Renowned Hong Kong director John Woo is to get a lifetime achievement award at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. The film maker made his name with Chinese language films like 'Hard Boiled' and 'The Killer', before moving to Hollywood to make well received English language flicks such as 'Face/Off' and 'Broken Arrow'.

More recently he made a return to China to make historical epic 'Red Cliff', and is planning a movie about the 'Flying Tigers', US fighter pilots who defended China against Japanese invaders during WW2.

The Festival's organisers called Woo "an innovator of the contemporary language of cinema", and added that he is "considered a master who has changed the language of contemporary film for generations of filmmakers".

They continue: "The acknowledgement recognises a filmmaker who in recent decades, with his revolutionary conception of staging and editing, has renewed action movies to the core, introducing an extreme stylisation close to visual art, both in Asia and in Hollywood".