The man himself John Woo was born on May 1st 1946, in Guangzhou, Republic of China, during the Chinese Civil War into a Christian family, they unfortunetly faced lots of persecution after the communist revolution and he and his family would have to flee to Hong Kong when he was only five years of age. Due to this sudden move they had been forced to live in extremely poor and high crime slums. His father was suffering from tuberculosis and his mother was a laborer on a construction site, he was always a very shy boy and he recalls in an interview always being beaten up whenever he would go out and he overall felt like the whole world was against him, that he was just meant to live like this. That is until he found a great passion for film making, saying that he fell in love with movies from the French New Wave, he eventually got a job as a script supervisor at Cathay Studios in 1969, he would than become an assistant director at Shaw Studios in 1971, and just to throw in a little fun fact he actually never attended film school. Woo ended up making lots of kung-fu films, some even being choreographed by Jackie Chan although they were unfortunately not very profitable for him, he also never really got creative control with the movies he worked on and he found himself sort of stuck. Although he never gave up hope and eventually enough money came through to make a project that he had been wanting to pursue for the longest time and that film was A Better Tomorrow (1986) an emotional drama about two brothers (one a cop, one a criminal) and was a huge stepping stone for the genre known as "Heroic Bloodshed" a genre revolving around lots of stylized action sequences and dramatic themes, oh and as I mentioned earlier brotherhood, duty, honor, redemption, violence oh and last but most definetely not least doves, lots and lots of doves.