The hallmarks of John Woo’s style are as well-known as the film-maker’s own name: tough customers with blacked-out sunglasses and never-ending chains of cigarettes, flying through the air with dual-wielded pistols blazing, doves a-flutter in the background. In Hong Kong’s booming pre-handover industry, Woo spent the 80s and early 90s cranking out works of operatic, hyperkinetic intensity termed “gun fu” for their ballistic fusion of martial arts with the gangster picture. Admirers also described the movement he spearheaded as a cinema of “heroic bloodshed”, its wanton violence paired with a classical notion of honor and villainy not so far from melodrama. Blazing a path to Hollywood, where his critical regard and box-office grosses slipped after a few early successes, he remained staunchly committed to maximalism in mood and content. Even as budgets shrank and expanded, everything had to be larger than life – the emotions and the explosions. But that’s not the case in the surprisingly pared-down Silent Night, Woo’s first English-language film in 20 years. The set-up sounds like another bullet ballet right in the master’s wheelhouse, a Death Wish riff in which a bereaved husband (Joel Kinnaman) opens up several successive cans of whup-ass on the no-goodniks responsible for killing his son. Where the Woo of old would have seized an opportunity for his favored formal pyrotechnics, he instead challenged himself to puncture his own aesthetic, and deflate his signature histrionics until all that’s left is a diamond-hard core. As a result, he’s turned in one of his leanest and meanest works, a shoot-’em-up with a more grounded brutality unexpected from a 77-year-old legend still capable of surprising his devotees. For a maverick synonymous with adrenaline-drunk zeal, his last remaining act of subversion demanded the one thing he hadn’t yet tried: restraint. He wears it well on an anomalous film that nonetheless re-establishes his powers as a peerless composer of action. “This is what I really wanted to do,” Woo tells the Guardian during a promo stop in Los Angeles. “I’ve done so much where everything is big. I needed to get back to reality.” After three flops in China that brought him swollen budgets and disdainful reviews, Woo asked his agents to scrounge up some strong material that could position him for a pivot back to success. He found what he was looking for in Robert Archer Lynn’s script for Silent Night, an unusually slim treatment in part for its near-total eschewing of dialogue. Family man Brian (Kinnaman) sustains an injury to his vocal cords as part of the drive-by that claims his son’s life one Christmas, and spends a terse year in training until he can take his bloody, faintly seasonally tinged revenge next 25 December. With pursed lips and clenched fists, he plots a merciless yet broadly plausible warpath; the montages of his laborious self-honing emphasize the work required to reconcile an ordinary guy and his real-world environment with the extreme acts of physical prowess he’ll soon showcase. “It was quite difficult, working without words,” Woo says. “I had to reform myself to figure this style out, a new technique or a new way of thinking. This all made me feel better about being normal. To tell a story normally – normal drama, normal expressions, normal fighting – I had to control myself, not go too far over the top. Everything had to be believable. To tell a story the audience would understand, for them to be moved by the characters, I had to behave myself.” If his diction hints at clock-punching compromise from a director following someone else’s marching orders on a one-for-them gig, know that scale and fulfillment have never been directly proportional for Woo. As he describes it, he starts itching for the opposite mode of production based on his task currently at hand; on smaller shoots, he longs for the resources and raw firepower of a bigger operation, but when immersed in such a studio job, he chafes against the lack of autonomy. The fast-and-cheap Silent Night struck him as an agreeable compromise, testing his ability to toss aside his usual formal fallbacks free of meddling from production company Thunder Road. (Not coincidentally, they brought the world John Wick, the single greatest affirmation of Woo’s legacy in modern Hollywood; he hasn’t met directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, though he’s heard they have his picture hanging in their office. In general, he’s flattered by how many bastard descendants of his fellow JW have borrowed his moves in the years since. “I feel like I have so many friends!”) He exchanged a certain leeway afforded by excess for a different, more precious form of independence, a showbiz tradeoff since time immemorial: what a director loses in funding, he gains in lack of oversight. Woo made off like a bandit in the deal, more than prepared to pick up the slack left by a modest allowance with his own ingenuity. “This made me feel just like old times, working on small budgets in Hong Kong,” he says. “I had all this control as a director. Before we started shooting, I spoke with our producer Basil [Iwanyk], the boss of Thunder Road. He said to me, ‘The good thing about an independent film is you get more creative freedom.’ And this is true. I didn’t get much interference, and the producers were very cooperative. Most of the time, I was particular about how to make everything work, with the budget and schedule being so tight. I had no choice but to shoot everything smartly.” Rather than shooting for coverage, setting up a battalion of cameras to capture as much of his melees as possible and sorting it all out in the edit, he was forced to pick and choose with his cinematography. He’s “not crazy” about CGI and prefers the tactile thrill of practical effects, but he sometimes finds the many regulations of the North American film industry a hindrance compared with the laissez-faire policies in China. “Shooting in Mexico, there were so many rules for using guns,” he says. “Every blank, if you’re doing half-load, or even one-third of the gunpowder, you have to log everything. And if they’re not making enough fire, then we CG in the flame.” The Yuletide setting implies holly-bedecked mayhem, but with one marked exception, Woo doesn’t go too hard on the seasonal camp in his fight sequences. The mano-a-mano action between Kinnaman – whom Woo describes as “so real, unlike a superhero” – and the waves of goons is smartly choreographed, but relatively reined-in. They clash not as too-cool-to-be-real demigods, but as human mortals, and each body blow hits harder for it. “With Hitchcock, every single one of his movies, he treated like an experiment,” Woo says. “When I was working on Silent Night, I thought this way. I always wanted to make a change, and this time, that change was to be simpler.” Though he vows that small-budget film-making will always be his home, he’s back to work on an English-language remake of his immortal crime caper The Killer following a multi-month hiatus on their Paris shoot due to the Sag strike. He hints that the production has been a bit more comfortable than Silent Night’s, but still considers himself a guest while working in this part of the world. He mostly looks upon Hollywood from afar; he checked in on his old stomping ground of the Mission: Impossible franchise with 2018’s “fabulous” Fallout, and he enjoys the occasional English-language genre piece. (The pastiches of Edgar Wright and 2016’s neo-western Hell or High Water are favorites.) He’s far from getting left behind, however, his step toward a more subdued register by no means a concession of fatigue. “Even though I’ve aged, my mind is still clear,” he says. “I still know what I’m doing. I’ve got the same instincts I always have.” Silent Night is out in US cinemas on 1 December and in the UK at a later date