COVER STORY : New Gun in Town : John Woo, Hong Kong’s legendary action director, teams with Jean-Claude Van Damme for his first American thriller, ‘Hard Target’

The first thing you notice is that it’s quiet, uncommonly quiet for a movie set. It’s so quiet you can hear the rustle of the bit players as they strap on the fake-blood squibs for their death scenes.

Then, as you walk farther into the chilly, cavernous warehouse, you enter the brightly lighted areas where the cameras have been set up for “Hard Target,” the $19.5-million Alphaville Productions project set for release this summer by Universal Pictures.

All around are mementos of Mardi Gras revelries: gaudily painted floats festooned with papier-mache men and cartoonish beasts are parked here, there and everywhere. Elsewhere--on the walls, hanging from the ceiling and stacked off in corners--there are even more elaborate creations. A massive white pelican. A dragon. A Carmen Miranda with bananas blooming on her head.

A small, soft-featured gentleman with an unassuming manner is standing next to what looks like an overgrown leprechaun doll. He is smiling as he speaks to an intent technician. He is describing just how he wants the leprechaun to explode when it is sprayed with automatic-weapons fire.

John Woo is the gentleman’s name, and he has all the easygoing charm and unhurried casualness of a friendly neighbor who has wandered by during his early-evening stroll to talk about crabgrass or last night’s thunderstorm. That’s hardly what you would expect from someone coping with the high-stakes pressure of directing his first American movie. But, then, Woo isn’t exactly a newcomer to filmmaking.

In Hong Kong, where he has amazed audiences and shattered box-office records, Woo already is a living legend. For the growing legion of his fans throughout Europe, North America and the rest of the world, he is the greatest thing to happen to action movies since James Cameron time-warped “The Terminator.”

And to Jean-Claude Van Damme, the two-fisted star of “Hard Target,” Woo’s premiere American effort, Woo is nothing less than “the Martin Scorsese of Asia.”

In the wild, wild world of Hong Kong action cinema, that crazy-quilt common ground where Indiana Jones and Sam Peckinpah meet the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, nothing succeeds like excess. Life as we know it in U.S. movies is a 33 1/3-rpm record, which filmmakers in Hong Kong routinely crank up to 78. No one ever runs out of bullets--a gunman may have to reload after firing a pistol 20 or 30 times, but he always keeps a fresh round in his pocket--and every good guy can walk away after the worst imaginable crash landing. Action heroes don’t merely defy death, they feverishly court it. Passions do not merely blaze, they erupt.

It takes a lot to simply get noticed in the ferociously competitive Hong Kong market, a battleground where a smash hit earns a two- or three-week run and a flop disappears in two or three days. Yet Woo has survived, and thrived, with such action-packed and intensely emotional movies as “A Better Tomorrow” (the highest-grossing film in Hong Kong cinema history), “The Killer,” “A Bullet in the Head” and, most recently, “Hard-Boiled.”

These and other Woo spectaculars have attracted a wide, wildly appreciative audience throughout Asia. Thanks to film festival exposure and bootleg video circulation, the cult has spread to North America, where only “The Killer” has received any sort of mainstream theatrical release, but almost every Woo film since “A Better Tomorrow” (1986) has attracted a greatly enthusiastic and almost obsessively devoted cult.

How devoted? Well, when “Hard-Boiled” premiered a few months ago at the 1992 Toronto Film Festival, the impatient audience of Woomaniacs began to chant “Woo! Woo! Woo!” like some sort of manic incantation until the screening began.

“Hard-Boiled,” which climaxes with a 30-minute police siege of a Hong Kong hospital where gunrunners have stored their booty, is typical of Woo’s maximum-overdrive movie-making. His films are distinctive in their nonstop action, their jaw-dropping stunts and their one-damn-thing-after another exuberance. The mayhem has a rock-’em, sock-’em, almost surreal quality, balletic and bodacious until it achieves a kind of lunatic beauty.

