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John Woo’s signature at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Image by NativeForeigner –

Top 10 Surprising Facts about John Woo

John Woo Yu-Sen is a Hong Kong film director, producer, and screenwriter. He was born on September 22, 1946.

He is considered one of the major figures of Hong Kong cinema. He set his sights on becoming a film director following a brief flirtation with entering seminary school and becoming a priest. He was determined to bring a level of artistry to Hong Kong filmmaking, which at the time was sorely lacking in creative talent.

Some of his notable action films include A Better Tomorrow (1986), The Killer (1989), Hard Boiled (1992), and Red Cliff (2008/2009).

He is the first Asian director ever to make a mainstream Hollywood film. His best Hollywood films include the action films Hard Target (1993) and Broken Arrow (1996), the action thriller Face/Off (1997), and the action spy film Mission: Impossible 2 (2000).

He has won various awards including the Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Picture, as well as a Golden Horse Award, an Asia Pacific Screen Award, and a Saturn Award.

He is the founder and chairman of the production company Lion Rock Productions. He pioneered heroic bloodshed films and the gun fu genre in Hong Kong action cinema, before working in Hollywood films.

1. His Christian family faced persecution

He was aged five when his family had to escape to Hong Kong. After the communist revolution, Christians were purged.

His family was affluent but the move reduced them to poverty. They ended up living in the slums of Shek Kip Mei. His father had been a teacher but a serious bout of tuberculosis forced him out of work. His mother became the only breadwinner and took on manual jobs on construction sites.

To make matters worse, a fire rendered them homeless. They had to rely on charitable donations from disaster relief. They moved to the projects where violent crime flourished.

2. Woo hates violence

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Woo does not like violence and death. Maybe it is because he grew up around it. It is then a bit satirical that he ended up making movies that are full of violence.

To escape the unbearable surroundings, he often went to either the local Chinese Christian church or a movie theatre. This is how he discovered and came to love American musicals and later the films of Sergio Leone, Kurosawa Akira, Sam Peckinpah, and Jean-Pierre Melville.

He loves peace. You would be surprised to hear that he has never fired a real gun or been in a fight as an adult.

3. One of his signature marks is using doves in his movies

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Woo has several things he is known for in his films. He is best known for highly chaotic action sequences, stylized imagery, Mexican standoffs, frequent use of slow motion, and allusions to wuxia and Western cinema. His best and most unique is the use of doves.

He is very religious. When a character dies in his film the set features lots of doves flying around. Woo claims that doves represent the character’s soul. To Woo, the doves are symbols of peace and purity, representing the spirits of his characters, even if they commit acts of violence.

4. His right leg is shorter than his left leg

When he was aged 3 years he got very sick. His back was affected and he could not sleep. His father was wealthy so he hired a lot of maids to just hold him for 24 hours a day.

Doctors could not tell what the illness was. They gave up on him and told his parents to give him up and have another child. Just like any parent would do, they didn’t give up on him. They loved him and spent all their fortune to find a good doctor.

At last, they found a young doctor educated in Germany who cut the flesh from his leg and put it on his back. His walking was affected until he was 8 years old. This made his right leg shorter than his left.

5. Woo’s start was not easy

Avenue of Stars (John Woo). Image by Ahleong-

Successful people attest that the road to success is never easy. The start of it all is the hardest. He just like many other people faced challenges. His first feature film, Tiehan rouqing (The Young Dragons), was completed in 1973 but not released until 1975. It was initially rejected because of its violent content.

He put in so many hours. He worked seven days a week 18 hours a day. He lived in his office. Shooting in certain locations was not easy. His crew was denied permission. However, they would go ahead and shoot quickly trying to avoid the police.

In Hollywood, things were even harder. Many limitations saw him drop important episodes in his films. The most characteristic example is the Hard Target movie with Van Damme which was taken by the studio and cut to make it suitable for the American audience.

He found it very difficult to maintain his style and to properly realize himself in these films.

6. His movie Red cliff is the most expensive Chinese-language production to date

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Working in Hollywood became very frustrating and dissatisfying.  He went back to China to make a two-part production, Chibi (2008; Red Cliff) and Chibi II (2009; Red Cliff II).

The budget for the movie was $80 million. To date, it is the most expensive Chinese-language production. He allegedly spent $10 million of his own money on the film and had spent two years writing and researching the script.

This investment paid off as the two parts became a box-office success, grossing more than $200 million worldwide.

7. Woo is an introvert

Growing up, Woo was very shy and had many difficulties with speaking. His movie-making became his way of communicating.

He once confessed that the two things that scare him were having an interview in front of a camera and getting an award. He has not yet mastered the art of talking and does not enjoy talking in front of a crowd.

He attests to his success as a director because he only has to say two words Action and cut. To unwind, he cooks. He compares cooking with making a movie in that all you do is cook and then watch people as they eat and enjoy the food.

8. He began making short films at age 19 using borrowed cameras

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When he compared the newly discovered western movies to the ones in Hong Kong and was very dissatisfied. That’s when he decided to make his films.

At 19, he joined a theatre company and began making short films with borrowed Super-8 and 16mm cameras. Since there was no film school, he learned his craft by watching movies and making his own. However, most of his work then got lost.

Two years later, he landed an entry-level job as a production assistant at Cathay Film Studio. He quickly worked his way up to the assistant director. He left Cathay to join forces with the Shaw Brothers as the assistant director for the master filmmaker, Zhang Che. Zhang taught him how to put emotion behind the action of his films.

9. He has never seemed to recapture the magic of his Hong Kong productions in Hollywood

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Looking at his history in the American Film Industry, he has not managed to achieve as much as he did in Hong Kong. Home treated him well unlike the foreign land.

In Hong Kong, he and his crew were used to working for extremely long hours. In Canada, things are a little slow. In Hong Kong, he was used to being given artistic freedom. This is not the case in America.

It seems that Woo’s directing experience in Hong Kong was more fruitful in terms of artistic self-realization and elaboration of new shooting and filming methods

He is very talented and several of his Hollywood projects scored a commercial success, many not as much.  However, when he returned to his roots with period pieces about Chinese history like the Mandarin language war epic Red Cliff, he seemed to regain considerable credibility.

10. Woo is best known for his creation of the genre of emotional drama

In the genre of emotional drama, Woo is the man. Here he found the space for realizing his mindset and directing orientation, creating the genre of action drama that could be consumed by the Western public.

This genre combines action sequences with such recurrent themes as duty, honor, brotherhood, revenge, and violence for good reasons. He has a way of compromising dramatic themes with action sequences and martial arts scenes. This in turn produces a deep emotional impact on the audience.

This expertise is what has led him to become an acclaimed director in the United States. Such directors appreciated his work as Scorsese and many others.