Blaze Fruit is a cooking ingredient that can be used in numerous meals in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. It’s one of the most difficult ingredients to acquire because the plant from which the Blaze Fruit grows is an absolute menace that can send you flying.
John Woo on returning to Hollywood at 77 and trying ‘to do it a bit different’
28.11.2023 - 19:21 / polygon.com / Christmas Eve
It’s been a long road back to Hollywood for John Woo. His last American movie was the Ben Affleck-led sci-fi movie Paycheck, a commercial success largely rejected by critics. That was 20 whole years ago. In 2023, though, one of action movies’ greatest minds has returned stateside with Silent Night, a largely dialogue-free revenge thriller that sees the legendary director reinventing his style once again.
Woo hasn’t been gone since Paycheck, just gone from Hollywood and working in China. His output in that time has included a few historical dramas (highlighted by the epic two-part Red Cliff) and the action thriller Manhunt. While there have been some gems in there, Woo told Polygon that since Paycheck, he hasn’t been happy with the limited projects available to him.
“In China, all I could do [were] historical movies,” Woo says. “In America, since I’d been established as a big-budget movie director, there’s a lot of cool scripts of little productions [I want to direct], but they’ll never come to me. So I was so frustrated, and I was so limited. All I could do was a big commercial action movie. I never got a real script.”
Woo has been waiting for the right project for his next step, and he found it in Silent Night. Robert Archer Lynn’s script featured no dialogue, which immediately appealed to Woo as a challenge, letting him reinvent the way he thinks of his movies. Woo grew up as a fan of silent cinema, especially Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. But he told Polygon he intentionally avoided using those moves as reference points in favor of relying on his instincts.
The movie’s gimmick provided some limitations and obstacles, but Woo was most interested in trying to make an action movie that felt more grounded than the melodramatic, highly stylized action he is known for.
“[It was good] to try something new,” Woo says. “I did a really big change [to] my style. It doesn’t look like much of a Hollywood movie. All the action sequences, I brought a more realistic [approach]. And some of the action is not over the top, and all the action works for the character and the human story.”
That story follows Brian Godluck (Joel Kinnaman), a father whose young son is killed on Christmas Eve, an innocent bystander to a drive-by shooting by local gang members. Chasing down the culprits, Brian is shot in the throat, losing his ability to speak. A year (and a training montage) later, Brian is ready to enact vengeance.
While Woo is trying a different, more grounded approach for Silent Night, his connection to the emotional elements of his stories is still very present. Brian’s wife, Saya (Catalina Sandino Moreno), also grieves the loss of their son, and Woo’s camera (and the movie’s silence) gives that pain focus. Brian
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