‘HARD-BOILED’ MEMORIES: Visiting the set of a John Woo classic.

We’re currently preparing our double-disc edition of the John Woo masterpiece Hard- Boiled. The crew just got back from Beijing, where they shot an exhaustive fresh interview with the director. I was thinking back to the summer of 1992 when I got to visit the ‘Hard-Boiled’ set. At the time, I was living in England, but would make fairly regular visits to Hong Kong. I was writing for various publications at the time, and used every means possible to meet and interview my idols from the world of Hong Kong action cinema.

Given the degree to which his style has now been appropriated by Hollywood, it’s hard to imagine the impact John Woo’s films had on those of us who discovered his work in the 80s. I remember watching A Better Tomorrow for the first time in a Taiwanese hotel room. It was such a revelation to see gunplay that looked as amazing as martial arts fights. What I didn’t realize at the time was that John Woo had transposed the values and aesthetics of his master, Shaw Brothers legend Chang Cheh, from swordplay actioners to gangster flicks, blending in the European style of his idol Jean-Pierre Melville. UK-based uber-fan Rick Baker dubbed this new breed of Asian action cinema ‘Heroic Bloodshed’. In terms of this genre, Woo’s work reached its apotheosis with ‘Hard-Boiled’. At the time, none of us suspected that this would be Woo’s last Hong Kong film for 15 years, nor that he and his cinematic alter ego, Chow Yun-fat, were not to work together for the same amount of time. This makes my memories of that summer all the more special.

John Woo always had a warm relationship with his fans. (For years, he used to call or write to the aforementioned Rick Baker at Christmastime.) Even though he was busy working on ‘Hard-Boiled’, Woo found time to allow me to both interview him, and to visit the set. The interview took place at Woo’s Milestone Film Company office in Prince Edward, which remains at the same address to this day. The director already had a decent grasp of English, and shifted back and forth between this and Cantonese as we spoke. My questions focused on the ‘A Better Tomorrow’ films, Once A Thief and Bullet In The Head. Finally, I asked him to describe his latest work: “‘Hard-Boiled’, I can say, has more action than all my others films together.” To prove his point, Woo showed me an early trailer cutting together images from the film. It was scored to a particularly haunting piece of music. Not content with simply screening the promo for me, he insisted on giving me the tape, and signing the label, and, yes, I still have it! (Unfortunately, the music rights were never cleared, so this trailer couldn’t be used commercially, and so is not included on our DVD.)

I visited the set when Woo was shooting the sequence in the hospital morgue. The hospital set was constructed at a studio built within the framework of what had once been a Coke factory (or so I was told at the time). It was the same studio at which the films Heroic Trio and Executioners were shot. The director greeted me warmly, and I watched him work, fascinating at the utter calm with which he choreographed a scene of massive mayhem.

I remember Chow Yun-fat strolling onto the set, tall and laconic, and being surprised how well he spoke English. At the time, there was a rumour that his English name was Eamon, but, if so, he wasn’t admitting to it. For the interview, Chow and I talked our way through his career, or, at least, the action beats of it. He bemoaned the fact that western audiences never got to see his gentler films, such as ‘Autumn’s Tale’ and ‘All About Ah Long’. He admitted that he didn’t enjoy the process of making action movies. “He does,” he said, indicating the distant figure of John Woo. “When guns firing, no earplugs.” He indicated his explosions in the air. “He love the sound!” When I asked to take a photo with him, he obligingly fetched a couple of prop weapons so we could pose with them. I’ve met Chow a few times since, most recently at a screening of ‘Curse Of The Golden Flower’. His gentle charm remains undiminished, at odds with the ‘hard-boiled’ image of many of his movie personas. Perhaps that’s what makes him so unique as an action hero, the sense that he takes no pleasure in being quite so lethal.

The publicist brought me a pile of stills from the film, and John Woo, as if he didn’t have anything better to do, came and sorted through them to make sure I was getting the good stuff. A little later, Tony Leung Chiu-wai arrived, and we sat on opposite sides of a sawhorse so I could ask questions in English which he answered in Cantonese. (I had the services of a charming lady interpreter.) I’ll try and dig out the texts of those interviews and run excerpts in a in a future blog, to give an idea of the impression the film made on its key players while still in production.
This year, Woo finally returned to China to make the epic ‘Red Cliff’, starring Chow Yun-fat. It was supposed to reunite the ‘Hard-Boiled’ team of Chow and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, but Leung has bowed out, to be replaced by Takeshi Kaneshiro. I guess his challenge has been reversed, and Woo must now make a period epic as exciting as his contemporary gunplay dramas have been.

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