John Woo on Hard Boiled – Here the gunman gets shot in the legs, and there’s a lot of smoke in the corner of the frame. In action scenes I usually like lots of things happening at once—big plumes of smoke or fires burning, or something else. If there’s no smoke, sometimes I’ll use fireworks that shoot off lots of sparklers. I like to blow up everything and anything so, before we shot the gunfight scene, I walked around the whole restaurant looking for things to explode. If I saw stacks of papers on a desk we’d use that. Or maybe the tickets waiters used for their food orders. If we were close to the kitchen, I might ask, ‘How about blowing up a gas tank?’
Why did Netlfix pick up the tab for House of Cards? – But before the studio met with any of them it put out a feeler to Netflix, thinking that fast-growing service might bid for the rights to repeat the show after a television premiere. The Netflix chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, a fan of the original, did what Netflix executives tend to do: He looked at the data. He found that Mr. Spacey and Mr. Fincher’s films were pretty popular among subscribers to Netflix’s streaming service. So were the films and TV shows in the category Netflix called “political thrillers.” And if that wasn’t enough evidence that a “House of Cards” reboot would fare well, there was this: The DVDs of the original mini-series were popular among subscribers to the company’s DVD-by-mail service.
