JOHN WOO BIOGRAPHY

JOHN WOO
Real name: Wu Yu-sen
Cantonese name: Ng Yu-sum
Date of Birth (location): 1946, Guangzhou (=Canton) Guangdong Province, China (Mainland)

Young John Woo 1946-1969

Canton is near Hong Kong, only 111 km (69 miles) to north-west from Hong Kong.  John Woo was born in Southern Mainland China in 1946, as a son of a philosopher. Their family found life under the Communists intolerable, so they moved to Hong Kong in 1951, when John was just 3 yrs old. After big fire of 1953 they became homeless and so they lived on the streets for a year. After that they lived in a slum. Their family was very poor, and when John was very sick child, they had to spend a lot money to his medical care and just to keep him alive. As a philosopher, Woo's father did not get a job in Hong Kong. He became very sick with tuberculosis and stayed in hospital for ten years. After that JW's mother had to take care of the whole family alone, doing hard work on construction sites, manual labour. They even coundn't afford to send John and his brother to school, but they were lucky; an American family sent them some money through the Church. So John entered into Lutherian school at the age of nine.

He was educated at Matteo Ricci College and was an actor/ member of the Chinese Student Weekly's Theatre Company. In lieu of film school, Woo sought entry-level positions in the flourishing Hong Kong film industry, which was deep into its post-Bruce Lee kung fu period. There he was given a oppotunity to direct some of the school's plays. For sure it gave good experience for his later career. As a young man, after the help he had got from the Church, JW wanted to be priest, to try and help out other people and to repay what he was given to.

JW's father died, when John was 16 yrs.
John about his father: "He loved me very much and taught me a lot of philosophy and Chinese culture, how to live with dignity, but he wanted me to be realistic. He was a old-fashioned scholar, very traditional and I was a rebel. I was fascinated by James Dean, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, I liked anything he hadn't see´n before."
By this time, the future director was regularly skipping school to visit libraries, museum and cinemas, andendlessly rewatch films of Truffaut, Antioni, Bergman, Kurosawa and his 'life-long idol' Jean-Pierre Melville.

John Woo: "In the sixties, there was no film schools in Hong Kong. My family was poor, especially after my father died, my mother couldn't afford to send me to school anymore. He needed to find a job and a way to study cinema as well) There was a newspaper called "The Chinese Student Weekly". The boss was a very kind man who made the paper's offices available as a sort of art centre. There was several sections of poetry, art, philosophy, and I met a group of young people who loved film. The newspaper rented art films for us to watch and we discussed them. Also I went to big libraries and book stores and stole film books. That's how I learned film theory."

As JW saw all those Western classics, he became more and more unsatistificed with domestic product. ("At that time Hong Kong movies were so bad. And I thought I could make better ones") Between 1968-1970 he made several experimental 8mm and 16mm shorts (Most of which are now lost), and supplemented his meagre income with casual work on professional shoots. At that time he fell on 'the new American cinema' an specifically the work of Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick.

 

Biography

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