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Driven by changes in the political landscape, Hong Kong director John Woo retrains his sights on New Orleans and the American market.
In a production screening room in a New Orleans hotel, the lights dim as dailies for the film Hard Target begin. Actors Lance Henriksen, Arnold Vosloo and their onscreen henchmen are making an entrance in slow motion. Shot with a wide-angle lens from extremely low angles, the actors stride f earsomely across the screen, their long duster coats and hair rippling in a dream-like breeze. Thanks to fluid camera movement and intricately devised points of view, the footage, even in its rough form, flows smoothly. The images have a surreal, dreamlike quality, as if time has stopped to pay homage to this mythical moment.
In the crowded screening room, yips and hoots of appreciation give way to a concentrated silence. Despite their exhaustion from 12 hours of shooting, the tired crew members fall under the spell of the images. John Woo, the director responsible for the flamboyant work on the screen, sits unobtrusively in the back, watching intently with director of photography Russell Carpenter.
The next day, in a vast warehouse where the film's finale is being shot, fog billows from machines interspersed among dozens of tattered Mardi Gras floats. Surveying the scene, the assistant director shouts "Fire in the hole," prompting crew members to reach for their earplugs. The film's star, Jean-Claude Van Damme, assumes a combat crouch and lunges backwards across the open floor, guns blazing from each hand as his shoulders propel a heavy painters' utility cart that deflects enemy bullets. Flames rise ominously from burning oil drums, and sparks shower from explosions. Dolly tracks criss-cross the set on three sides like a private railway, as camera operators in plastic face shields huddle for protection behind a sheet of Lexan bracketed to the matte box.
The shot ends in just a few seconds, and an army of technicians rush forward to cut the gas Unes to the fires and to tend to Van Damme, the prop guns, and the cameras. Hard Target is in its 47th day of shooting, and the crew operates with the crack precision of an Indianapolis 500 pit crew. The abundance of equipment and...