Disaster Artist

Hollywood Knew what it wanted when it convinced director John Woo to leave his role as Hong Kong's most successful action director. It wanted violence—the stylized, balletic violence that Woo perfected in The Killer, Hard-Boiled and A Better Tomorrow. The violence that made him one of the most widely copied directors in the world. It worked. Woo turned his talents to such films as Broken Arrow, Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II and attracted stars like Tom Cruise, Nicolas Cage and John Travolta. The emperor of Hong Kong cinema became a box office ruler in America as well. Now Woo branches out into different territories. In Hong Kong, he not only directed action films, he also directed dramas, comedies and even operas. His newest film, Windtalkers, will be his first American drama. Based on real incidents from World War II, it stars Cage as a hardened GI assigned to guard a naive, idealistic Navajo who, with others from his reservation, has been recruited to transmit information in his native tongue—the only code the Americans used that couldn't be cracked by the Japanese. There will be artistic battle scenes, but Woo hopes the emotional story line will separate Windtalkers from the recent spate of Hollywood war flicks and show the public the director has more to offer than action films. It's a career gamble for Woo, but the 56-year-old is accustomed to taking risks. Growing up in Hong Kong, Woo fell in love with American movies, haunting theaters and stealing books about film. That taught him enough to get a low-level job in the Hong Kong film industry. At the age of 26—aided by a friend's inheritance—he directed his first film, The Young Dragons, a martial-arts movie (continued on page 148) John Woo (continued from page 104) that featured an early appearance by Jackie Chan. Woo spent the next decade churning out one unmemorable film after another—until he teamed with actor Chow Yun-Fat to make A Better Tomorrow. The film about Hong Kong Triad criminals and cops became the highest-grossing action film in Hong Kong history, and forged a partnership between actor and director that reminded many Americans of Martin Scorsese's relationship with Robert De Niro. It wasn't long before Hollywood took notice. Despite a decade of working in America, the diminutive Woo struggles at times with English, but is fluent in making motion pictures that complement his artistic vision.

Playboy: You claim you loathe real violence, but you're famous for stylish, bloody scenes that other directors copy. Could you please explain?

Woo: I don't think my movies are that violent. They are about dignity and honor. I try to mix emotion and action, starting with emotion. I hate to see people get hurt by evil, so when I show an action sequence, I always stand on the right side. When my heroes fight back, it's for good reason, even if they fight evil in a hard way. I also use action to send the message that we should stop crime. I might use a certain kind of style to glorify the behavior of my hero or the way I see life and death.

Playboy: Where did this preoccupation with violence come from?

Woo: I'm not a violent guy, but where I grew up was pretty awful, and I've seen a lot of things. We moved to Hong Kong when I was five years old. Our family was extremely poor and the place we lived was like hell. So many gangs, so many drugs, so many evil things. I have seen people chopping each other up in gang wars. I've seen people get killed by the police. Killed in a mud slide. Killed in a riot in Hong Kong.

Playboy: Who is tougher on violence, Hong Kong or Hollywood?

Woo: In Hong Kong there is much concern about violence, but the Asian audience got used to the Hong Kong action film—they realize the violence and action in the film is entertainment, not real. Here, I needed to adjust a little bit. I know some people are easily influenced by film, especially with a superstar who some people take as a role model. So I tone down the violence and make more action. As I get older I also feel a responsibility. I really don't want people to get a bad influence from the film. Ten years ago, I heard some kids robbed a store and when they were caught by the police, they said they learned from one of my movies.

Playboy: How did you react?

Woo: I was pulling out my hair. Crying. I was sad to be that kind of influence, sad for those young people. After that, I became more careful. When I'm making an action sequence, I will change a little bit. I really want to go to extremes and I know my style, my technique, is visually pretty strong, and it easily influences people. So I have to be careful.

Playboy: There is plenty of emotion in Windtalkers, the most serious film you've made in Hollywood. After having fun with your style in implausible films like Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II, are you worried audiences won't know how to react?

Woo: Some people still see me as an action-film director, but I want to prove that I love serious drama. And that I'm good at it. This is an amazing story, the contributions the code talkers made to our country during World War II. This is about friendship, with action, and I put my style into the emotional moments. The action sequences I wanted to look real, like a documentary, so there wasn't much room for style. I am focusing more on the serious drama.

Playboy: You don't like sequels, yet the biggest hit of your career was Mission: Impossible II. Why did you do it?