Commentators such as J. Hoberman, the film critic of the Village Voice, and David Overby, programmer for the Toronto Festival’s Asian cinema programs, have waxed eloquent about the absolute grace, the kinetic excitement and “the full-throated roar” (Overby’s description) of “The Killer” and “Hard-Boiled.” Still, Hoberman, Overby and other ardent fans insist, with ample justification, that there is as much heart and soul as sound and fury in Woo’s cinema.

For example, in “The Killer” (1989), the entire plot is propelled by the title character’s quest for spiritual redemption after he accidentally blinds a pretty singer (Sally Yeh) during a gangland rub-out. Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat plays Jeff, the guilt-racked hit man, who agrees to just one last job to pay for the young woman’s eye operation. (Not for nothing has Hoberman described “The Killer” as “ ‘Magnificent Obsession’ remade by Sam Peckinpah.”) Unfortunately, the hit man is double-crossed by the people who hire him--and, worse, by his best friend, who must then redeem himself by accepting beatings, then bullets, as his just desserts. As for Jeff, he meets his fate during an epic gun battle that ends with he and the blind singer re-enacting the climax of “Duel in the Sun.”

(“The Killer” recently was released on home video by Fox Lorber, marking the first time a Woo production has received wide, non-bootleg U.S. exposure. If you want a high-octane introduction to Woo’s world, check it out.)

“A Better Tomorrow,” the crime drama that ignited Woomania in the first place, has Ti Lung as a melancholy gangster who wants to go straight, and Leslie Cheung as his hotheaded brother, a police inspector who blames his errant sibling for their father’s death. But the real star of the piece is Chow Yun-Fat, playing a mob enforcer who oozes insouciance--in one of his first scenes, he lights his cigarette with a counterfeit $100 bill--and dresses spiffily.

In “Hard-Boiled” (1992), Chow Yun-Fat is on the other side of the law, playing a Hong Kong police inspector who makes Dirty Harry look like a civil libertarian. (Woo himself appears as sage bartender who encourages the cop to be as nasty as he wants to be.) Tony Leung co-stars as undercover cop who needs his own shot of redemption after posing too long as a mobster’s hit man, and taking the role much too seriously. The relationship between the two leads, much like the relationship between Jeff and the cop on his trail in “The Killer,” represents male bonding of a sort that is deeply felt, boisterous comic--and, at times, flagrantly flirtatious.

Co-producer Terence Chang, Woo’s longtime friend and partner in the Milestone Entertainment production company, thinks the real key to Woo’s appeal lies in something far less obvious, and far more important, than pyrotechnics.

“I think it’s the way he invests a hundred percent of his emotion into the characters, into the story,” Chang says. “Unabashedly. He believes in it so strongly that, eventually, it works. You can criticize the plots--they are sentimental, they are melodramatic. But he fully embodies his sentimentality. And that’s why his films work.”

Producer James Jacks (“Raising Arizona”), one of the prime movers behind “Hard Target,” puts it this way: “In all of his movies, John has a very strong emotional underpinning. It’s loyalty, it’s friendship, it’s love, it’s all these things. It gives his movies a resonance that the normal action movie doesn’t have.”

More than one critic has detected a homoerotic subtext in Woo’s movies, something the director views with bemused sympathy. “I’ve talked to John about that,” Overby says. “And John--who, by the way, is not gay--he just sort of looked at me, and said, ‘If you see it there, it’s there.’ ”

Maybe, maybe not. During a break in filming “Hard Target,” Woo shies away from saying anything one way or the other.

“I never tried to explain my intentions for making films, for individual shots or sequences,” he says. “I’m like a painter after he has made a painting--it’s really up to the spectator on how to interpret the painting. With my movies, whether people read a lot of things into it, or whether they think it’s funny, or they think it’s sad--it’s really up to the audience.”

In Mandarin, the language of his youth and, sometimes, his dreams, John Woo is Wu Yusen. He was born in Canton, the capital of Guangdong province in South China, in 1948. Three years later, his father, a scholar and high school teacher, decided that life under a Communist regime was intolerable. So he fled to Hong Kong with his wife and young son, seeking his own sort of better tomorrow.

Before long, Woo had a brother, then a sister. And little else.

