John Woo

John Woo
John Woo attending the 2005 Cannes Film Festival
Background information
Chinese name	吳宇森 (traditional)
Chinese name	吴宇森 (simplified)
Pinyin	Wú Yǔ Sēn (Mandarin)
Jyutping	Ng4 Jyu5 Sam1 (Cantonese)
Origin	Hong Kong
Born	(1946-05-01) 1 May 1946 (age 70) Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China
Occupation	Film director, producer, screenwriter, editor
Spouse(s)	Annie Woo
Awards Hong Kong Film Awards Best Picture 1986 A Better Tomorrow Best Director 1989 The Killer Best Film Editing 1990 Bullet in the Head 1992 Hard-Boiled Other awards Saturn Award for Best Direction 1997 Face/Off

John Woo SBS (Ng Yu-Sum; born 1 May 1946) is a Chinese-born Hong Kong film director, writer, and producer. He is considered a major influence on the action genre, known for his highly chaotic action sequences, Mexican standoffs, and frequent use of slow motion. Woo has directed several notable Hong Kong action films, among them, A Better Tomorrow (1986), The Killer (1989), Hard Boiled (1992), and Red Cliff (2008/2009).

His Hollywood films include the action films Hard Target (1993) and Broken Arrow (1996), the sci-fi action thriller Face/Off (1997) and the action spy film Mission: Impossible II (2000). He also created the comic series Seven Brothers, published by Virgin Comics. Woo cites his three favorite films as David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï.

Woo was born Wu Yu-Seng (Ng Yu-Sum in Cantonese) in Guangzhou, China, amidst the chaos of the Chinese Civil War at the end of October, 1946. Because of school age restrictions, his mother changed his birth date to 22 September 1948, which is what remains on his passport. The Christian Woo family, faced with persecution during Mao Zedong's early anti-bourgeois purges after the communist revolution in China, fled to Hong Kong when he was five.