John Woo's come a long way since his first days in Hollywood. Back then, Woo was just another newly arrived, 99-pound weakling in a Hollywood that couldn't have cared less about his rep as the director of some of the best Hong Kong action movies ever made. Feeling his way through a couple of generically scripted, made-in-America projects and saddled with Jean-Claude Van Damme as his star, it seemed all but certain that Woo was destined to become one more faceless appetizer for Hollywood to chew up and spit out.

Then everything changed. Along came a series of mega-hits beginning with Face/Off and then the phenomenally successful Mission: Impossible II, transforming John Woo into a major player capable of pretty much writing his own ticket in Tinseltown.

Windtalkers, Woo's new film, is the director's first attempt to flex his newly acquired muscles. The new film is less of a straight-up action flick, and more of an old-fashioned war movie, filled with a tough, tortured main character and lots of heart. "After Mission: Impossible II, I really tried to do something different," the director explained to me recently, speaking by phone from Miami. "I also wanted to make a war movie," Woo laughs. "I think a war movie sends more of a message."

The message implicit in Windtalkers is sincere but fairly standard stuff about friendship under fire, but what's really interesting about the film is the little-known piece of history it touches upon — the story of the Navajo American soldiers who helped win World War II by transmitting and deciphering a virtually unbreakable code based on their own language. "When I heard about this story, I was so excited," exclaims the director, his voice filling with emotion. "When the writers pitched this story to me, I was crying. Before this movie, I had never heard anything about the "code talkers' or the Navajo culture, so after I heard that, I really admired their courage. What they had done for the country was so amazing, I feel I should tell the story."

The story of the code and the men who carried it is something that Roger Willie knows a little something about. Willie, who plays one of the code talkers in Woo's movie, is a Native American artist and teacher who spent his down time on the set of Windtalkers teaching the Navajo language to the cast and crew.

As an unwritten language, Navajo lent itself well to being used as the foundation for a code, but there are many other reasons it was such a good choice. "It's a very tonal language," explains Willie, "where the slightest mispronunciation can mean something totally different. It really takes someone with a trained ear and who is able to speak it very fluently to understand it.

"The other thing is that it's such a descriptive language," the actor continues, referring to the Navajo tongue's ability to adapt and create new words out of old ones. "For example, if we're exposed to something new that's basically foreign to our ways, then we give it a descriptive term. In that sense, the code can be developed in many ways. The word for, say, phone — like what we're doing over this phone conversation — we translate by asking ourselves, "Well, what is it?' Then we translate it as "Metal-That-Talks.' So we're constantly creating new words."

Windtalkers was a first for Willie — he had never acted in a film before — and it's something of a first for co-star Christian Slater too. "Yeah, I'd never done a war movie before," says Slater, "and this was a unique opportunity. It wasn't just an all-out action movie. There were interesting characters and a real story about loyalty and camaraderie and questioning orders. That's what really fascinated me about it."

With its realistic, unusually serious focus, Windtalkers was quite a change from the actor's previous collaboration with Woo, the gleefully over-the-top, almost cartoonish Broken Arrow. In an attempt to amplify the new movie's emphasis on authenticity, Woo actually set up a makeshift boot camp, where Slater, star Nicolas Cage and many of the other actors endured a week of rigorous training. "Yeah, we all went," confirms Slater. "John wanted us to get the real feel of what it was like for those Marines back in the war. We all slept in a barracks with 50 other guys, and then went out and marched in formation on the beach. We were really a full platoon there by the end of our week of training. I think it helped to round out our feelings and to bring us all a lot closer together."

Woo's dedication to keeping things real extended to the movie's massive battle scenes, where thousands of extras, stunt men and movie stars found themselves running around huge open fields dodging bombs and live fire. Fourteen cameras, including one mounted on a helicopter, filmed it all. "The scene was so big that I was suggesting to use stunt doubles for all the actors, but the actors all refused," says Woo. "They all wanted to do it by themselves. And I said, "The scene is so big that none of the camera will see your faces, and there's danger, so many bombs, fire, so much going on.' But they all refused. They didn't care about the cameras. They said, "We are the Marines!' All the actors, they really gave their hearts for the film."

Woo doesn't really stay in touch with the Hong Kong movie scene anymore ("Too busy," he politely explains), but, strangely enough, his new film takes him back to those roots. Any longtime John Woo aficionado can tell you that Windtalkers is not the director's first war movie; his first real foray into this territory was Bullet in the Head, a 1990 Hong Kong film sometimes described as a Deer Hunter-esque take on Vietnam told from the Chinese perspective. "I think Windtalkers and Bullet in the Head both have similar emotions," the director offers. "They're both about ordinary people who got tested by the war. The other thing is the characters are so complex in both films, and they're trying to redeem themselves. Of course Bullet in the Head was a little too depressed for some audiences, but Windtalkers is different. At the end of this movie there's a lot of hope."

As much as Windtalkers harks back to those early H.K. days, it's about as far from Hong Kong as Woo has ventured, at least stylistically. "I did try to make it a different style from what I've done before. More serious. I had to behave a little bit," he chuckles. "I didn't use much of a stylized technique like extreme slow motion, or holding two guns and flipping in the air or birds flying. I wanted to get the realism and the horror of the war, you know, that kind of feeling. I wanted to show the chaos, the danger, the life and death during war."

Even with the stiff competition of Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor and all the other recent high-profile war movies out there, Woo claims he never felt he was trying to live up to anything with Windtalkers. The truth is, with the exception of Spielberg's film, Woo hasn't even seen any of those other war movies, and he doesn't particularly want to. He feels confident that the ultimately upbeat and very human message of Windtalkers stands on its own and will set his film apart.

"That's the thing I'm really interested to do," says Woo. "I see myself as a bridge: I always wanted to bring the good things from the East and the great things from the West and try to bring them together, try to let the people understand each other more. I always feel that there are so many misunderstandings in the world, people have so many hatreds. I wish in my future that I could send a message that we should all get closer, more understanding."

Echoes of Rodney King aside, Windtalkers is an admirable attempt by a veteran filmmaker to stretch the boundaries of what Hollywood and the world expect of him. It would be more than a little naive to suggest that John Woo's new film is going to change the world with its universal message of brotherhood, but that's hardly the point. Whatever else Windtalkers may or may not be, it's a commendable and perhaps necessary step in the journey of one of the most talented men working in movies today.

See the review of Windtalkers in Outtakes.

Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.

This article appears in Jun 12-18, 2002.