ABSTRACT
Johnnie (or ‘Johnny’) To is the most prominent Hong Kong film director/ producer not to have tried his luck in Hollywood, and I speculate that with his penchant for action genre filmmaking, given the right conditions – with the kind of freedom and control allowed John Woo, for example – he could make the transition very successfully. (A negative example would be Tsui Hark who perhaps did not choose his Hollywood projects wisely, and who seemed to have taken the title of Knock Off literally in his approach to making films in America.) To has certainly given the prospect of working in the United States a lot of thought. During his visit to Montreal in 1999 he talked of making the move, but only on his own terms, where he would be able work similarly to the way he does in Hong Kong – a very unlikely prospect.
