JOHN Woo, Hong Kong's internationally acclaimed director and the only local star to boast a Hollywood deal, hasn't been behind the camera in more than two years. If it was Hong Kong, his colleagues would be circulating a collection plate. But it's Tinseltown, and Woo has been getting used to the way they do business there.

'It can be horrible,' he says in his offices on the Fox lot. 'You have to be half a politician and half a film-maker to get a movie made here. You just expend energy and time handling stupid political things.

'I have been here a long time now and I've seen so many things; when I watch an American movie I give it more respect because I understand what the director has gone through.' After numerous setbacks and disappointments, a change of agents and a new company, and finally a development deal at Rupert Murdoch's Twentieth Century Fox, Woo is ready to call 'action' again.

The profile of one of China’s top nuclear weapons scientists has been scrubbed from the website of the nation’s engineering brains trust.

It is not known when the page was removed, but Chinese media reports noted the change on Saturday.

Fu, also a deputy to the National People’s Congress, told the South China Morning Post during the “two sessions” annual political gathering last week that the company aimed to achieve mass production of several core photoresist materials used in advanced processes within five years.