Seven Homeless Years, Then Hong Kong's Action Maestro

John Woo grew up in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s in a very poor family. In a 1997 interview reported by the South China Morning Post, he recalled that the family was homeless for seven years. They lived in a rough neighbourhood among gangsters, security guards and gamblers. As a boy he sometimes got into fights and was beaten up.

He credited his parents with giving him a decent start despite those conditions. In his words, he had good parents who taught him to live with dignity.

Outside the street, he found refuge in popular culture. He was devoted to comic books, American Westerns and musicals, and he admired the filmmakers Jean-Pierre Melville and Sam Peckinpah. Those enthusiasms fed into the style of the action films that made his name. The article does not say much about the early years of his film career.

At the time of the interview he was working in Hollywood. Universal required him to storyboard Hard Target, something he does not normally do, and to submit designs so that the studio could set the budget. He said he planned to return to Hong Kong after gaining more experience in America, because he missed its talent and crews.

In 1997 he was preparing the release of Face/Off, his third American film. The picture the article gives is of a director who came from years without a home and a rough childhood to work at the centre of the American film industry while still thinking of Hong Kong as home.