John Woo on making the dialogue-free ultraviolent Christmas movie 'Silent Night' — and why Tom Cruise is 'crazy ... but in a good way'

John Woo hasn’t made an American film in 20 years, since the 2003 Ben Affleck-headlined Paycheck —which is surprising considering the run of stateside success the legendary Hong Kong director had with such action favorites as 1997’s Face/Off and 2000’s Mission: Impossible II.

After that long hiatus, Woo has finally returned to Hollywood with Silent Night. The title not only celebrates the holiday setting of the film, but is also quite literal.

The thriller, starring Joel Kinnaman as a grieving father who plots the demise (read: extremely violent deaths) of the entire Los Angeles gang responsible for the Christmas Eve drive-by shooting that claimed the life of his young son, is told entirely without dialogue.

“I got excited about it because since [the characters] have no dialogue, it means [it would showcase] more of the director's work,” says Woo, 77, who established his bona fides with such high-powered classes as A Better Tomorrow (1986), The Killer (1989), Bullet in the Head (1990) and Hard Boiled (1992). “I never liked long dialogue. I liked Steve McQueen movies.

“But this could allow me to use more visual [storytelling]. It is a tragic story, [this] innocent kid that got killed by the gangster. I think it could happen to any family, to anyone, so it shouldn’t be pretty fancy and too over-the-top action. So [I wanted to] make the audience feel it. It’s a real thing. … And make the audience get a much more close encounter with the actors to feel with them and to enjoy the great performances.”

That starts with Kinnaman, the Suicide Squad and The Killing actor whose character, Brian Godluck, is rendered speechless early in the film, after taking a bullet to the throat. His visceral performance includes a full-body transformation. At the outset, Godluck sports a rail-thin physique before gradually adding more and more muscle as he spends a year meticulously plotting revenge for the following yuletide.

“When I met him, honestly, I [had] only seen one of his movies,” Woo says. “But when I met him in person, I found he looks so real. He’s a real man, and he’s not a kind of a superhero. He’s not that type. … [The character] is an ordinary man, then something happened, something tragic happened his family, so he got so much pain. … So he had to train himself, learning how to fight and learning how to use guns. But I think [Joel] is a real actor and he is so smart.”

That’s high praise coming from Woo, who has worked with a long list of top action stars, both in Hong Kong and Hollywood.

Asked if he has had a favorite, the filmmaker doesn’t hesitate before naming his two stars of The Killer, Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee, and Tom Cruise, who has gained a reputation for attempting increasingly dangerous stunts as he ages, particularly in the Mission: Impossible movies.

“He’s crazy,” Woo laughs of his Mission: Impossible II star. “But in a good way.

“He’s always trying to take a risk, [he] always like to take a challenge. But he always made me worry while working with him. I said, ‘It is so dangerous.’ I always ask him, ‘Why don't you use a stunt double? The audience won’t find out. There are a lot of shots where we can use the double.’ He said, ‘No, no.’ He wanted to do everything. He said the audience could tell which shot is himself, which shot is a double, even [when] he’s shot from behind him because they will have a different body movement. The audience got used to his body movement. So I had a great time working with him.”

Silent Night is now in theaters.