist country, they're gangsters.

But in Hong Kong, because we're in the film industry, so we are very much aware

of the gangsters' presence in the film industry.

Yeah, for some reasons, the gangsters always thought, you know, movies is very

glamorous and they like to be involved in it, you know. It's also very

for them.

I personally have very, very little dealings with gangsters myself, but...

Except, you know, of course, when you're in production, there are always

gangsters, you know, hoodlums coming to you and ask for protection money.

And I remember, you know, many years ago when you're shooting in the streets,

you pay off one gang and they would keep the other gangsters away from you.

But now when you're even shooting in a private property, they come to you.

For instance, when we were shooting in that tea house or in hospitals that

different gangs would come to you and ask for money and you just got to pay

off.

All of them.

I guess, you know, it's the popular actors who are most afraid of gangsters.

mean, the gangsters would go to them and ask them to, you know, sign movie deals

with them.

If they say no, then something might happen, not necessarily to them, but

to the people who work for them, you know, to the family or whatever.

Generally, I have never used any second units in my film.

I always like to do everything by my own hand. Even though a tiny little close

-up for a cigarette or for a gun or some of the action, dead by the stuntman.

You know, I like to watch, just like watching my baby.

I would like to see them cry, they laugh, and what they feel.

So that's why I've never used the cigarette units for all my films.

But for Hard Boy, it's the...

Exceptional, you know, because since we are way over budget and over time, and I

only use the second unit in some of the action sequence in the hospital scene.

Every night we have a very long hour for the shooting. We usually shoot over 18

or 24 hours a day, or non -stop shooting

within four or five days.

Since the hospital set is a very big set up, we need to do a lot of things at

the same time. Like while I'm shooting the interior scene inside the hospital,

then we use the second unit to shooting another stuff outside of the hospital.

Most of the time we will have three units shooting at the same time.

While I'm shooting, Takeda and Tony Leung, they are fighting with the gang

inside in a room.

And my assistant director, Patrick Leung, shooting the car park scene, the

policeman having hit by the gunman.

And my brother shot the patient escape scene.

All of the scenes, I went to watch the rehearsal, and I set up everything,

and they're going to do it.

But sometimes they did more than I expect.

So the interesting thing is that the whole building is a real war going on

because no matter inside or outside, there are always the bang, bang, bang,

bang, there's firearms.

And the both crews, they are shooting each other.

I'm firing at a second unit crew, and the second unit crew, they're firing at

us. So we always got to complain from the neighbors and the police force.

The entire concept of having this huge action sequence with explosions and

and just complete chaos, just oceans of bullets flying through the air in a

hospital and especially in the baby ward. I mean, that's a pretty daring

to do right away.

I think that you wouldn't really see that often in an American film. But at

same time...

It's such, it's just how I feel. A man from Hong Kong would view doing a big

kind of American action ending, but keeping it distinctly Asian.

But it's such a strange cultural amalgamation that it becomes pleasurable

to watch.

I think when John made Hard Boiled, he was ready to come to the United States.

And I think actually he probably imagined Hard Boiled.

as an American film. I mean, I'm speaking for John, and I don't know if I

do this, but this is how I feel watching the movie.

It feels, more so to me than his other films, it feels like an American

movie, like it could have been transplanted and completely done from

America, and that it feels like other American action films.

Well, actually, John started getting offers from Hollywood when we were

Once a Thief in 1990.

Fox... was the first studio to contact John. We were shooting in Paris and we

got a call from them and saying, you know, we want you guys to come over here

and I want John to do this film. But somehow, you know, things didn't work

because we got to finish the film and we got to do Hard Boiled. And so we didn't

come over here until we finished Hard Boiled. It was really the killer that

opened the doors for John.

Because it's very unusual for an action film that you have, you sort of

romanticize the gangster, the bad guy, and also it's shot with such a style,

know, which is very unusual in action for an action film. But then I'm glad

we made Hard Boiled afterwards because, you know, it confirmed that, you know,

John can make a conventional kind of action films and he can do it well. I

Hard Boiled is much closer in production to a typical action film.

Somebody call it Die Hard in Hospital.