Woo: I wanted to work with Tom Cruise, who I admire as one of the great actors. When Tom asked me to do it I was pretty surprised, and didn't want competition because I felt the first Mission: Impossible was fun and successful. I always liked Brian De Palma's unusual style. But Tom, who produced both, told me he wanted to make each Mission: Impossible unlike the last. He wanted every episode to have a different director and style. He wanted a John Woo–style Mission: Impossible, and that got me pretty excited.

Playboy: The movie took a long time to complete and there were some rumors that Tom was a controlling producer.

Woo: I think that's a little exaggerated. Of course, we had a lot of arguments, but mainly about the work. Tom and I wanted everything to be perfect and we came up with ideas and changed things all the time. Tom and his producing partner, Paula Wagner, had a lot of control on the set, and I think sometimes they over worried everything. But a good thing about Tom Cruise is he always listens, and loves when new ideas come up. What drove me crazy was that he liked to do his own stunts, like in the motorcycle scene. I suggested using a helmet so the stunt could be done by a stuntman. He refused. He got on the motorcycle and took off. And it was so dangerous. The other big argument was with him doing the rock-climbing scene. He had only one safety cable, and the cliff was really dangerous. And he was begging me to let him do the scene. I was pleading with him to use a stunt double. But he didn't listen. Those were the kinds of arguments we had.

Playboy: Did he get hurt?

Woo: No, he never got hurt. He is pretty sure of himself, he knows his limits. I said, "I don't want you to fall and get hurt." And he said, "What about the stuntmen? Won't the stuntmen also get hurt?" I couldn't win that argument.

Playboy: Although you now work with Hollywood stars like Cruise, Cage and Travolta, the Hong Kong films you did with Chow Yun-Fat were memorable enough to be compared to the early pairing of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. What made you two so special?

Woo: When I started working on the film A Better Tomorrow in 1985, I wanted to make a great gangster film, with an actor like Humphrey Bogart. The movie was a serious drama and we looked for a serious actor. When I was young, my idols were Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Alain Delon and the Japanese actor Ken Takakura. I needed a guy like that, tough but very emotional. I had not seen his films, but I read how Chow Yun-Fat took care of orphans, that he was a man with a great heart. And as soon as I cast him, I realized he was the image of all my idols. He looks a little like Alain Delon. When he holds a gun, he looks pretty much like Clint Eastwood. When he's not speaking, his face is like Steve McQueen's. And when he puts on sunglasses, he looks like Ken Takakura. I wanted to be an actor but I was short and never could speak well. In the old days an actor had to be tall and handsome, and I wasn't. So when I saw Chow Yun-Fat, I thought he could represent me and fulfill my dreams. And we have a lot in common. Before I made A Better Tomorrow, I had failed for quite a few years and I was down. People even said, "John should retire," which really hurt me. Chow Yun-Fat also had failed and had gotten a name as box office poison. So the two failures got together for A Better Tomorrow. We gave it our hearts, dignity and real emotion, to prove we weren't failures, and it was the highest-grossing movie in Hong Kong history. People cried when they watched the film and it made Chow Yun-Fat a superstar. It was my turning point as well.

Playboy: Chow Yun-Fat personified who you wanted to be in your Hong Kong films. Which American actor comes closest to Chow?

Woo: Nicolas Cage. He is so honest and emotional. When we work together, we don't need to say much. We don't argue or worry about anything. His acting is very natural and always gives a lot of surprises. That's the way I work with Chow Yun-Fat. I like my actors to bring real experience, even improvise dialogue. I gave Nicolas the freedom to do what he feels. I set up the camera not knowing what he's going to do. He is always surprising me and when he does something unexpected or new, it really excites me.

Playboy: You worked early on with Jackie Chan. Did you imagine he'd become such a successful comic actor?

Woo: Jackie was the stunt coordinator for my first film, The Young Dragons. Even then, Jackie had a special quality, but he was too shy to show much of a sense of humor. He was always dreaming of becoming a movie star, but he had no luck. He worked for me as a stunt double in a low-budget movie in Korea. When we got there, the actor we were supposed to use was too old and I gave Jackie Chan that big part. He almost got killed.

Playboy: What happened?