“My family was very poor,” Woo recalls. “And my father, he became very sick, with tuberculosis. He stayed in a hospital for 10 years. He couldn’t work.

“My mother was doing hard work in construction sites, manual labor. And we were living on the streets, living in tin shacks.”

Still, Woo consider himself lucky, maybe blessed. “Even though we were poor,” he says, “my parents taught me a lot of philosophy and Chinese culture. And also taught me how to live with dignity. This you can see from my movies. This is what my parents gave to me--dignity.

“And there was a church, the church that supported me through school. An American family sent me school fees through the church. Just like now, people can adopt the African children through churches. This American family helped me the whole time I was in school.”

Despite what some observers might make of the violence in his movies, Woo still considers himself a Christian. (Which might explain the chaste, almost chivalric depiction of women in his films, and the almost total lack of explicit sexuality, gratuitous or otherwise.) By his own sheepish admission, though, he hasn’t attended a church service in more than 15 years.

“But I believe what I believe,” Woo says. “When I was in high school, my first ambition was to be a priest. Because I like to help people. Since I got the help from other people, I wanted to repay to society. And I wanted to help the people who needed help.

“But the seminary, they would not accept me. Because, I guess, I was an artist. And maybe I got too many things in my head.”

Woo lost his father when he was 16. “He loved me very much,” Woo recalls, “but he wanted me to be realistic. I was a pure dreamer, and he thought I was unrealistic. He was like the old-time scholar, very traditional. And I was kind of like a rebel, like James Dean, Elvis Presley. I liked anything he hadn’t seen before, like the Beatles.”

And movies. Lots of movies. When he wasn’t working at odd jobs to help support his family, Woo spent most of his spare time during the mid- to late ‘60s inside cinemas, watching “a lot of art films, especially the European movies.” Asked to name his favorites, he rounds up most of the usual suspects--Truffaut, Antonioni, Bergman, Kurosawa--and his “longtime idol,” Jean-Pierre Melville, who directed Alain Delon as an antiheroic hit man (who, like Chow Yun-Fat’s “Killer,” is named Jeff) in “Le Samourai” (1967).

What Woo saw in these imported movies--and, later, in the films of Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese, his other acknowledged influences--he could not find in domestic product. “At that time,” Woo says, “the Hong Kong movies were so bad. And I thought I could make a better movie than they were making.”

At 19, Woo joined a theater company established by the periodical Chinese Student Weekly and began making super-8 and 16-millimeter shorts with borrowed cameras. “We had a group of young people who really loved the movies,” he says. “There were no film schools, so we learned by watching the films of all the great masters and making experimental movies.

“I also went to the library or the bookstores,” Woo adds, grinning like a child apprehended in close proximity to the cookie jar. “I went there to steal the film books.”

(It should come as no great surprise that one of Woo’s favorite movie moments--maybe the favorite--is the scene in Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” in which Jean-Pierre Leaud swipes glossy stills from a movie-house display.)

By 1969, Woo had taught himself enough to qualify for an entry-level job as production assistant at Cathay Film Studio. Within two years, he worked his way up the ranks to assistant director and moved over to the immense movie factory of the Shaw Brothers.

Then as now, escapism--cheaply made, efficiently distributed and highly profitable--was the product valued most highly by Hong Kong producers. Sir Run Run Shaw, the legendary studio chief, once defined the parameters of his artistic aspirations by noting that “the cinema offers air-conditioned darkness.” (His best films, Shaw added, have been “the ones that made the most money.”) It didn’t take Woo very long to discover that, to get ahead, he would have to go along.

Woo proved to be so industrious at Shaw Brothers that he was given the relatively prestigious job of assistant director to a filmmaker he greatly admired, Zhang Che, the grand master of “martial chivalry” epics. The stoic, spiffily dressed swordsman of Zhang Che’s “Golden Swallow” (1968) has been viewed as a forerunner of the noble rogues played by Chow Yun-Fat in “A Better Tomorrow” and “The Killer.” Woo readily acknowledges that he was heavily influenced by his former boss.