When I'm in choreography and action scenes, I'm very sensitive to all the

movements around me, from the actors, from the set, from the crew, from

anything, a bird or a fly flying by or a guy moving his arms. They

immediately stimulate me to create some action movements by combining the

movements of the actors and the cameras.

The trick with movies is that you can actually cut in all those spontaneous

moments and shape them and create that spontaneous feeling.

When you're making a really big movie, you become insulated from a lot of the

problems that you normally have to deal with.

There's nothing more scary to the money people than when all of a sudden you

throw out a plan and say, I'm going to work off of the inspiration of the

moment.

That is like terrifying for a producer to hear.

In

this

scene, when the two cops entered this area, I wanted to create surprises for

gangsters and the cops as well as for the audience.

Now, this is a thing that's going to strike a lot of people as just insanely

excessive, but at the same time, it is following out and completing all of the

moral contrasts, all of the moral movement of the film.

And it's doing so in this kinetic, sonic light show, something so

completely abstract and intense that it almost becomes something other than

action.

Wu's films are ultimately about transcendence, about a search for

search for peace.

And it's a search that's obviously conducted through its exact opposite,

extreme stimulation, through extreme action, through the physical intensity

finally, when it subsides, gives way to a sense of being on a new plane,

something spiritual, something beautiful.

You never wonder if they're going to run out of bullets because Wu has

established that this is not a world where that is even a possibility. This

another place. This is a far more abstract, more metaphorical, more

environment.

There are as many bullets in this world as there are impulses and desires and

wants. It's a limit.

Probably the most important director of this kind of film before

Woo, would have been Don Siegel in his cop movies in the 50s and the 60s.

And then in Dirty Harry, which really invented the modern cop film.

And again, a film that's much more ambiguous than many people give it

being. A parallel between Harry, who's a pretty sleazy guy who peeks through

windows, who uses excessive force, who is not a hero, not a tidy good man, but

renegade. Every bit as violent, every bit as capable of cold -blooded murder

his opposite number, this psycho killer who's stalking San Francisco.

That idea that Siegel had developed in a lot of films before that, which really

came to the fore in Dirty Harry.

Ooh, I don't know if he's been directly influenced by Siegel. He certainly has

been influenced by Clint Eastwood, by the whole urban cop thriller genre that

came out of Dirty Harry.

The cinema is achieving an international language, and unfortunately that is the

language of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who appear to

every country in the world.

And it is not a two -way street. Chow Yun -fat does not play in every country

the world.

You know, chalk that up to the triumph of American imperialism or what you

but that is the reality.

And not a very encouraging one.

The hospital scene, too, has its...

precedent in a little -known film by Sam Fuller called Dead Pigeon on Beethoven

Street, where there's a shootout in a maternity ward.

After we had shot more than

35 days non -stop in a hospital set,

Everybody was extremely tired and exhausted.

We didn't get much sleep, and the environment was very unhealthy.

We were like shooting in hell, like we were fighting in a war that never ends.

And my producers were nagging me about going over budget.

Creatively, I was also getting very tired of shots of my heroes firing

and kinds of reactions of...

gangsters getting shot.

So I decided to do something crazy, something totally new and exciting.

Near the end of shooting of my every movie, I usually went crazy and...

and lost my senses.

So I told my crew, I wanted to create a shot lasting 2 or 12 minutes long and

with a lot of action going on.

I discussed this with my actors and my crew, and they were all excited about

They looked upon this as a challenge to them, and the morale was suddenly very

high.

Aside from aesthetic reasons, I also wanted to create room for my crew to

stretch their creative limits.

We were rehearsing for one day and using one and a half day to set up.

all the squid, special effects and explosion stuff.

And we were using 9 to 11 monitors to set up in every corner to see the

whole thing, see the actors and the stunt guy.

So we were all hiding in a small room with the special effects guy with the

stunt coordinator.

So when our hero was firing and we...

The special effects guy in the room, you know, so they press the button to blow

out the effect.

It got to match perfectly.

So we have 11 monitors in every corner.

While we were rehearsing, we were using the static camera. But there was not

enough room to use that equipment.

It is so heavy and big, you know. It's hard to turn smoothly.

It's hard to get a good distance with the actors.

They always cross together.

So we give up that.

At the end, we just handheld camera.

