May 2010 Contest: John Woo Yu-Sen

John Woo Yu-Sen (born 1 May 1946) is a Chinese film director and producer from Hong Kong. Recognized for his stylized films of highly choreographed action sequences, Mexican standoffs, and use of slow-motion, Woo has directed several notable Hong Kong action films, among them, A Better Tomorrow, Hard Boiled, and The Killer. His Hollywood films include Windtalkers, Hard Target, Broken Arrow, Face/Off, and Mission: Impossible 2. He also created the comic series Seven Brothers, published by Virgin Comics. Woo was described by Dave Kehr in The Observer in 2002 as "arguably the most influential director making movies today". Woo cites his three favorite films as David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Melville's Le Samouraï.

Woo was born amidst the chaos of the Chinese Civil War in 1946. The Christian Woo family, faced with persecution during Mao Zedong's early anti-bourgeois-Nationalist purges after the communist takeover of China, fled to Hong Kong when he was five. His father was rendered unable to work by tuberculosis. Impoverished, the Woo family lived in the slums at Shek Kip Mei. Woo went to Concordia Lutheran School and received Christian education. His Christian background shows influences in his films. The family was rendered homeless by the big Shek Kip Mei fire of 1953. Charitable donations from disaster relief efforts enabled the family to relocate, however, violent crime had by then become commonplace in Hong Kong housing projects.

As a young boy, Woo had wanted to be a Christian minister. He later found a passion for movies influenced by the French New Wave especially Jean-Pierre Melville. Woo has said he was shy and had difficulty speaking, but found making movies a way to explore his feelings and thinking and would "use movies as a language".

The local movie theater would prove a haven of retreat. Woo found respite in musical films, such as The Wizard of Oz and American Westerns. He has stated the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made a particular impression on him in his youth: the device of two comrades, each of whom fire pistols from each hand, is a recurrent spectacle later found in his own work.

Woo married Annie Woo Ngau Chun-lung in 1976 and has had three children. He has lived in the United States since 1993.