John Woo celebrates a comeback with “The Killer” – and maybe a musical?

Suffering from Olympic withdrawal? Chin up. The Paris Games may be over, but there’s an Olympic-level event here: an assassin’s triathlon, complete with guns, motorcycles, and chases all over the French capital.

The Hong Kong master, considered by many to be one of the greatest action directors, makes a comeback of sorts after a 20-year absence from Hollywood with The Killer, a remake of arguably his best film and his second film in nine months.

“I was so happy to be shooting in Paris,” Woo told the Chronicle in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles. “I’ve admired French crime films for a long time, so I think this film is a tribute to the old French films.”

In fact, behind Woo during the interview there was a framed poster of the 1963 thriller “L’Aîné des Ferchaux” (“Magnet of Destiny”), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and directed by his favorite director, Jean-Pierre Melville.

In Woo’s original film, The Killer (1989), Chow Yun-fat played a mafia assassin who accidentally blinds a pretty lounge singer (Sally Yeh) during a murder attempt. He is ordered to kill her because she is a witness, but instead he protects her and teams up with a Hong Kong police officer (Danny Lee) to take down the mafia.

In the new version – not to be confused with David Fincher’s Netflix film “The Killer,” released last year – the character Chow is a woman, played by British actress Nathalie Emmanuel of “Game of Thrones” and the “Fast and the Furious” franchise. The police officer is French actor Omar Sy, star of the Netflix series “Lupin,” with American actress Diana Silvers (“Space Force”) as the singer and Sam Worthington (the “Avatar” films) as the villain. Woo’s daughter Angeles Woo appears as a rival assassin.

It features many of Woo’s trademark fetishes: flying pigeons, religious imagery (the filmmaker is a long-time practicing Lutheran), slow-motion gunfights and an epic feel. He invented the genre that became known as heroic bloodshed (the BBC once called Woo the “Mozart of chaos”).

“John is very romantic with the camera,” Emmanuel told the Chronicle in a separate video interview from Los Angeles. “We do these big action sequences, but it’s really like a kind of tango with the movement of the camera. It’s very much like a dance choreography and has a romantic energy. I liked that.”

“And the way he introduces characters or shows that point of view is very, very, very, very cool.”

Woo said his intention was to enable the actors and crew to do their best work, whether it was an action or dialogue scene.

“I shoot everything with emotion – the most important thing is how I feel,” he said. “Every scene has to have meaning and the actors look for that. Nathalie is very different (in ‘The Killer’) from her other films and she and Omar preferred to do as many stunts as possible themselves. They were very dedicated and I am so grateful.”

Emmanuel, who will soon be seen in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, also had by far the most scenes with pigeons; her character hangs out in an abandoned church where the pigeons live.

“They didn’t always fly where you wanted them to and they didn’t always do what you wanted,” she said, “but it was great! They’re a John Woo trademark and that just kept making me feel cool throughout the entire shoot.”

Woo began his career in the 1970s producing wuxia, martial arts and chivalric films set in ancient China before revolutionizing the action genre in the 1980s with a series of violent, modern-day epics starring Chow, including “A Better Tomorrow,” “Once a Thief,” “The Killer,” “A Bullet in the Head” and “Hard Boiled.”

Hollywood took notice and he spent 10 years in America, where he shot action classics such as the Jean-Claude Van Damme film “Hard Target,” the Nicolas Cage-John Travolta thriller “Face/Off,” and “Mission Impossible 2,” starring Tom Cruise.

But after two consecutive box office flops – the underrated World War II code-breaking film “Windtalkers” and the Ben Affleck thriller “Paycheck” – Woo returned to Asia. By then, the center of filmmaking had already shifted from Hong Kong to mainland China, where he returned to the wuxia genre.

Still, he said he always felt there was work to be done in Hollywood. He returned to make “Silent Night,” a highly unusual experiment in dialogue-free action, which was released in December, and “The Killer” came soon after.

Woo, 77, doesn’t know how many more films he will make, but says he is working on several projects, including a Western and a remake of Melville’s 1970 gangster film “Le Cercle rouge.”

He also has a dream project: “I want to do a musical,” says Woo, laughing.

“Like an old French musical, like ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.'”

Trading weapons for umbrellas – why not? As long as there are pigeons.

Contact G. Allen Johnson: [email protected]