Much more simple. So the whole shot, we took three times.

And the camera, we're just holding the camera, just following the whole thing.

He was angry for two times.

And we were way out of budget.

Because he need about $800 ,000 for one day.

But... On the fourth day, I tried to do it in a separate shot because we don't

have money.

Because it's a difficult shot.

Sometimes, you know, the elevator door wasn't that good. Sometimes it couldn't

open. Sometimes it stuck.

And then we did the whole thing again.

I was so frustrated. But the whole crew, the actors, the stuntmen, the

special... They asked me to do it again.

They'd rather, like, do it with no pay.

Because they thought this is a very great idea to do it well. They just want

finish it.

I couldn't really afford to reshoot the entire shot.

So I just reshot the second half.

And the two halves were joined together by dissolves.

Guess where it is.

In the meantime, the other reason was Tony Leung got hurt on the first take.

eyes were hurt by the broken glass.

And the glass come to his eyes. He almost got blind.

And he need to take rest for a few days.

So when we do it again, and I was so much aware of the people get hurt, so

I always try to give up, but Zhao Yunfei, Tony Leung, they always do it.

They don't care.

Well, like a lot of the classical Hollywood filmmakers, Wu has been able

develop a very personal set of themes across a very commercial set of plots,

stories. He has the ideas that he wants to treat and the relationship of...

men to each other, of men to their past, of men to what their moral

responsibilities may be.

He is able to deal with these themes through the codes provided to him by the

action film.

It's become very rare, I think, for a director to be able to be this personal

the context of a cinema that is marketed ruthlessly for audience appeal.

He is a wholly committed personal filmmaker in a degree that is extremely,

extremely rare in today's cinema.

This movie is kind of intimidating. It's too big for people.

It's out of scale.

Woo doesn't back off from his implications the way a lot of American

are really smart enough to do. He doesn't play the audience's

He doesn't back down and give you a reason to laugh.

There's very little irony, very little distance from the characters here. He is

right in there with them.

There's no distancing, self -deprecating jokes the way Arnold Schwarzenegger

will offer a wisecrack after he's just murdered somebody, which is a way of...

diminishing the horror of a killing in a way of reassuring the audience that

it's okay, it's not serious, it's all just a joke. Wu never gives you that

relief.

It's not a joke, it means something.

In Hong Kong, the women policemen have no gun.

The Hong Kong policeman, they cannot carry a gun.

So for this scene, I wanted to design something for

Theresa Moore to show her hatred and

to try to make her

as a heroine.

So she grabbed the gun, shot the guy.

for the purpose of protecting the baby.

By coming to Hollywood, John Woo is fulfilling a very old tradition, which

that Hollywood absorbs the great talents of the world cinema.

Some people learn to function there very well.

Fritz Lang probably made his best films in Hollywood, and some were just

rejected right away.

Sergei Eisenstein had his unfortunate experiences, and any number of others.

And Louis Bunuel, Paul Fejos, the list is really probably equally balanced

between those who made it and those who did not.

And a bit mysterious to know just why some people succeeded and some people

not.

We're coming to a point where Hollywood is going to be the only cinema left in

the world. So thank God someone like John Woo can work his way in there.

All these local traditions are going to be eliminated.

Wu is lucky because he is able to talk this language, this Hollywood language,

too, whereas a lot of those regional filmmakers are not going to be able to.

And a great challenge for Wu, will he be able to preserve his identity, his

cultural background, his specific point of view and life experience when he

begins?

working in earnest in Hollywood.

And my hopes are with him because he's a strong and smart man.

There are three rating categories in Hong Kong. It's equivalent to our NC -17

and R and PG.

We call it Grade 1, Grade 2, and Grade 3. And Grade 3 being equivalent to NC

or X. Hot -boiled, despite his...

did not get a Category 3 rating.

They only suggested if John makes some minor cuts, you know, like four or five

minor cuts, then the film would get an R or Category 2 rating, which John, you

know, did.

The cuts are mostly bullets going to the body and, you know, stuff like that.

One of the senses of Jack most is when a person gets shot or knifed, you know,

you have all these streams of blood spilling out from the body. That's what

don't like.

No,

everybody knows that John Woo's films are violent, and it's not a big deal,

you know, we like to joke about it, you know, on the set.

