John Woo's American Career

John Woo After a fairly lucrative career in Hollywood, film director John Woo has returned to Hong Kong to continue making movies. While in the United States. Woo directed several successful films, including Face/Off with Oscar award-winning actor Nicholas Cage. Some refer to his American films as being "terrible" (Middlebrook 1) and "disappointing" (Leong), while others claim that his departure from Hollywood was a "loss to us all," (Leigh 1). Undoubtedly Woo has left an impact on American cinema, given the polarizing opinions regarding his legacy this side of the Pacific.

Woo's first American movie was Hard Target, produced in 1993 and starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. After this American directorial debut, Woo remained firmly in the action genre. Hunt claims that Hard Target proved that Woo is one of the most "underrated director of actors," in that he coaxed grand performances out of Van Damme and his character's nemesis, played by Lance Henriksen (Hunt 1). Hard Target took 74 days to produce, and $20 million. Interestingly, some of Woo's signature techniques did not at first woo American audiences.

A test "audience of young males laughed at some of the devices -- freeze frames, dissolves, slow motion, choreographed violence -- that are the director's stylistic trademarks," (Harmetz 1). Woo took elements of the Hong Kong cinematic oeuvre and aesthetic, and fused those with American tastes and sensibilities. The result was a new type of action movie in America, one that bore the stamp of globalization. Learning what American moviegoers expect from their action films, Woo became a "dominant force" in cinema (Leigh 1).

Thus established as a fine director who was able to maximize the potential of his cast's acting talents, John Woo did not direct any other feature until 1996, when he directed Broken Arrow as well as Once a Thief. Although Broken Arrow had a budget even larger than that of Hard Target, it did not fare well at the box office. Once a Thief did even poorer, and it was actually a remake of a previous Woo film he had made in Hong Kong in 1991.

Finally in 1997, Woo directed the film Face/Off. Reactions to Face/Off are generally favorable. Hunt lauds the film for its "metacommentary on the art of acting," and Leigh calls it a "heroically demented" film (1). The film bears the trademark Woo elements including dramatized conflict scenes with intense stand offs (or face offs, in this case) between rivals.

Woo had to alter his approach to the hero motif, making his heroes and villains more black-and-white than he might have in Asia, because as he puts it, Americans do not like too much ambiguity (cited by Leigh). There were some elements of his filmmaking style that worked in Hollywood, and others that did not, and it allowed Woo to create a style that was hybrid and multicultural. Woo also collaborated with several filmmakers in Vancouver, Canada after first shifting to North America in the early 1990s (Harmetz).

Yet it seemed that films subsequent to Face/Off fared less well both at the box office and with critics. Leigh notes that Mission Impossible II did a disservice to Woo's career, not necessarily because he did not do his job well but because the Mission Impossible franchise had done Woo a disservice. After Mission Impossible II came another Nicholas Cage movie called Windtalkers.

Windtalkers was about the Navajo code breakers, but Woo was widely criticized for not featuring the native actors enough in the film and relegating them to thin supportive roles (Leigh). Windtalkers lost about $60 million (Leigh). Woo seemed to be on a downward trajectory at this point, notes Leigh, directing Ben Affleck in a dismal failure of a film called Paycheck. Paycheck was the last film Woo directed in the United States before deciding that his career would blossom better in Asia.

One of the problems Woo encountered in Hollywood was restrictions to his creativity and style. In Hong Kong cinema, Woo could decide how many bullets the villain fired, how many villains could enter the scene at once. Now that Woo is back in Asia -- both China and Hong Kong -- he may be freer to explore multiple dimensions of cinema that he may not have had access to in Hollywood. For example, Woo has been currently working on epic dramas for the Asian audience.

In 2008, Woo's Chinese film Red Cliff earned accolades and did exceptionally well at the box office. Yet this film did not fare well outside of China because it is a historical epic. Woo is currently working on a film called The Crossing, which is about the history of Chinese people crossing the straits to Taiwan. This film is expected to be poignant, and hopefully will reach a global audience. Woo has had a tremendous influence on Hollywood and global cinema.

In Hong Kong, he became an established action director who had moved the film industry forward, focusing on modern gangster themes and urban motifs. This allowed Woo to transition fairly easily into Hollywood, although.