From acclaimed Hong Kong-based action director, John Woo (Face/Off, Broken Arrow, Mission: Impossible II) comes Silent Night – his first American film in 20 years.
Starring Joel Kinnaman (The Suicide Squad, Robocop, Hanna), Silent Night tells the story of a man who witnesses the death of his young son on Christmas Eve, when the boy gets caught in crossfire between warring gangs. Recovering from a wound that has cost him his voice, he soon embarks upon a bloody and gruelling quest to punish those responsible.
Ahead of the film’s theatrical release, Peter Gray spoke with Kinnaman about the challenges he faced in Woo’s bold, dialogue-free approach, his personal input into both the physical and emotional outlay of his character, and embracing a necessary grittiness when it came to the action.
I spoke to your lovely co-star Catalina and asked her what her favourite action film was. So before getting to the nitty gritty of Silent Night, is there a favourite for you? A gateway movie into the genre?
(Laughs) A gateway drug? I mean, if we’re on the topic of John Woo I think Face/Off is definitely up there. John Wick 3 is probably my favourite when it comes to fight sequences. It’s pretty epic. Hard Boiled (too). There’s a bunch.
I feel like John Woo has to be one of those directors you just put your absolute trust in, especially when you’re given something like this. When you’re handed a script – or not handed a script – and you realise this is all physical, all emotional and no dialogue. What’s your reaction?
I was super hyped. I had a conversation with the producers, Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee, who I’ve made a couple of movies with before, and we like working together, so we’re trying to figure out the next “thing”, and then Basil brought this up. He’s like, “Listen, I have John Woo who’s coming back to Hollywood after 20 years, and he wants to do a movie with you. The kicker is, there’s zero dialogue.” For me that was it. I was really hyped.
I trained in theatre and worked on stage for several years in Sweden before I moved to the US to work, and I mostly did drama films when I started out, so, you know, over the course of my career I’ve really enjoyed doing action (movies). But it’s really important that there be a strong acting challenge in it as well. And for me, this checked all the boxes. What an incredible opportunity. And then we started shooting and it was incredibly demanding, and I realised very quickly that text is sort of a gateway into emotion. It helps trigger the emotion, so when that’s removed, the only method I have of telling the story is what’s in my eyes and the little movements. The twitches that happen on my face when I’m filled with emotion and my mind is racing. I realised it was a lot more demanding for me.
Before every take I found myself preparing emotionally for every take in the film. I was acting like a fucking lunatic on the set. I was screaming and kicking and crying, just to get that inner motor (running) and have all that desperation and rage and grief in my eyes.
Films like this demonstrate that there’s so much more beyond the surface of a physical action movie. We have that loss and that grief, and what such an act does to someone. And as much as your character loses his humanity, I feel like we’re still absolutely connected to you. Is that a difficult line to toe between staying human but losing humanity?
You absolutely nailed it. That’s how I’ve been describing this journey. What this guy goes through as he loses his son, the light of his life, it’s a love that he’s never felt before, and when that is taken away from him he can’t reconnect to love, basically. It hinders him from reconnecting with his wife (and) with life in general. The only thing he can connect to is the idea of making these people that took that light away pay for it. This movie is intense, it’s a hardboiled action movie, and it’s about him losing his humanity,
I was very much expecting action from beginning to end, so that 40-or-so minutes in the middle where we experience that loss and we just see your reaction to what’s happening, it’s like, “Oh, we’re getting into some serious shit now.” It’s amazing how much comes across without dialogue, and talking with Catalina about the script having no dialogue and little outline on characters, it became a collaboration between the two of you as to who these characters were as individuals and as a couple. How did you find that process of creating Brian?
First of all, I felt so much gratitude and I felt so fortunate to get to work with Catalina on this. She was dedicated to getting into those deep emotions. That’s hard regardless, but when you don’t have any words, there’s no dialogue to guide you there, and it’s even more demanding. I never would have gotten to where I got if it wasn’t for (Catalina). On one hand it is a challenge, but it also gives you a lot of freedom. And I think you really see that in the way that John worked. You see why he was so drawn to making this film. In a normal film you’d have to spend time filming the person talking and then cutting to the people listening. Here, because we didn’t need to do that, he could focus all the time and energy on designing one beautiful shot that just tells the whole story of that scene.
The elements of the movie are not action-packed. They’re very cinematic. Sometimes, John had a very clear idea of what the shot was and how we were to move. And then sometimes he just wanted to see us sort of play out the scene and see our emotional take on the situation, and then he would design the shot after that. Sometimes it would be a collaboration, but since we didn’t have any dialogue, so often it was about creating one shot. There was a lot of freedom in the development.
Catalina told me that her character was a banker who loved to paint. Was there any backstory to Brian that you came up with? Or any decisions you made that might not be so visible on first watch, but second time we can see “Oh, that’s who Brian is.”
Nah (laughs). I kinda just showed up. Basically for me it was just to embody a regular guy. You know, he’s a working class guy, and he’s created this little paradise. He doesn’t have much, but he has exactly what he wants. He has this little family. He has his son, the love of his life, together with his wife, and he’s right where he wants to be in life. And at the peak of happiness it all gets taken away. The film doesn’t linger too much before the accident happens. We don’t get to see that much of who he was before, so I didn’t linger too much on that. My thought process was more how this man cannot reconnect to his humanity.
As you said, you have a history with the action genre, so how was the physical process for you in getting ready for this? Is it a case of “If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready?” You’ve survived my fellow countrymen Margot (Robbie) and Jai (Courtney) (on Suicide Squad). Are you always ready now?
(Laughs) Yeah, exactly. I mean, I still haven’t quite survived Jai Courtney. He’s left some scars that are just never going to heal. Emotionally, that is (laughs). Yeah, I enjoy training (and) martial arts, and I just need it for my sanity. Usually, I’m not that far off. It’s more if I have a role that needs me to be really out of shape, or really skinny or something, that’s usually when I start losing my mind and getting into bad shape intentionally. But here it was a great process working with the fight coordinator and the stunt guys. I sort of brought them to this film, it’s a crew that I’ve worked with for several years on different projects, and this movie was the culmination of (that). What we wanted to achieve with Brian was he’s just a regular guy that doesn’t really have any skills before the film starts. Nothing that we really know of. He’s just a guy consumed with rage and prepares himself in the garage. It was never going to be anything flashy.
We wanted the action to be exciting, so we made it gritty and dirty and ugly. Much more like real fights and not feel so choreographed. I enjoy the kind of training where I could spar with the stunt guys. It would start with grappling and get more intense from there. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is one of my passions in life, so we would choreograph elements, or anchor points in the fights, where it would feel semi-improvised. I think we all felt comfortable turning up the intensity without risking hurting each other too much.
I think that grittiness added to the emotional weight of everything. It can take you out of a film if it looks super polished and perfect, so I liked that your character gives as much as he gets. And I know that you as an Executive Producer on this means there’s a lot more encapsulated for you than just being “the face” of the movie, so what’s been created here is really exciting. Really, hats off to everybody involved.
I love hearing that. That makes me really happy. It was a risk to do something like this that has an element of experimentation in it, and people tend to avoid that when they’re investing millions of dollars. We don’t know how this is going to perform, but we’re getting really nice responses, and the atmosphere in the screenings… it feels like everyone watching is engaged. Hopefully that feeling will continue.
Silent Night is screening in Australian theatres from December 7th, 2023.
