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What they said about The Killer: director John Woo and stars Chow Yun-fat and Sally Yeh on shooting the classic Hong Kong action movie
- The Killer put John Woo on the international stage and introduced Chow Yun-fat as an action hero
- The stars, director and producer talk about how the film was cast, preparing for scenes and the dangers during shooting
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Although The Killer made John Woo Yu-sum famous internationally, he was already a well-regarded director in Hong Kong – in fact, as a 1989 Post interview with Gary Chan noted, Woo was already a star filmmaker three times over.
“The popular action-packed comedy format, the resurgence of Cantonese Opera films [due to the 1977 hit Princess Chang-ping] and, most recently, the run of gangster-cop productions [after the success of 1986’s A Better Tomorrow] can all be put down to the local filmmaker, who started each craze with an innovative picture that captured the imagination of the audience and proved a box-office hit,” wrote Chan.
The Killer, which was inspired by Japanese director Teruo Ishii’s 1964 film An Outlaw, features Chow Yun-fat as a hitman who accidentally blinds nightclub singer Sally Yeh Chian-wen while carrying out a final kill before retirement. The hitman falls in love with her, and takes one last job to pay for her medical treatment.
But then the hitman himself becomes a target. Much of the film is taken up with the friendship that the hitman develops with a police officer (played by Danny Lee Sau-yin) who is pursuing him – an examination of the idea of brotherhood that results from Woo’s time as assistant director to martial arts legend Chang Cheh.
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