Like I said Korean sources list often for quota regulation (or tax reasons) Korean directors at co-productions.
No one can honestly believe that WARRIORS TWO, for example, was co-directed by a Korean director. At most a few landscape shots or insignificant shots. This is Sammo Hung's baby!
HEROES SHED NO TEARS (John Woo) is another case with Korean credits with no John Woo as director but an Korean director. See that report about that matter (it is in German):
https://www.schnittberichte.com/schnitt ... ?ID=401846One part translated:
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A Film By... Sin Wi-Gyun?!? - Credit oddities
Before we get into the main movie, a few words about the credits. The opening credits are all in Chinese. Golden Harvest is known to have renamed the film's original title (The Sunset Warrior, or 黃昏戰土 in Chinese) to Heroes Shed No Tears (英雄無淚) just ahead of its theatrical release, hoping the new title would evoke associations with Woo's megahit A Better Tomorrow (英雄本色 - "The True Nature of a Hero") and make the box office ring. Curiously, the Korean version uses neither the one nor the other title, the title given there is 九死一生, which means something like "Jump from death". In the Korean Movie Database, the English title is consequently given as Close Call With Death. Der Korean title 구사일생 will not be displayed during the movie.
But the confusion of titles is only the beginning. The next thing to wonder about is that the two main actors, Eddy Ko and Lam Ching-Ying, aren't named in the credits. Instead, names like Ho Yiu-sum and Lam Gun-bo appear in the credits. A quick look at Wikipedia brings the explanation: These are the birth names of Eddy Ko and Lam Ching-Ying. Why the birth names and not the usual stage names of the actors are mentioned here remains a mystery at first.
The biggest hit then comes with the crew credits. After the Korean Lee Woo-suk is named as the producer, one actually expects a directing credit for John Woo. But instead of Woo, a Korean gets the sole credit as director: Sin Wi-Gyun. But who is this Sin Wi-Gyun? Is Sin Wi-Gyun the ominous director of the infamous reshot scenes?
Anyone looking for Sin Wi-Gyun on the Internet will first find what they are looking for in the Hong Kong Movie Database. There, Sin Wi-Gyun (AKA Chin Wei-Chun AKA Shen Wei-Kun AKA Shin Wei-Chun AKA San Wai-Kwan AKA Shen Wei-Chun) is credited as an assistant director on a good dozen HK productions. It is striking that these are only productions in which actors and crew members from Korea were involved. Among other things, Sin served as an assistant director on the terrific Shaw Brothers classic Zhao directed by Korean Cheng Chang-Ho, which popularized the kung fu film in the US under the alternate title Five Fingers of Death. However, what is even more interesting in connection with Heroes Shed No Tears: Both Sin Wi-Gyun and Lee Woo-suk had already worked together with John Woo on a Golden Harvest production almost 10 years earlier, namely on Woo's girl power martial arts - Finger exercise The Dragon Tamers (released in Korea as A Dangerous Hero), which again featured numerous Korean actors. So there's a 99% chance that he won't be the director of the reshooted scenes, especially since only a few of the Hong Kong actors can be seen in the reshoots.
Consequently, neither producer Lee Woo-suk nor assistant director Sin Wi-Gyun are named in the Hong Kong credits. To make the chaos complete, the Golden Harvest boss Leonard Ho is named as the sole scriptwriter in Korea. The original author Chua Lam is not named in either version, Woo gets the sole author credit in the Hong Kong version.
These strange changes probably have a simple reason. In "Woo: Life and Films" the "absurd situation in the film market in the Republic of South Korea" is explained very vividly:
Since the television age dawned in the south of the divided peninsula in the late 1960s, viewers have been running away from local cinema productions with their outdated technology. To stop this development, the 'Motion Picture Promotion Corporation' (MPPC) pushes through an insane law: A quota system is supposed to protect the local film industry from foreign imports (mainly from Hollywood, but also from Hong Kong), but in the end it ruins it thoroughly for years to come. According to Article 16 of South Korea's Film Law, a film company can only import a foreign film if it exports four domestic productions with a total profit of at least US$20,000. However, resourceful business people quickly come up with the idea of how to circumvent 'the worst film law that has ever existed in Korea': professionals from Hong Kong realize films with Cantonese stars in secret co-productions, which on the one hand look like foreign productions and go down well with the Korean audience and on the other hand, as 'Korean' productions, do not fall under the quota system for imported films. (Of course, the name of the co-producing Hong Kong company was not allowed to appear in the opening credits of the Korean version.)
So it is likely that the film was officially released in South Korea as a South Korean production. This probably also explains why a copy of the film is stored in the Korean Film Archive.
Excerpts from "Woo: Life and Movies" courtesy of Thomas Gaschler.
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The other parts of the article are also very interesting (the studio ruined the movie with new shots).
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) that the KMDB can be spotty, but unless we know otherwise for sure, shouldn't he be listed as a director? I wouldn't object strongly to moving him to assistant director, but I'm just not sure if it would be the correct move 
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. The KMDB lists the run-time as 1h35, whereas my HKL copy runs at about 1h25, so these prints surely differ in some way.
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What!! I thought it was him, who else would have such a weird face