A Quote by John Woo
When I made 'Hard Boiled,' I had no idea that it would be released to an international audience. I just wanted to make a film to team up my two favorite actors, Tony Leung and Chow Yun-Fat.
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Growing up I watched a lot of Hong Kong movies, I watched big stars like Chow Yun Fat, Andy Lau, and Tony Leung on the big screens.
He was never a kung fu guy. Now, he's Mr. Kung Fu. Oh, man. Even Chow Yun-Fat gets typed!
CROUCHING TIGER is nevertheless a gloriously big epic, starring the Hong Kong action stars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh in a visionary adventure where the characters seem set free from the force of gravity.
'Baahubali' team is not after numbers. If we would have been number guys, we would have never made a film with such a huge budget. We just wanted to make the biggest war film of this country, but what it has achieved is amazing.
I never made this film with the motive of making money. I wanted to make a different film, which would strike a chord with the audience. I'm extremely happy that 'Mithunam' succeeded in what it wanted to achieve.
In America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience.
If I ever thought of directing again, I mean - I don't know, even the idea of directing a film is a strange one for me, because I feel kind of anti mathematics in a way in that sense. Anti - I don't like when things make sense, I prefer if they don't, so if I made a film, it wouldn't make any sense and no one would see it. So maybe I'll just make little films at home with my phone, never to be released.
I wanted to make a film about anorexia. I thought about it for a long time, but then gave up on this idea as I felt that this theme would be so hermetic and closed that it would not reach an audience. However, the plot about the character of Olga and the idea that a body has a lot of different meanings were still present in my mind.
'Hard Boiled' is my last film in Hong Kong, before I moved to the U.S. It is the one film which is most accepted by the audience in the West.
In 2011, I released my first album called 'International Villager.' I had no support, and whatever money I had made, I put it all in the album. I shot the music video for 'Brown Rang' with one lakh dollars. I spent so much money, as I just wanted to put it up on YouTube, as I knew that my market was there, and it became a huge hit.
I chose 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith' specifically 'cause I had just made 'The Bourne Identity' and made a film that glamorized being an action hero, and I wanted to make the exact opposite. I wanted to make a movie that glamorized maintaining a marriage, and that made the action hero part seem easy and made the marriage part seem hard.
When we made the original 'Dhoom,' we wanted to make a film that would not bore us and wanted it to be just a breezy cool film.
Balancing is hard. I've lost roles that I really wanted because I had set up a tour. I cancelled tours to do roles before. But I have to find the time to make that up to my audience. I made a commitment to them.
Can you imagine, just talking and chatting with Tony Leung? I got to ask all my fan girl questions.
Martin Scorsese was one of the few who had not been an assistant. Most of the guys had been an assistant and worked their way up. But I had seen an underground picture he had made in New York, a black-and-white film. I had done a picture for American International, about a Southern woman bandit, the Ma Barker story, and it was very successful, and I had left to start my own company, and they wanted me to make another one.
I directed 'Death in the Gunj' which released in 2017. It got very good reviews and a few awards but did not do well at the box-office. But I'm not bothered. I made the film that I wanted to make. It was not a film for everyone.
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