Last year, Peacock revealed that it was remaking the seminal Hong Kong action classic The Killer — and that the film’s original director, John Woo, was returning to update his own work. But we’ve learned a bit more about the production — which had almost finished shooting when the actors’ strike began.
The new details come from producer Charles Roven, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. (Roven also produced Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.) Roven was discussing his upcoming projects and specifically mentioned The Killer, which he described as a “wonderful movie.”
Roven also revealed that the new Killer was being shot in Paris, and that it stars Nathalie Emmanuel — best known as Missandei on Game of Thrones and as computer hacker Ramsey in the Fast & Furious franchise — in the title role originated in the 1989 film by Chow Yun-fat.
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Roven also explained why Woo wanted to take the rare (but not totally unprecedented) step of remaking his own movie:
Well, he was motivated by the Jean-Pierre Melville New Wave gangster movies that Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon starred in, and those were obviously shot in Paris. And so he just became motivated about doing an homage to The Killer in Paris because he was inspired by those movies. He also came up with an idea to make it fresh. In the original Killer, the great Chinese male actor Chow Yun-fat played the killer, but the killer in this movie is played by Nathalie Emmanuel. And by changing the dynamic to a woman, the storyline became quite different. So, while it’s an homage to his movie, it’s definitely not a remake.
In the original The Killer, Chow Yun-Fat plays a hitman who accidentally blinds a young woman, and then feels obligated to restore her sight by paying for an expensive surgery — which he can only afford if he takes one last contract killing. He’s opposed (and later befriended) by a cop, played by Danny Lee. In addition to Emmanuel, the remake (or homage) will also star Omar Sy.
The Killer was in production when the SAG strike began; according to Roven, the new version needs “somewhere between 10 and 18 days” to complete shooting. So once the strike is settled, it shouldn’t be too long before we see this updated action classic.
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