The Killer was Hong Kong director John Woo’s action masterpiece and is possibly one the greatest actioner you’ve never seen. Made in 1989 it starred Chow Yung fat as a disillusioned assassin who accepts one last hit in hopes of using his earnings to restore vision to a singer he accidentally blinded. It is an astonishing and bravura piece of film making that saw Woo coaxed to Hollywood where he fared less well with Mission Impossible 2. Inevitably there’s been talk of The Killer remake and one has finally started with Woo himself at the helm.
The films producer Charles Roven currently promoting ‘Oppenheimer’ was about it and said, ‘I was also shooting a wonderful movie in Paris. John Woo is remaking his own movie, The Killer, which was one of his seminal Hong Kong movies that he made in 1989. So we had to shut that down because we lost all of our SAG actors, and of course, we honored that. We’ve got somewhere between 10 and 18 days left, so that was obviously very disappointing.‘
The Producer went on to say, ‘Well, he (Woo) was motivated by the Jean-Pierre Melville new wave gangster movies that Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon starred in, and those were obviously shot in Paris. And so he just became motivated about doing an homage to The Killer in Paris because he was inspired by those movies. He also came up with an idea to make it fresh. In the original Killer, the great Chinese male actor Chow Yun-fat played the killer, but the killer in this movie is played by Nathalie Emmanuel. And by changing the dynamic to a woman, the storyline became quite different. So, while it’s an homage to his movie, it’s definitely not a remake. There’s a lot of original content in it that’s different from the first movie.’
Expectations are that we should see The Killer remake sometime late 2024
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