Woo: Besides acting, he was the stunt double for the villain. Our hero was supposed to kick him in the stomach, and we had six men using a cable to drag him backward. We couldn't get the timing right, so we did it seven times. The last time, I saw that he was tired and I wanted to use somebody else, but he insisted on doing it. And the back of his head hit a rock on the ground. He was bleeding and lost consciousness for about 30 seconds. We were so scared, we slapped him, tried to wake him up. After he woke up, he forgot where he was, what his name was. We were all crying—he's got tears, too. There's a Chinese saying, "If you don't get killed in the disaster, then you will earn a great fortune." He was so dedicated to his work and was never scared of anything. When he became a legend, I was so happy for him.

Playboy: Many young Hollywood directors have borrowed your style for their action scenes. When you see shootout scenes in The Matrix that borrow heavily from movies such as The Killer and Hard-Boiled, do you feel flattered or like you've been ripped off?

Woo: I just feel flattered and happy. We are this big family, we learn from one another. I learned so much from American, French and Japanese movies. I combined them with my culture and my technique to create my own style.

Playboy: Movie stars want you to make them as cool as Chow Yun-Fat, but when you came to Hollywood and made Hard Target, Jean-Claude Van Damme forced the studio to let him make his own cut of your movie. How did it feel to have him suddenly take over the edit of your film?

Woo: It was shocking. I never knew that movie stars had so much power here. I wasn't happy, because in Hong Kong the director has full control. Making a movie is a simple thing, why make it so complicated? And if you hire somebody to do the job, why not have full confidence in that guy? People here find it hard to trust others, because this is an insecure business.

Playboy: Hollywood executives are notorious for admiring the work of foreign directors, then sticking them into formula films and discarding them when they fail. Were you concerned that you'd be headed back to Hong Kong after the first film wasn't a hit?

Woo: No, I still was determined to stay in Hollywood because working 25 years in Hong Kong was enough. The market there is so small and everybody makes the same kind of movie. I decided I couldn't make the same movie for the rest of my life. Another reason was my family. In Hong Kong, you work like crazy, seven days a week, sometimes 14 hours a day. I shot in the daytime and edited at night. I never had any time for my family, and my children started to hate me. My family almost fell apart in Hong Kong. Because my wife is an American citizen, we decided to move our whole family. People don't work on weekends in America, so I could spend more time with my family.

Playboy: The budgets that you work with are astronomically higher than those in Hong Kong, where you made your most memorable films. Have you become a better director?

Woo: Yeah. It's experience. It was harder to make a big-budget movie in Hollywood. It involves so much money and you have to have a good plan. In Hong Kong, I improvised on the set all the time. The Killer and Hard-Boiled were shot without scripts. We had a treatment that told the story, a little bit of dialogue, and we created it all on the set. That's why my movies in Hong Kong always went over budget. In Hollywood, I behave better. We plan and storyboard every action sequence. But I still like to improvise. On a big movie like Mission: Impossible II, the last motorcycle-chase sequence and the fight between Tom and Dougray Scott came from an idea we had on the set.

Even with a big movie like Windtalkers, which involved hundreds of extras and lots of explosions, only one of five battle scenes had a storyboard. The other four, I shot what I felt. I still follow my emotion. If I feel, Ok, I need 12 guys to get blown up by the bomb here, then that's what I do. I always challenge myself to do something I haven't done before, some good action people haven't seen.

Playboy: Aside from the violence around you, what movies influenced you when you were a kid?

Woo: I loved musicals. My favorite movies were The Wizard of Oz and the cartoon of Bambi. And Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp. They made me feel that life could be beautiful and gave me a lot of hope. I love the Western genre. John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Cagney. Jimmy Stewart I took as my role model, the man with a pure heart. My father was an old-fashioned, traditional scholar, a philosopher, a sincere Christian. He never liked movies, but my mother was crazy about them, and she used to bring me to the theater to see American classics like Gone With the Wind. My father was very sick, he had tuberculosis for 10 years and all he could do was stay in the hospital. I couldn't help him and the only escape from that sadness was the theater. I wanted to escape from the hell we were living in, and in the theater I found my heaven.

Playboy: You've always cited Singin' in the Rain as a big influence on your action films. Could Gene Kelly have been an action star?

Woo: I would have liked to work with Gene Kelly in an action film. He was one of my idols, so pure and charming. I love musicals and will make one here. I want to make a movie like West Side Story, which I've seen 21 times in the theater. I also love Bob Fosse. Somebody once offered me Chicago, but it didn't work out because I took Mission: Impossible II. John Travolta wanted me to do The Phantom of the Opera, but that didn't work out. My dream is to do a musical and a Western.

There's a Chinese saying, "If you don't get killed in the disaster, then you will earn a great fortune."