| Bullet in the Head | |
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| Directed by | John Woo |
| Produced by | John Woo |
| Written by | John Woo Patrick Leung Janet Chun |
| Starring | Tony Leung Jacky Cheung Waise Lee Simon Yam |
| Music by | James Wong Romeo Díaz |
| Cinematography | Wilson Chan Horace Wong Ardy Lam Somchai Kittikun |
| Editing by | John Woo David Wu Dai-Wai |
| Distributed by |  Golden Princess Film Production Co. Ltd. |
| Release date(s) |  August 17, 1990 |
| Running time | 136 mins. |
| Country | Hong Kong |
| Language | Cantonese English French Vietnamese |
| Budget | App. $3,500,000 |
| Gross revenue | HK$8,545,123.00 |
Bullet in the Head (simplified Chinese: 喋血街头; traditional Chinese: 喋血街頭) is a 1990 Hong Kong action-drama-war film co-written, produced and directed by John Woo.
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Bullet in the Head portrays the distressing escapades of several friends cajoled, through a random act of violence, into sacrificing the idyllic innocence of youth to fanaticism and injustice of the Vietnam war.
In 1967, on the way to the wedding of a friend, a young man is accosted by a local gang member. Later, the three friends administer justice, in the process of which the gang member is killed, so they leave Hong Kong to avoid the police and the gang. They run black market supplies to Saigon and get embroiled in the war, being arrested as Viet Cong, then later captured by the Viet Cong, and find that their friendship is tested to the limits as they try to escape.
Bullet in the Head was originally planned to be a prequel to A Better Tomorrow but a falling out between Woo and producer Tsui Hark prevented this from happening. Woo reworked the script into what it is today, and Tsui made his own prequel, A Better Tomorrow III. After the breakup with his partnership with Tsui, Woo was having trouble finding backing for his films; stories have circulated that Tsui (one of the most powerful men in Hong Kong cinema) said Woo was hard to work with, and this led to his virtual blacklisting. At any rate, Woo financed almost all of the cost of the movie out of his own pocket.
Woo rewrote much of the script to incorporate his reaction to the 1989 incident in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Woo has described this project as his equivalent of Apocalypse Now, as it had the same exhausting and draining effect on him as that film had on Francis Ford Coppola. The cost of the film was around US$3.5 million, the highest budget for a Hong Kong film at the time. Like Woo's previous film, The Killer, this film did not do well in Hong Kong because audiences didn't like the allusions to the Tiananmen Square protests during the riot scenes. Woo was deeply affected by the shootings and felt badly that he touched such a raw nerve in people, but at the same time he felt the Chinese people should react and not hide from it.
The Vietnam exteriors were shot in Thailand, and the interiors were shot in Hong Kong at the Cinema City Studio. It was deemed too expensive to shoot the nightclub shootout in Thailand. The helicopter footage used in the camp raid was a mixture of stock footage from the Vietnam War, as well as scenes from another Vietnam film.
During the filming of some of the riot sequences, things got so chaotic on the set that John Woo panicked and ran into several shots. Once, he actually ran into an explosion, which caused large cuts on his head. Simon Yam actually burnt his face during the POW camp sequence.
Woo's original cut of the film ran over three hours long. Golden Princess demanded that Woo cut the film down to a commercially viable length; however, the original theatrical version still remained massively edited from Woo's final cut. As a result, the film exists in many different cuts due to local/market censorship.
The longest version available now is the 2 disc-set edition by Joy Sales runtime:135mins.
The longer 136min version was screened at a festival and was released on a Bootleg VHS.
A Directors Cut lasting 136mins screened at some festivals.Has illegally ended up releasing on a bootleg VHS:
Another 135min version released on DVD has been sold to the public legally. It is distributed by Joy Sales; this disc has seamless branching which can be shown in its Theatrical Version, Alternate Ending version and the Festival Print version but the deleted scenes maintain a blue tint (possibly from the chemicals of the film reacting badly) and also frame jumping (film preservation done too late by the director himself).
In Hong Kong, the film grossed HK$8,545,123 - a disaster when considering its large budget.[1] John Woo is quoted in Jeff Yang's book Once Upon a Time in China as saying that Tsui Hark's A Better Tomorrow III was rushed into theatres to beat Bullet in the Head at the box office.
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