There's a scene in Face/Off, the astonishing new action thriller by Hong Kong auteur-turned-Hollywood big shot John Woo, that distills the essence of the film into a few seconds of screen time. In the midst of a typically ecstatic Woo firefight - plunging bodies and flying bullets in a slow-motion ballet of violence and destruction - a small child crouches, his ears protected from the mayhem by headphones through which Judy Garland is singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow. It's a bravura, hugely theatrical moment, and in most action movies would be seen as either a smartass Tarantino-ish gag, or as cynical fake sentimentality. The difference is that nobody could pull this scene off like John Woo, and for one important reason - he really means it.
"I always try to have some kind of message - like when I use that song I'm trying to get the message of the child's beauty being destroyed by the violence," says Woo. "The children in my movies always represent hope and a new future. I always feel no matter how evil and miserable the world is, there is always hope for the future."
Face/Off stars John Travolta as Sean Archer, an FBI agent driven by bitterness and hatred in his confrontation with archvillain Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage), who had murdered Travolta's child years before. When Troy lapses into a coma, Travolta is persuaded to have his face surgically grafted onto his own in order to find a deadly bomb. The role switch which follows is the kind of star-friendly plotting which gets blockbuster scripts into production, and persuades stars like Travolta and Cage on board.
But what may be unexpected for those unfamiliar with Woo's earlier, Hong Kong films is the sheer level of poetic intensity brought to bear on what is apparently a fairly trashy plot premise.
Face/Off is John Woo's third American film, after the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target and the nuclear blackmail thriller Broken Arrow (which also starred Travolta), but it's the first to bear the unmistakable stamp which brought his Hong Kong films like The Killer and Hard Boiled to the attention of Western audiences at film festivals at the end of the 1980s.
Prior to that, he had spent almost 10 years turning out kung fu films and comedies, before getting the chance to express his own style and themes. Deeply influenced by the French New Wave, Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, Woo demonstrated an exhilarating command of film-making craft in his moral tales of the clash between good and evil.
So would he agree that that this is his first real American movie, after a twomovie apprenticeship? "I agree with that. I was so happy that the studio gave me so much creative freedom, especially the producer, Michael Douglas. They're getting to know me pretty well now, and they like my style, and want me to put that into these films. There's more humanity in this movie. In my films I always like to show something about human nature."
You can see how in other hands Face/Off could have been a slick but unsurprising action flick. Originally conceived as a sci-fi movie, it still bears only a tenuous relationship to life as most of us know it at the end of the 20th century. It's here, in the fantastical, apparently pulpy nature of his films, that Westerners often get Woo's work wrong, seeing it as some form of post-modernist High Camp. Nothing could be further from the truth - as far as John Woo is concerned, he is constructing highly moral fables about the nature of good and evil, and in particular about the nature of heroism.
"You know, I like to shoot everything in a romantic way," he admits. "And especially I like to glorify the behaviour of my hero, so I use slow motion. For me it's not enough for my hero to be able to fight with the bad guys, he must also have a great heart, so that's why I want to show their spiritual side. I like the actors to represent me as well, and I think that John Travolta and I have something in common - we're both quite old fashioned. We feel that people in the past respected each other more."
The idea of heroism in the films owes more to Woo's own Christianity, and to his Chinese roots, than to Hollywood: "I'm a true admirer of Jesus. I think he was a great man and a great philosopher. He sacrificed himself to save our souls. I try to put that spirit into my heroes. The other thing comes from Chinese culture. In our society, the real hero will sacrifice himself for his friend or his country."
Of course, there are adjustments to be made in the transition between China and America. "I've got a lot of respect for the people in Hollywood, I've found them really professional, especially the actors and crew. I still shoot the same way I did in Hong Kong, but with a Hollywood movie I've got to hold back the violence a little bit. The action sequences are played a little more subtly, less exaggerated, but in general I'm still doing my own thing."
Ah, the violence . . . One of the criticisms levelled at Face/Off in the US (where it's been a major critical and commercial success) has been of the level of lovingly-choreographed slaughter and mayhem which runs right through the film. Does he think that there is a cultural divide on this issue between East and West? "I do think so. The great thing about Hong Kong was that we could do whatever we wanted. Our market was so small that we didn't need to worry about these things. People in the Western world are so aware of the violence issue. Whenever anything happens, they just blame a movie. They are afraid that people will be influenced by films, but I don't think so. My kind of action is almost like opera. It's like a musical to me, so I always shoot and cut those scenes to music. My movies are about human nature and emotion, and I frame my action sequences like an opera or a ballet.
"I was raised in a slum, and I've seen so much violence, so many gang fights. Every morning when I woke up, I had to prepare for the chance of being killed. I had to fight very hard to survive. Since I grew up in such a violent world, I always dreamed of justice, and that I could fly away from hell to a better place, where there was no violence, or crime or hatred, and where people would love and care and appreciate each other. I always believed that justice would win, and that's why my heroes are so idealistic."