Hard Target (1993)
Hard Target is a 1993 American action film directed by Hong Kong film director John Woo in his U.S. debut. The film stars Jean-Claude Van Damme as Chance Boudreaux, an out-of-work Cajun merchant seaman who saves a young woman named Natasha Binder (Yancy Butler) from a gang of thugs in New Orleans. Chance learns that Binder is searching for her missing father (Chuck Pfarrer), and agrees to aid Binder in her search. They soon learn that Binder’s father has died at the hands of hunt organisers Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and Pik van Cleef (Arnold Vosloo), ruthless businessmen who arrange the hunting of homeless men as a form of recreational sport.
Plot.
In New Orleans, a homeless veteran named Douglas Binder (Chuck Pfarrer) is the target of a hunt. He is given a belt containing $10,000 and told that he must reach the other side of the town to win the money and his life. Pursuing him is the hunt organizer Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen), his lieutenant Pik van Cleef (Arnold Vosloo), a businessman named Mr. Lopacki – Fouchon’s client who has paid $500,000 for the opportunity to hunt a human, and mercenaries including Stephan (Sven-Ole Thorsen) and Peterson (Jules Sylvester). Binder fails to reach his destination and is killed by three crossbow bolts. Van Cleef retrieves the money belt. While searching for her father, Binder’s estranged daughter Natasha (Yancy Butler) is attacked by a group of muggers who saw that she had a lot of cash earlier.
She is saved by a homeless man with exceptional martial arts skills named Chance Boudreaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme), a former Force Recon Marine. Chance is initially hesitant to involve himself in her mission, but as his merchant seaman union dues are in arrears, he reluctantly allows Natasha to hire him as her guide and bodyguard during her search. Natasha discovers that her father distributed fliers for a seedy recruiter named Randal Poe (Eliott Keener) who has been secretly supplying Fouchon with homeless men with war experience and no family ties. Natasha questions Randal about her father’s death, but they are discovered by an eavesdropping Van Cleef. Fouchon and Van Cleef beat Randal and cut his ear as a punishment for sending them a man with a daughter.
Filming.
Filming began on October 1, 1992. Hard Target had 74 days of production time and was shot on location in New Orleans, including sequences shot in the French Quarter. Hard Target was put on a tight schedule by Universal that allowed only 65 days of shooting time. This put a lot of pressure on Woo. Woo was also pressured by Universal to tone-down the violence and body count that they had seen in his Hong Kong films. As Woo had not mastered the English language yet, it took time for the cast and crew to get used to working with him. When Woo could not explain what he wanted with a shot to cinematographer Russell Carpenter,
he would resort to simple statements such as “this will be the Sam Peckinpah shot” to get his message across to Carpenter. Actor Lance Henriksen recalled that it was a gradual process that led everyone involved to start seeing the film as a John Woo film rather than a Jean-Claude Van Damme film. Producer James Jacks recalled that Woo was not “the most powerful person on the set but as far as I was concerned, he was certainly the most respected. The weapon fire on the set was considered dangerous, which led the crew to build a new bulletproof plexiglas shield that could be bolted to the camera. This shield was useful particularly for one sequence in Hard Target where Van Damme empties a magazine of ammo into the camera.
