John Woo on returning to Hollywood at 77 and trying ‘to do it a bit different’
It’s been a long road back to Hollywood for John Woo. His last American movie was the Ben Affleck-led sci-fi movie Paycheck, a commercial success largely rejected by critics. That was 20 whole years ago. In 2023, though, one of action movies’ greatest minds has returned stateside with Silent Night, a largely dialogue-free revenge thriller that sees the legendary director reinventing his style once again.
Woo hasn’t been gone since Paycheck, just gone from Hollywood and working in China. His output in that time has included a few historical dramas (highlighted by the epic two-part Red Cliff) and the action thriller Manhunt. While there have been some gems in there, Woo told Polygon that since Paycheck, he hasn’t been happy with the limited projects available to him.
“In China, all I could do [were] historical movies,” Woo says. “In America, since I’d been established as a big-budget movie director, there’s a lot of cool scripts of little productions [I want to direct], but they’ll never come to me. So I was so frustrated, and I was so limited. All I could do was a big commercial action movie. I never got a real script.”
Woo has been waiting for the right project for his next step, and he found it in Silent Night. Robert Archer Lynn’s script featured no dialogue, which immediately appealed to Woo as a challenge, letting him reinvent the way he thinks of his movies. Woo grew up as a fan of silent cinema, especially Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. But he told Polygon he intentionally avoided using those moves as reference points in favor of relying on his instincts.
The movie’s gimmick provided some limitations and obstacles, but Woo was most interested in trying to make an action movie that felt more grounded than the
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