In fact, in the earlier, longer version, there's a line which was cut. It was in

a library when Tony Leung killed that guy.

And somebody said, oh, that's so much blood. It must be a John Woo movie.

But that was cut from it.

Dave Kerr.

Well, I think John clearly has seen a lot of Western films. I would assume

seen a lot of Sam Peckinpah movies. I would assume he's more or less familiar

with the film noir tradition.

And yet these movies feel completely Asian to me. A different culture is

this material.

And it comes out a completely different way.

What is kind of sadistic and cruel and excessive when this is done by a lot of

American directors becomes in John Woo's film something really spiritual and

transcendent, very intense.

John Woo.

A mad dog is different, you know. He's a man of the principle, you know, even

though he's a bad guy. But he had to cook up honor for himself and for his

world. It's a matter of loyalty.

Well, a lot of American films, you see that sadistic villain elevated really

to... Star status, Dennis Hopper in Speed or Tommy Lee Jones in

Blown Away.

Somehow the audience is cheering for that character. The heroes tend to be so

pale and uninvolving that the villain walks away with the movie.

Natural endpoint of that being something like Natural Born Killers, which tries

to be ironic but really ends up doing little more than fetishizing the

the psychotic couple on the run.

Not much perspective there at all.

And here's a case where the villain represents just the furthest extremes of

amorality, of chaos, of darkness.

He doesn't have much personality apart from that. He's such the radical

of the values of the film that there's really no need to characterize him

anymore. He's death. He's black. He's the whole.

And it's a tribute to Wu that he's really not interested in that kind of

He's not fixated on the villain's sadism. He characterizes the villain

He certainly doesn't shrink from it, but he's not fetishizing it, not obsessed

with it. It's nowhere near the center of his movie.

It's a necessary element. It's the background. It's the thing that all the

characters are reacting against, but it's not what the film is about.

In a film like Blown Away, where the violence is used...

In a sadistic way, I think, to create the expectation that in this case a

girl and her mother are going to be blown up by something in their house.

As it turns out in the scene, nothing very serious happens, but you see them

walking through the house, turning on various appliances, these gigantic close

-ups of things like the gas range lighting and the sparks flying between

contact points on the electrical switches.

It's an aggression on the audience. It's really, it's hammering you in the head

saying, we're going to kill a little girl, you know, so watch this and be

excited by it. And that I find really sickening, awful.

Nothing to do with what John Woo does with the baby in Hard Boiled, let's say.

It becomes an expression of the character's gallantry, his amazing grace

fire, his special status that he is able to protect this child. And the child

returns the compliment by protecting him, by putting out the fire in his

It's a loving, it's a tender relationship, and it's very beautiful.

do with the kind of sadism you see in a movie like Blown Away.

You know, dangerous stunts like this really take a lot of time to set up and

lot of time to prepare.

And in Hard Boiled, since John can literally have as much time as he

so a lot of those amazing stunts are created. But in Hard Target, we kept

looking at our watches all the time. It's just impossible.

I guess John is kind of lucky, you know, because I remember the scene, the shot

where Chow Yun -Fat was holding the baby and he was running away from the

explosion. The first take, you know, John didn't like that because, you know,

the explosion is too far behind. And so for the next take, he said, let me push

the button.

And before Chow Yun -Fat was ready, you know, he pushed the button and Chow was

really scared and he was actually running for his life in that shot.

But, you know, even though, you know, after the shot, he went up to the DP and

to John and said, you know, how does it look?

Does it look real? And so forth. And, you know, he's really professional.

But then he turns around and said, that motherfucker.

John Wu.

Never a real baby in a gunshot scene.

I only use the dummy.

As I say, the...

I only thought to close up for the baby only for 20 minutes.

When I'm holding my baby, they usually pee on my pants.

So I got that inspiration for this scene.

While I'm shooting the explosion scene, I was crazy. We shared a gasoline bomb

in a real building.

So there was over 10 explosions in a hospital scene.

And we were using four cameras to shoot the whole scene.

Joe and Fred holding the babies, running, you know.

During the scene, it explosion.

Somehow, some of the explosion could have wrong timing. Some explosion blow

sooner, some later.

