John Woo is making a comeback with ‘The Killer’ — and maybe a musical?

Are you suffering from Olympics withdrawal? Cheer up. The Paris Games might be over, but here’s an Olympic-level event: an assassin triathlon, complete with guns, motorbikes and car chases all over the French capital.

John Woo is back, baby.

The Hong Kong master, considered by many to be one of the greatest action directors, is making something of a comeback after 20 years away from Hollywood with “The Killer,” a remake of arguably his best film and his second movie to be released in nine months.

“I was so happy to shoot in Paris,” Woo told the Chronicle in a video interview from his Los Angeles home. “I have long admired French crime movies, so I feel this film is very much a tribute to the old-time French movies.”

Indeed, behind Woo during the interview was a framed poster of the 1963 thriller “L’Aîné des Ferchaux” (“Magnet of Doom”), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and made by his favorite director, Jean-Pierre Melville.

Woo’s original “The Killer” (1989) starred Chow Yun-fat as a mob assassin who accidentally blinds a pretty lounge singer (Sally Yeh) during a hit. Ordered to kill her because she is a witness, he protects her instead and teams up with a Hong Kong cop (Danny Lee) to take down the mob.

In the new version — not to be confused with David Fincher’s Netflix film “The Killer,” released last year — the Chow character is a woman, played by British actress Nathalie Emmanuel of “Game of Thrones” and the “Fast and the Furious” franchise. The cop is French actor Omar Sy, star of the Netflix series “Lupin,” with American actress Diana Silvers (“Space Force”) as the singer and Sam Worthington (the “Avatar” movies) as the villain. Woo’s daughter, Angeles Woo, appears as a rival assassin.

Many of Woo’s trademark fetishes are there: flying doves, religious imagery (the filmmaker has long been a practicing Lutheran), slow-motion gunbattles and an epic feel. He invented the genre that came to be known as heroic bloodshed (the BBC once called Woo the “Mozart of mayhem”).

“John is very romantic with the camera,” Emmanuel told the Chronicle during a separate video interview from Los Angeles. “We’re doing these big action sequences, but it’s really like doing a sort of tango with the movement with the camera. It’s very like dance choreography, and it’s got a romantic energy to it. I loved that. 

“And the way that he introduces characters or shows that point of view is very, very, very, very cool.”

Woo said his intention, whether it be an action scene or a dialogue scene, is to put the actors and crew in a position to deliver their best work. 

“I shoot everything with emotion — most importantly, how I feel,” he said. “Every scene has to have meaning, and the actors are looking for that. Nathalie is really different (in ‘The Killer’) than she is in her other movies, and she and Omar preferred to do as many of the stunts by themselves as possible. They were very dedicated, and I’m so grateful.”

Emmanuel, who will soon be seen in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” also had by far the most scenes with doves; her character hangs out in an abandoned church where they live.

“They didn’t always fly where you wanted them to fly, and they didn’t always do the things you wanted them to do,” she said, “but it was amazing! They are a John Woo staple, and that just didn’t stop being cool throughout the entire shoot for me.”

Woo began his career in the 1970s making wuxia films, martial arts and chivalry movies set in ancient China, before revolutionizing the action genre in the ’80s with a series of violent, modern epics starring Chow — “A Better Tomorrow,” “Once a Thief,” “The Killer,” “A Bullet in the Head” and “Hard Boiled” among them.

Hollywood took notice and he spent 10 years in America, making such action classics as the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle “Hard Target,” the Nicolas Cage-John Travolta thriller “Face/Off” and “Mission Impossible 2” starring Tom Cruise.

But after two box office bombs in a row — the underappreciated World War II code-breaker movie “Windtalkers” and the Ben Affleck thriller “Paycheck” — Woo went back to Asia. By then the center of filmmaking had moved from Hong Kong to mainland China, where he went back to the wuxia genre.

Yet, he said he’s always felt there was unfinished business in Hollywood. He returned to make “Silent Night,” a most unusual experiment as an action film without dialogue that was released in theaters in December, and “The Killer” came together quickly after that.

At 77, Woo doesn’t know how many films he has left, but says he’s working on several projects, including a Western and a remake of Melville’s 1970 heist film “Le Cercle Rouge.” 

He also has a dream project: “I want to make a musical,” Woo said with a laugh. 

“Like an old-time French musical, like ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.’”

Trading guns for umbrellas — why not? As long as there are doves. 

Reach G. Allen Johnson: ajohnson@sfchronicle.com