John Woo Yu-Sen SBS is a Hong Kong filmmaker, known as a highly influential figure in the action film genre.
28 Facts About John Woo
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John Woo is a pioneer of heroic bloodshed films and the gun fu genre in Hong Kong action cinema, before working in Hollywood films.
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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 created 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 is a winner of the Hong Kong Film Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Editing, as well as a Golden Horse Award, an Asia Pacific Screen Award and a Saturn Award.
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John Woo was born as Wu Yu-seng on September 22,1946 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 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 would make several more Heroic Bloodshed films in the late 1980s and early 1990s, nearly all starring Chow Yun-Fat.
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John Woo gained international recognition with the release of The Killer, which became the most successful Hong Kong film in America since Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon and garnered John Woo an American cult following.
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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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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 has made three additional films in Hollywood: Mission: Impossible 2, Windtalkers and Paycheck.
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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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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".