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The Killer (John Woo, 1989) is one of the key films of the Hong Kong New Wave period. It achieved a secure cult status in the West and has exercised great influence on Western and Asian filmmakers. Additionally, the film served as the springboard for the fame of its director and contributed materially to the early attention given to Hong Kong cinema during the 1990s by Western film critics and audiences. Its connection to the chivalric tradition in Chinese and Hong Kong cinema is readily apparent and important, most particularly in its indebtedness to the work of masters such as the late Chang Cheh. The influence of The Killer on subsequent neo-noir films, including “hitman” and gangster films, becomes clearer when the influence of the noir canon on Woo is more fully understood.

John Woo's The Killer was central to the innovative quality of the new Hong Kong cinema. This film helped to filter Hollywood and European action and noir influences through the web of Chinese traditional motifs found in the chivalric tradition. The Killer brought Woo to the attention of critics in the West and helped thereby to foster the careers of younger Hong Kong, and Korean, filmmakers who in turn have drawn upon Woo's innovations to create their own original commentaries on the Woo corpus. Woo himself evaluates The Killer as one of his creative peaks. The hyperbolic romanticism and unabashed spirituality and sentiment often identified as essential to the Woo style, as well as the bravura visual approach, with its well-known elements of circling camera movement, quick editing, and focus on facial expressions, are all found in fully developed form in this film.

Woo came to The Killer with a diversified background in Hong Kong filmmaking. In addition to John Woo's apprenticeship with Chang Cheh, he had worked as a contract director for Golden Harvest. Woo's career had taken a downturn by the mid-1980s due to a series of unsuccessfully realized comedies. One of the reasons for the film's Western success may be its increased stylization relative to A Better Tomorrow; The Killer foregrounds allusions to European and Hollywood filmmaking in ways that the former film did not. Its conscious allusion to Melville as inspiration would also tend to generate interest in Western cinephile circles. The general tone and texture of The Killer fit more closely with the noir tradition than does A Better Tomorrow, which borrows more specifically from melodrama and the Hollywood gangster genre.

Like John Woo, French director Jean-Pierre Melville has often been considered an unorthodox force in his native cinema. A man of unusual life experience, including membership in the Resistance during World War II, Melville funneled his autobiography into his filmmaking. The most important of Melville's policies to a discussion of his influence on, and artistic kinship with and differences from, John Woo and The Killer, are Le Doulos (1962), Le Deuxième Souffle (1966), Le Samouraï (1967), and Le Cercle rouge (1970). They share with the Woo film personalist concentration on the underworld, including the police, and feature unhappy denouements for their gangster anti-heroes. What Woo did not inherit from Melville is the cynical world-weariness and gray exposition that pervade much of the Frenchman's work.

This chapter discusses the treatment of intimacy in Michael Winterbottom’s Go Now (1995), The Trip (2010), Code 46 (2003), 9 Songs (2004), Butterfly Kiss (1995), and The Killer Inside Me (2010). The treatment of intimacy in Winterbottom’s films is marked by an acknowledgement of the impossibility of intimacy or, more precisely, how intimacy is structured around the impossibility of its fulfilment. Given that the treatment of intimacy in these films is frequently framed with self-reflexive formal devices, such as the juxtaposition of generically incompatible or unconventional elements, this thematic preoccupation can thus be understood as both a reflection upon and an interruption of circuits of cinematic intimacy and cinematic representations of intimacy. However, what characterises the thematics of intimacy in the films is the tenuous, provisional quality of intimacy between friends, lovers, and family members or, indeed, its absence.