The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

220 John Woo
That’s one of the perks of this business. You get to grow up and meet
your idols.
Woo: Not only that, but before I came to this world, I didn’t know much
about filmmakers from here. I always felt they were very high—hard to
reach. We can touch their movies, but it was very hard to see and talk to
them in person. Like David Lean is a god to me. Stanley Kubrick, Hitchcock—they
are hard to touch. After Scorsese, it was Oliver Stone—and I
found that they were very easygoing, very easy to talk to, just like friends. It
made me feel so happy, and I know it’s not a dream.
Mean Streets came out in 1973, the year after The Godfather. Can you
tell me a little about the climate this movie came out in?
Woo: Well, at that time, the audience loved The Godfather the most. It had
a great impact. It made the gangster movie a high art form. It was very successful
and made a lot of people, filmmakers, think they could never make a
movie like that. It was so perfect. And also, it made the gang world change. It
made a lot of people feel like all those gangsters were also human beings: they
had family and love and conflict. The cinematography, the design, everything
in the movie was so perfect. It changed the look of our movies. There were a
lot of imitations. It made Hong Kong movies follow his step. The Godfather
became a classic.
After I saw Mean Streets, I still loved both movies, but Mean Streets was
kind of an art film. It didn’t have the wide-open distribution. It was only in
art houses in theaters.
Here, it won all sorts of awards and critics loved it, but few people outside
of New York saw it. How did it play in Hong Kong?
Woo: For the movie lovers and intellectuals, they loved it very, very much.
Francis Coppola became the great master. Martin Scorsese became the new
symbol, the New Wave. We admired him. We admired him just like Jean-
Luc Godard and François Truffaut. He was that kind of director. I must say,
Mean Streets gave us more impact. The movie is so free, so natural.
Why do you think that Americans and the citizens of Hong Kong love
the gangster genre so much?