He is known for his highly chaotic "bullet ballet"[3][4] action sequences, stylized imagery, Mexican standoffs, frequent use of slow motion and allusions to wuxia, film noir and Western cinema.

Hard Target (1993), starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, was his first American directorial debut, and the first major Hollywood film made by a Chinese director.

His first Chinese-language feature since Hard Boiled (1992) was the internationally co-produced Red Cliff (2008-2009),[5][7] which broke the Chinese box office record previously held by Titanic in mainland China.

[9] Woo was born as Wu Yu-seng (Ng Yu-sum in Cantonese) on 22 September 1946, in Guangzhou, China, amidst the chaotic Chinese Civil War.

The Woo family, who were Protestant Christians, faced persecution during Mao Zedong's early anti-bourgeois purges after the communist revolution in China, and fled to Hong Kong when he was five.

[10] Charitable donations from disaster relief efforts enabled the family to relocate; however, violent crime had by then become commonplace in Hong Kong housing projects.

[14] 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.

[16] The same year, he watched Bruce Lee's The Big Boss, which left a strong impression on him due to how different it was from earlier martial arts films.

He later had success as a comedy director with Money Crazy (發錢寒, Fā qián hàn) (1977), starring Hong Kong comedian Ricky Hui and Richard Ng.

It was during this period of self-imposed exile that director/producer Tsui Hark provided the funding for Woo to film a longtime pet project, A Better Tomorrow (1986).

[22] An émigré in 1993, the director experienced difficulty in cultural adjustment while contracted with Universal Studios to direct Jean-Claude Van Damme in Hard Target.

Like other foreign national film directors confronted with the Hollywood environment, Woo was unaccustomed to pervasive management concerns over matters such as limitations on violence and completion schedules.

Reluctant to pursue projects which would necessarily entail front-office controls, the director cautiously rejected the script for Face/Off several times until it was rewritten to suit him.

A complex story of adversaries—each of whom surgically alters their identity—law enforcement agent John Travolta and terrorist Nicolas Cage play a cat-and-mouse game, trapped in each other's outward appearance.

That same year, Woo served as executive producer and action choreographer on Antoine Fuqua's directorial debut The Replacement Killers, which featured Chow Yun-Fat's first international starring role.

[24] Woo made two additional films in Hollywood: Windtalkers (2002) and Paycheck (2003), both of which fared poorly at the box office and were summarily dismissed by critics.

[25] In 2008, Woo returned to Asian cinema with the completion of the two-part epic war film Red Cliff, based on a historical battle from Records of the Three Kingdoms.

[30][31][28] Following another hiatus, Woo returned to Hollywood to direct the action thriller Silent Night, where a normal father heads into the underworld to avenge his young son's death.

Woo has previously tried to get musical projects in production,[40] and shares a love of French cinema and Jaques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with the Mael brothers.

Reports indicated that Woo might be working on another World War II film, this time about the American Volunteer Group, or the Flying Tigers.

The movie was tentatively titled "Flying Tiger Heroes" and Woo is reported as saying it will feature "The most spectacular aerial battle scenes ever seen in Chinese cinema."

[5] His three favorite films are David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï.