1. John Woo Yu-sen is a Hong Kong film director known as a highly influential figure in the action film genre.
38 Facts About John Woo
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John Woo is known for his highly chaotic "bullet ballet" action sequences, stylized imagery, Mexican standoffs, frequent use of slow motion and allusions to wuxia, film noir and Western cinema.
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John Woo is known for his collaborations with actor Chow Yun-fat in five Hong Kong action films: A Better Tomorrow, which made Chow a box-office superstar in Asia, A Better Tomorrow II, The Killer, Once a Thief, and Hard Boiled.
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John Woo has directed martial arts films such as The Dragon Tamers, Hand of Death, and Last Hurrah for Chivalry, and action comedies such as Follow the Star, From Riches to Rags, Run, Tiger, Run, and the aforementioned Once a Thief.
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John Woo made his Canadian debut with the action comedy film Once a Thief, which is a remake of Woo's 1991 film of the same name.
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John Woo continued to be active in Hong Kong cinema, directing films such as the two-part historical epic The Crossing.
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John Woo is the creator of the comic series Seven Brothers, published by Virgin Comics.
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John Woo is the founder and chairman of the production company Lion Rock Productions.
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John Woo was born as Wu Yu-seng on 22 September 1946, in Guangzhou, China, amidst the chaotic Chinese Civil War.
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Impoverished, the John Woo family lived in the slums at Shek Kip Mei.
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John Woo's father was a teacher, though rendered unable to work by tuberculosis, and his mother was a manual laborer on construction sites.
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John Woo later found a passion for movies influenced by the French New Wave especially Jean-Pierre Melville.
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John Woo has said he was shy and had difficulty speaking, but found making movies a way to explore his feelings and thinking and would "use movies as a language".
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John Woo found respite in Bob Dylan and in American Westerns.
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John Woo has stated the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made a particular impression on him in his youth: the device of two comrades, each of whom fire pistols from each hand, is a recurrent spectacle later found in his own work.
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In 1969, John Woo was hired as a script supervisor at Cathay Studios.
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John Woo worked as assistant director for some films directed by Chang Cheh during the 1970s, and took inspiration from Cheh's work.
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John Woo later had success as a comedy director with Money Crazy, starring Hong Kong comedian Ricky Hui and Richard Ng.
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John Woo: Interviews includes a 36-page interview with Woo by editor Robert K Elder, which documents the years 1968 to 1990.
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Around this period, John Woo would produce and direct several film and TV projects.
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In 1996, John Woo produced and directed Once a Thief, a Canadian made-for-television remake of John Woo's 1991 caper film.
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In 1998, John Woo directed Blackjack, which featured Dolph Lundgren as a leukophobic bodyguard who hunts down an assassin.
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That same year, John Woo served as executive producer and action choreographer on Antoine Fuqua's directorial debut The Replacement Killers, which featured Chow Yun-Fat's first international starring role.
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Later, John Woo directed Mission: Impossible 2, the second entry in the Tom Cruise-led action film series.
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John Woo made two additional films in Hollywood: Windtalkers and Paycheck, both of which fared poorly at the box office and were summarily dismissed by critics.
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Also in 2003, John Woo directed a television pilot entitled The Robinsons: Lost in Space for The WB Television Network, based on the 1960s television series Lost in Space.
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John Woo directed and produced the 2007 video game Stranglehold, which is a sequel to his 1992 film, Hard Boiled.
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In 2008, John Woo returned to Asian cinema with the completion of the two-part epic war film Red Cliff, based on a historical battle from Records of the Three Kingdoms.
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John Woo was presented with a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2010.
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John Woo followed Red Cliff with another two-part film, The Crossing, in 2014 and 2015.
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John Woo followed up The Crossing with Manhunt, a remake of the 1976 Japanese crime thriller of the same name.
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John Woo commented in 2015 that he would remake The Killer for American audiences.
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The film was directed by John Woo, produced by Universal Studios and released exclusively on Peacock.
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John Woo has previously tried to get musical projects in production, and shares a love of French cinema and Jaques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with the Mael brothers.
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In May 2008, John Woo announced in Cannes that his next movie would be 1949, an epic love story set between the end of World War II and Chinese Civil War to the founding of the People's Republic of China, the shooting of which would take place in China and Taiwan.
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Reports indicated that John Woo might be working on another World War II film, this time about the American Volunteer Group, or the Flying Tigers.
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John Woo has been married to Annie John Woo Ngau Chun-lung since 1976.
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John Woo is a Christian and told BBC in an interview that he believes in God and has utmost admiration for Jesus, whom he calls a "great philosopher".