“Not so much in (Zhang Che’s) way of portraying violence,” Woo said at the Hong Kong Film Festival premiere of ‘A Better Tomorrow,” “but in his unrestrained way of writing emotions and chivalry. Chinese cinema has always been too low-keyed. We should be more expressive, put more of ourselves into our films.”

At 26, Woo was in a position to back his words with deeds. By the standards of Hong Kong’s patriarchal studio system, his rise could only be described as meteoric.

“First of all,” Woo says, “around this time, most of the directors who were making their first films were in their 40s. Because, in this system, you would have to start out on the bottom. And after 10, 15, maybe 20 years as an assistant director, then you become a director.

“And the film people, they really looked down on intellectuals. They thought if you were an intellectual, you were not good for making films. So when I became a director--because I was young, an intellectual--the people at the studio really gave me a hard time.”

But they also gave him a chance. Golden Harvest, the rival studio founded by former Shaw associate Raymond Chow, picked up Woo’s first effort, an independently financed feature called “The Young Dragons,” even though it had to be substantially re-edited to pass the censors.

(Why? “Too violent,” Woo says, not sounding terribly remorseful.)

Then Golden Harvest hired Woo to direct two ultra-cheap kung-fu quickies in Korea. One of the flicks, known variously as “The Hand of Death,” “Shaolin Men” and “Countdown in Kung-Fu,” is notable for providing Hong Kong action-comedy star Jackie Chan with his first major screen exposure.

During the next decade, Woo made a dozen more films, running the gamut from cartoonish slapstick to Cantonese opera. He was typecast as a director of comedies, and the label stuck even after he moved over to Cinema City studio. After directing a pair of what he called “very cartoon-like” movies on location in Taiwan, Woo vowed to do something completely different.

So, returning to Hong Kong, he made “A Better Tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, back at the warehouse: Key grip Lloyd Moriarity is joking that, to accommodate the fluid camera movements that figure so prominently in Woo’s movie-making, he’s had to lay down “maybe five, six times more dolly track on this show than I’ve ever done before. I would say we’re almost at five miles now.”

Moriarity gestures to the most frequently used of the dollies--dubbed “the Woo-Woo choo-choo” by the crew--and notes the special reinforced plastic shields that have been mounted to protect the camera operators from flying debris and blank bullet casings during the frequent shootouts and blowups. “It’s easier to set that kind of thing up with a stationary camera,” Moriarity says. “But with this movie--with John Woo--the camera is always moving.”

Still, Moriarity isn’t complaining. Woo, he says, is an extremely safety-conscious filmmaker. Just as important, the key grip adds, Woo’s an absolute sweetheart to work for.

“I’ve worked with a lot of directors, and some of them, I don’t know if they don’t know what they’re doing or something, but they’re very tense, and they scream a lot. . . .

“But now, John, he comes on the set every day with a positive attitude. A very nice gentleman. Very thankful to the crew, which not a lot of directors are. He thanks everybody at the end of the night.”

Woo’s low-stress calm appears to have spread like a benign virus throughout the cast and crew. There’s much of the usual joking and wisecracking, but very little of the barely contained, near-the-edge intensity that you often encounter on movie locations.

Jean-Claude Van Damme seems in a particularly relaxed mood, despite a recent bout of scandal-sheet press over his breakup with his wife. He is unfailingly polite as he offers suggestions to an MTV film crew doing a behind-the-scenes report--”Sir,” he says to the cameraman, motioning to a spot near the main action, “you have a better angle from here!”--and apologizes to a bit player who’s supposed to lie corpse-still at his feet. “Oh! I’m very sorry! Did I step on you? No? Oh, good!”

Today, and for the next few days, Van Damme will dash across the warehouse, hotly pursued by the villains who have turned New Orleans into their own private hunting ground. Normally, the bad guys (led by Lance Henriksen) stalk homeless men with military backgrounds, for cruel sport. But in Chance Boudreaux, a hard-luck merchant sailor played by Van Damme, the hunters have found a prey who’s capable of shooting back in the typical two-gun style of a Woo antihero.

