Producer Charles Roven talks John Woo’s remake of The Killer

Weeks ago, John Woo posted on social media that he was recently in Paris for the production of the English-language remake of his classic Hong Kong action film, The Killer, which starred his Scorsese’s “De Niro,” Chow Yun-Fat. The remake of the same name is set to star Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy. There is no word yet on how much the remake will stay close to the original’s plot. There are also minimal details on the project outside of Woo, the two leads, and the location. However, it is said to be planned for an exclusive release for the streaming service Peacock.

Producer Charles Roven, who is a frequent collaborator with Christopher Nolan, and is currently enjoying the success of their latest outing, Oppenheimer, recently spoke with The Hollywood Reporter on a bevy of topics involving his projects and Roven relinquished some details on the John Woo remake.

The producer revealed that they were in the middle of production when the strikes put a hold on everything, “I was also shooting a wonderful movie in Paris. John Woo is remaking his own movie, The Killer, which was one of his seminal Hong Kong movies that he made in 1989. So we had to shut that down because we lost all of our SAG actors, and of course, we honored that. We’ve got somewhere between 10 and 18 days left, so that was obviously very disappointing.”

While Nathalie Emmanuel is a far cry from the established action icon of Chow Yun-Fat, Roven addresses some of the changes to narratives with this interpretation as he reveals she is in the “Killer” role. Roven talks about putting Emmanuel in the crucial part when he was inquired about Woo’s motivation for remaking his own classic film, “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. There’s a lot of original content in it that’s different from the first movie.”