When I see any part is so great, so amazing, I usually

push the cameraman, pushing the cameraman into the fire to catch a real

I was pushed and take the cameraman, the camera crew to grab the camera, get

into the explosion.

And into the fire.

In the scene where the gangster is trying to blow up the hospital, John

the hospital with so much explosives that, you know, the special effects guys

was really alarmed. And through an AD, he called me and said, you know, look,

John wants to use that much explosives. The whole building is going to come

down. We are all going to get killed. But nobody dared to talk to John about

because he was always in a very foul mood.

People were afraid of him.

So I was in the office. I got a call, and I rushed to the set and tried to

him out of it. And finally I did.

And so he ended up using just one quarter of the amount of explosives, and

was spectacular.

One of the interesting things about this film is how unimportant the villain

ultimately is. He doesn't have much screen time.

He's identified mainly by that haircut and the orange jacket he's always

wearing. He is not nearly as central to the action as the relationship between

the two policemen.

which is where all the emotional force is.

He's an excuse. He's a narrative device.

I think where Hawks' characters bond through objects, through technology,

drive cars together, they pilot planes together, they chase animals and jeeps

together.

Wu's character is united more through a sense of mission, through shared goals,

through common values.

It's not quite as individualistic, not quite as, I would say, modern a

sensibility as...

as Hawks.

There isn't the same love of machinery, there isn't the same love of the object

that you see in Hawks films.

It's a social vision, but it's not a political vision.

He's always concerned with groups, he's always concerned with the relationship

of the individual to the group, but it's not a power relationship, it's not a

leadership relationship.

I don't have a sense of different political values being in play here.

I suppose you could say the gangsters represent a form of extreme

as they do in American movies, where we sort of admire them for that. But I

don't think he's admiring them here. He's not on that fringe.

Tony Leung's character is an undercover cop.

There were only two solutions for him, death or go into hiding. And according

treatment, he should sacrifice himself to save everybody at the hospital.

That kind of tragic ending was more...

consistent to my other films. However, after we saw the final shootout in the

car park, my dear producers, Terrence and Linda, and even Joanne Fatt and the

whole crew, they all suggested that Tony should leave.

They all thought we should create more hope and be more positive.

Well, after all, life should not be so pessimistic. Also,

Throughout several months of shooting, we were almost like a big family.

And I really appreciate everybody's total involvement in the project.

So I finally agreed with them and shot the little epilogue where Tony Leung

continues to chase after his dreams.

As the sequence comes to an end and we feel the relief of the Chao character,

he's faced his demons, he's destroyed them.

He's recovered some of the innocence of that baby that he has rescued.

It's a little bit of a rebirth, the baby being lowered out of the window.

And as the action subsides, we feel that sort of calm after the storm, that

peace that comes after the ritual drumming or the detonation of the

firecrackers. Things are coming back together.

That goal has been achieved. Certain wholeness has been recaptured that was

at the beginning of the film.

The framing device is important in that we need always a sense of closure in

John Woo, a sense of coming to an end point, a sense of equilibrium.

There's a real economy of the work. There are certain things that are set

the beginning and certain things that have to be rounded off and fulfilled at

the end.

And with the burning of the file and the return to the origami birds and the

water, again, a sense of ritual of peace achieved.

The balance is back, and it's a symmetrical form that has to be

bring the film to an end.

Roger Avery.

You know, another really interesting thing to me about John Woo's films is

constant preoccupation with the sea and sailing away and being able to just let

the wind, literally, the wind and the ocean, you know, two elements that have

nothing to do with mankind, let that take you away.

I oftentimes wonder what it's like to live in Hong Kong and maybe not have a

out and to know that the communists are basically coming in and that basically

you're living on borrowed time and that you might not be able to get away and

just what it must be like to just stand there at the ocean and just to know it's

just so close yet so far away and it's such a dream.

I was raised in Hong Kong. I love Hong Kong and its people.

And I love my country, of course.

And I do not want to see any changes.

I live a very simple life.

And I can live in an environment where there is no freedom of speech and no

freedom of creativity.

As a Hong Kong person, I feel like I'm a floating weed or a falling

leaf. I don't know where's home.

But I'm always chasing a dream.

Just like the characters in all my movies.