“I wanted to work with John Woo,” Van Damme says in the inner sanctum of his trailer, “because I knew this guy was good for me, because he has a new type of action, where he makes the hero look very good. Like those black-and-white French movies with Alain Delon.”

Screenwriter Chuck Pfarrer, an ex-commando who based his “Navy SEALS” script on personal experience, admits that he borrowed a few pages from the oft-filmed short story “The Most Dangerous Game” for “Hard Target.” He’s on the set at Woo’s invitation, offering rewrites and suggestions and serving as a sounding board for Woo’s own inspirations. “John’s just so confident,” Pfarrer says. “He knows I’m no creative threat to him. And it’s really been wonderful to work that close with a director.”

Flashing a naughty-boy smile, Pfarrer adds: “I had the honor and privilege of being able to show John a new thing to do with a gun that we’re going to do on this film. It’s an old SEAL team trick, about fanning the trigger to make a regular semiautomatic pistol sound like a machine gun. I showed it to him, and John’s face lit up.

“Ha! I didn’t think there was anything you could teach John Woo about gunplay.”

“Hard Target” is one of several projects that were pitched to Woo after “The Killer” started making the rounds of film festivals and Hollywood screening rooms. At one point, there was talk of Woo directing an Americanized “Killer” remake with Denzel Washington and Richard Gere, but, Woo says, “I didn’t want to make the same movie I had already made.” At another point, Woo was called in for meetings for a project that later evolved into 20th Century Fox’s “Rapid Fire.” Most of the other projects that came his way were exploitation movies with more hardware than heart, more bang-bang than brains. Woo wasn’t interested in them either.

“John Woo is a very special man,” Van Damme says. “And I believe that they approached him in the wrong way. He likes very simple people, very straightforward, honest people. He likes to be respected as a person more than anything else.

“He’s a very sensitive guy, very quiet, very smart. And he will never change. He’s too strong.”

Quentin Tarantino, the red-hot young writer-director of the blood-soaked “Reservoir Dogs,” can barely contain himself.

“After I saw ‘A Better Tomorrow, “ he says during an interview at the Montreal World Film Festival, “I went out and bought a long coat, and I got sunglasses, and I walked around for about a week, dressing like Chow Yun-Fat. And to me, that’s the ultimate compliment for an action hero--when you want to dress like the guy.

“And that scene (in “The Killer”) where he goes into the restaurant and blows those guys away--that’s just one of the best stand-up action scenes ever filmed, as far as I’m concerned. John Woo is reinventing the whole genre. The guy is just terrific--he’s just the best one out there right now.”

Producer Jacks was scarcely less impressed when, during his tenure as a Universal Pictures executive, he was given a videotape of “A Better Tomorrow” by film critic David Chute. (Jacks later hired Chute to be the unit publicist for “Hard Target.”)

“I was really struck by a lot of the original business, stuff I had never seen before in an action movie,” Jacks says.

“I’ll tell you the thing that was really interesting to me--the bit where Chow Yun-Fat is going to confront the guys who betrayed his friend. So he’s walking down the hallway in this building where there’s a lot of potted plants all along the way. And every time he passes a potted plant, he puts another gun in the plant. And so he got into the meeting, and of course everything went badly, and he started firing--and on the way out, every time he got to a potted plant, he could grab another loaded gun.

“And I thought, ‘This is really neat!’ I mean, this guy seeded the entire building with guns, just in case he had to get out fast and wouldn’t have time to constantly reload.”

Jacks was impressed once again a few years later when he saw “The Killer” in a special screening at the Sundance Film Festival. (This year at Sundance, Woo’s “Hard-Boiled” will be showcased in a special program on “New Hong Kong Cinema.”) “I thought it was a little over the top,” he says, “but the action was just spectacular.”

So Jacks was favorably disposed when he received a call from Woo’s William Morris agent, who pitched the Hong Kong filmmaker for “Hard Target.”

Jacks thought it was a great idea. But the Universal brass took a little persuading.

“There was this rather long period of talking the studio into it,” Jacks allows. “And I’m not sure why. . . .

