David Konow: When you and I spoke for "ScreenTalk" magazine several years ago, I remember you told me the huge motorcycle chase at the end of "Mission: Impossible II" took 10 weeks, seven days a week, from seven in the morning to 11 at night, to edit. Was that the toughest segment you worked on in a John Woo film?

Steven Kemper: That was around-the-clock. I remember it being easily almost a million feet of film in itself, and when you think that an average movie may be 12,000 feet long, that’s a long movie. So just going through all the material was immensely time-consuming. The way I approach the work is I make what I call "select reels," which is basically sort of a (collection) of the best stuff. I literally look at that stuff and figure out what I’m going use in the final scene. So it was very time-consuming; it was just weeks on end. But what was (really) tough was the stuff that was problematic in the beginning of the movie, setting up the story, because it was so confusing and it wasn’t well-written. The tough part was reworking the opening and the first half of the movie. So that it made sense, you could understand everything, and it wasn’t too oblique.

A motorcycle chase climax of "Mission: Impossible II" was a difficult process for Woo and Kemper.

David Konow: Reportedly Robert Towne had to write the movie around the action scenes, which were set up before there was a story.

Steven Kemper: There were stories about that. I have to point out that I wasn’t on "Mission: Impossible II" until near the end of shooting, but yes, I did hear that. There was all this difficulty with that, and once we started mangling the movie further, [Towne] had to come in again and try to restructure, write dialogue and make things work for the changes that we had made. I do remember the talk that he was on the set a lot and they were writing on their feet all the time.

David Konow: Also from what I recall from the "ScreenTalk" interview we did was you were still cutting the negative when they were doing optical effects?

Steven Kemper: Yes. It was a little intimidating because there was so much time pressure. We were getting our last optical effects while they were negative cutting; it was that tight. Not only that, but we were negative cutting and starting prints. I was still working on stuff when they were mixing. And we were starting our check prints, doing our color timing where there were tons of holes, where there were just black edits, waiting for the final opticals to come in, which is not all that unusual on big action movies.

David Konow: You can really go down to the wire.

Steven Kemper: You can. And nowadays, now that they’re not even cutting negative anymore, it’s going be worse. Everything eventually gets scanned to video and then a digital inter-negative is made from that. It goes into a computer and right back out. So now your inter-media, the things that they use to create the prints, those are all one long piece of film now.

David Konow: Brian DePalma once said he had a style that could fit well into mainstream films like "The Untouchables" and the first "Mission: Impossible," and he could go in and out of the mainstream, meaning he could make big and smaller, more personal movies. Do you feel John Woo ever thought along these lines, that he could apply his style to a major movie but also do his own stuff?

Steven Kemper: I don’t know. That’s a really good question because I don’t see that he ever really tried to do that in any of his pictures. I really think he always tried to make the pictures that he knew how best to make. There were difficulties in "Windtalkers" where he brings that Asian kind of philosophy; in acting scenes, we should play the scenes long, we should hold on reaction [shots], and hold on moments, which makes the movies very long, and Americans don’t go to see those kind of movies. They don’t like that kind of stuff, and I’ve even had arguments with John where I said, "This just isn’t going fly in America." He had me extending so many scenes and performances, and I said, "You’re trying to apply Asian dramatic technique. This actor is not holding the emotion anymore, I can see it in his face." But John felt holding was an important part of acting. I think he was often caught in-between in that situation, where he was looking at it with an Asian eye, and it just wasn’t holding up. I think that was the toughest thing, and I didn’t realize he had those issues until we were on "Windtalkers." But that was the only time I really saw that he was fighting the cultural approaches in films, the disparity between our two cultures. And "Windtalkers" was overly long, it wasn’t very successful, and unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be a good movie, but I think there were a lot of script issues in that movie that just didn’t resolve.