John Woo Is the Greatest Director of Our Time
By Jill McKay
Published: April 1, 2009
When you think of good directors, you undoubtedly think of Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and M. Night Shyamalan. These three represent the epitome of quality film making: symbolism, fascinating narrative arcs, and super surprising twist endings. But there’s another, often overlooked director whose skills equal and arguably surpass those of these great film makers. His name, of course, is John Woo.
I remember when Mission: Impossible 2 came out I’d gone to the theater to see 28 Days starring the always fabulous Sandra Bullock, but it was sold out so I decided to see the new Tom Cruise movie instead. I bought an extra box of Jujubes to cheer myself up and prepared myself for two hours of Tom Cruise’s gross long hair. But to my surprise, Tom’s greasy hair looked great in slow motion, which is a good thing because this movie was almost entirely slow motion. His hair looked particularly good during the car chase between him and his female costar, which ended when her car spun out of control and, in order to save her from going off a cliff, Tom crashed his car into the side of hers and the two cars spun in slow motion circles together while Tom and the woman looked into each other’s eyes and tango music played on the soundtrack. Slow motion cars tangoing? I was sold!
John Woo is the master of slow motion: slow motion greasy hair, slow motion trench coats, slow motion guns, guns, and more guns. You want slow motion? John Woo’s on it. It’s thanks to Woo’s use of slow motion that I learned about a property of physics that I’d never known. Apparently if you’re on a beach and a bad guy’s about to shoot you but you’re defenseless because you’ve dropped your gun in the sand, you can kick the gunand it will fly straight up into the air in slow motion so that you can grab it and shoot the bad guy. Maybe scientists should take a cue from John Woo and use more slow motion in their studies.
Biologists, especially, would benefit from using John Woo’s slow motion technique. Scientists who study birds wouldn’t even have to conduct their own studies: they could just watch John Woo’s movies to study the flight patterns of white doves flying in front of the camera right before a tense slow motion gun battle.
John Woo’s craft is clearly on display in his best movie ever, Face/Off. It takes a certain kind of director to dare to use two of today’s most talented actors, the masterful John Travolta and the incredible Nicolas Cage. At the end of the movie, these two realistic and multi-dimensional characters, having switched faces with each other, are engaged in a fierce slow motion gun battle when they end up on opposite sides of a mirrored wall. After several tense slow motion moments, the two men swoosh around in slow motion and shoot at their reflections in the mirror, which reflect back not their own faces, but the faces of their enemies. Simply incredible. John Woo will undoubtedly be forever remembered as the world’s greatest director of slow motion movies.