John Woo wants to put down his gun

He gets sick of car chases. He personally hates violence. And these days, he would rather see himself as a next-generation John Huston or Alfred Hitchcock, directing old-fashioned movies and actors on par with Cary Grant.

Maybe this is the wrong room in Toronto's Four Seasons. Maybe this person sitting here in a conservative business suit and speaking with a hoarse, but very polite voice isn't John Woo, the Hong Kong director turned saviour of the hyper-kinetic, high-action Hollywood blockbuster.

It's refreshing to hear him speak about the more romantic side of old Hollywood, but also a little incongruous. He's describing small details like the two lovebirds used in a scene in his action-thriller Paycheck, which opened Christmas Day. It turns out that they are a homage to the two caged birds in Hitchcock's T he Birds, while the film's man-versus-subway-train chase scene is a tribute to North By Northwest.

"Even before we started shooting, I found it was a very Hitchcock-style movie," he says, during a publicity stop in Toronto to promote Paycheck.

"There are a lot of little things here and there" he adds quietly -- this coming from the man known for mowing down actors in a hailstorm of bullets and body counts that can run into the hundreds.

Woo in recent years has staked his career on heavy, almost operatic detail, often with fluttering doves and religious symbolism that are about as subtle as the "hi-ya-ho" Ride of the Valkyries.

Like Ben Affleck's lead in Paycheck, it would be easy to demand some real answers from Woo since he seems to utterly contradict the image suggested by his films. Here's the director who treats cars like so many expendable soap bubbles. He goes through blank ammunition in bulk as he stages his "ballets of bullets," in which the principal shooter invariably makes a slow-motion, gun-in-each-hand swan dive. And there's Woo's trademark Mexican standoff scenes, with two opponents holding guns inches from each others' faces.

Nope. Woo says he gets a little tired of all that sometimes. "Yeah, sometimes I feel that way: 'Oh, okay, another chase, what should I do? How to make it be better than the other one?' It's always a challenge," he says.

Robert "Rock" Galotti, Woo's weapons specialist, says in the film's production notes that despite being famous for working with firearms, Woo has never had the desire to fire a weapon.

Woo himself says he's calming down a bit. "In Paycheck, I tried to make the movie more realistic. Even though there are action sequences, I didn't want to go too over the top. I just wanted to make it more real."

And although there are a number of scenes with fast, swirling visuals and constantly moving cameras, they never quite feel like a video game, like some of his other films.

"When we were making Paycheck, me and my DP [director of photography]Jeffrey Kimball, we are both old-fashioned guys. We wanted to make a movie that's a tribute to the classic Hollywood movie." He adds in his halting English, "Maybe I got a little older." In fact, Woo wasn't going to use a Mexican standoff in the latest film, he says, but Affleck was itching to include it.

That's not to say that Paycheck doesn't have a cache of action-film trappings and pseudo-science gimmicks like Woo's past films. In 1997's Face/Off, for instance, there was the medical improbability of the lead characters played by Nicolas Cage and John Travolta having their faces transplanted.

Cage's character even wakes up on his hospital bed to find that his face has been removed as he touches the bloody, exposed surface. (Wouldn't that sting a little?)

In Paycheck, meanwhile, there's a machine that destroys individual brain cells that contain specific memories, while allowing the individual to awake unscathed and otherwise okay.

There's no fear then that Woo has suddenly become a mise-en-scène naturalist.

But you get the suspicion talking to Woo that Paycheck is only an initial foray, like his 2002 World War II film Windtalkers, into a new phase of his career.

His next project is a historic epic called The Divide, he says, about Chinese and Irish workers building the railroad in 19th-century America. He's also planning to shoot what he describes as an action musical, "an old gangster-type film with a lot of dancing. It's action and dancing and has a strong love story about a guy who is in love with two women. It's a classic Casablanca with a lot of action." (You can't help picturing two gangsters in a Mexican standoff singing show tunes to each other.)

But it's hard to imagine Woo ever completely turning his back on violence and the kind of emotionally wrought, controlled anarchy that have made his films so popular. It's comes partly from his own life, he says.

As a three-year-old, he suffered from a spinal infection that ate into the flesh on his back and required an operation in which tissue was transplanted from his leg. "That's why my right leg is a little small," he says smiling.

When he was five, his family moved to Hong Kong, where he found himself surrounded by violence and crime.

"I've seen so much crime, and I had to deal with so many violent things when I was a kid. I used to meet up with a gang and I had to fight back. It was very hard to survive. And I've seen the big riots in Hong Kong, people setting bombs and blowing up people, demonstrators killed by the police. I was just scared, but maybe I learned from that kind of life experience. It made me really hate crime and hate violence actually." He laughs at how that seems to contradict his films.

"Of course my movies involve quite a few violent things. But I just want to emphasize that when it's good against evil, the good always win."

As for the action genre itself, Woo seems to feel it's time for a change, especially in a world where television and video games are even more violent than the movies.

"I think it's going toward more complicated stories and characters, because people are finding that a lot of big commercial Hollywood movies are too empty," he says.

He may have been seen as th e master of the Hollywood action film over the last decade, but, as he adds, "For myself, I have not much desire to watch all those big commercial movies. There's not much to think about."