“Well, no, I am sure, actually. There’s probably as many people killed in the first scene of ‘Hard-Boiled’ as there probably are in both ‘Die Hards.’ So there is a point where you have to think, ‘This won’t work for American audiences.’ Even if you get an R rating--which I’m not sure you would get--it just won’t work.

“So the studio had to be convinced that I would take full responsibility for this and make sure John doesn’t go too far. On the other hand, though, after I finally got (Universal Chairman) Tom Pollock to look at ‘The Killer,’ he did come back and say, ‘Well, he can direct an action scene, that’s for sure.’ And so, to his credit, he agreed to let John have the shot.”

(Told of Pollock’s pronouncement, Tarantino snapped: “Yeah, he can direct an action scene--and Michelangelo could paint a ceiling!”)

Pressed on the subject, even Van Damme acknowledges that he encouraged Woo to tone things down a notch or two for “Hard Target.”

“You have to be careful with the audience here in America,” Van Damme says. “They like simple movies, not too complicated. And it’s good to bring John down. Because if you see his movies in Hong Kong, like ‘Hard-Boiled’ and ‘The Killer,’ he’s got some good messages, but there’s too much boom-boom-boom, bam-bam-bam, boom-boom-boom!

“And if there’s too much action, the audience here gets bored. They have to feel for the hero first, to get involved with his private life and code. Then, you can go up, and up, and up. Here, in ‘Hard Target,’ it’s nicely paced.”

“Hard Target” is set to wrap this month. After completing post-production, Woo will direct either another Van Damme vehicle, tentatively titled “Shadow of Death,” or a thriller written by Tarantino to co-star Chow Yun-Fat and a yet-unnamed American star. Or, very likely, Woo will do both. If that sounds like the work schedule of a man who doesn’t plan to go home anytime soon, well, it is.

“I still think that I want to make movies again in Hong Kong, someday,” Woo says. “But in the last year, my family--especially my children--they don’t want to stay in Hong Kong anymore. They don’t like Hong Kong; they feel it has too much pollution, that the school system is not fit for them. They would rather study in the States, where they can feel more comfortable, have more freedom.

“And I intend to let them learn more about democracy.”

Woo says that Anne, his wife of 17 years, and their children--two girls and one boy, ages 10 to 15--share his fear that, come 1997, when China reclaims the former British colony, the hammer will come down in Hong Kong. If and when it does, they want to be half a world away, living in Los Angeles.

“When the communists come in,” Woo says, “I’m sure everything will be limited. There will not be much freedom for creativity or speech. So I figured this is the time, since I got the opportunity to work here. I’m not asking to have luxury living. What I’m asking for is to have a creative luxury.”

Woo takes one last drag from his cigarette, then exhales with something not unlike a melancholy sigh. He is seated in a cramped French Quarter restaurant where the po-boy sandwiches are delicious, the waitresses have an uncanny knack of appearing only during lulls in the conversation, and most of the regulars are clustered near a TV set to view a Saints victory on “Monday Night Football.” The hour is late, and Woo has an early start for the next day’s shooting. But he doesn’t seem to care.

“I’m dreaming,” he says, “of making movies in different countries, and making different kinds of friends. For me, to make a good movie and to make a lot of good friends, that’s the most important thing in my life. I would like to share the happiness or the sadness, the beauty or the ugly, with all different kinds of people, through the movies. To learn more about our world, and get a lot of friendships, a lot of great memories.

“You can see, I’m still a dreamer. In my dreams, everything is good . . . there is a better place, there is a better world. In my dreams, there is no enemy. Like Jesus is saying: Love your enemy. Love your neighbor. Love everyone.”

Of course, there appears to be a distinct lack of love in the bloody melodramatics of “Hard Target.” So far, Jacks is happy with what’s he seen, though “we’ve probably killed about five or 10 more people than I would have preferred.”

“What we’re doing here,” says screenwriter Pfarrer, “is making an art movie with a body count. You know, I would hate to be another director with another buddy-action movie out next summer. Because, let me tell you--there’s a new sheriff in town.”