Venice Film Festival artistic director Marco Mueller said that telling Chinese filmmaker John Woo he would be presented with the venerable festival's Golden Lion career honor had all the drama of one of Woo's films.

"At first, he said 'No, no, no, I don't deserve it,'" Mueller recalled Friday during a briefing for the award. "It took a lot of deep convincing from me and [long-time Woo collaborator] Terence Chang. But I don't feel we are bestowing an honor here. The prize was simply there waiting for him."

With Friday's award, Woo joins the ranks of the cinema industry giants who have won the award before him, including Orson Wells, Igmar Bergman, Luis Buuel, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Stanley Kubrick.

The career Golden Lion prize has been presented to 80 people before this year, but Friday is the first time a Chinese figure has been so honored.

"When Marco called me, my first reaction was shock," Woo told reporters. "Then I thought he might be joking. Then I felt emotional, and finally I was just grateful."

The 63-year-old Woo -- best known for his 1987 classic A Better Tomorrow and The Killer two years later -- said he dedicated the Golden Lion prize to his mother, who he said was the first person to take him to the cinema and who encouraged him to follow his cinematic dreams, and to fellow director Cheh Chang, Woo's mentor, who died eight years ago at the age of 79.

Woo was officially presented the prize in a black tie ceremony several hours after the briefing in Venice's sold-out Palazzo del Cinema, just before the world premiere of Reign of Assassins, the thriller Woo co-directed with Chao-Bin Su. Terence Chang is the producer of the film, which tells the story of a skilled assassin in ancient China.

The Reign of Assassins is Woo's third film -- following epics Red Cliff and Red Cliff II -- since Woo returned to China two years ago, after making films exclusively in Hollywood for more than 15 years, where blockbuster titles to his credit include " Broken Arrow," "Face/Off," and "Mission Impossible 2."

"I learned a lot in my years in Hollywood, and I wanted to bring what I learned back to Asia," Woo said. All three films he has made since his return blend aspects of Chinese and Hollywood traditions, according to Woo.

On Friday, he said his respect for both Chinese and Hollywood filmmaking makes him a natural ambassador for each culture to the other.

"I want to be like a bridge between cultures," Woo said. "I want to link the best from east and west in my work. I'm back in China now, but I'm not done working in Hollywood. I want to keep working in both places."

He said future projects will include his first IMAX film " Flying Tigers," a Hollywood-style remake of his award winning Chinese action film The Killer, and another remake, of the 1967 French classic "Le Samourai," originally made by Jean-Paul Melville.

This is Woo's fourth trip to Venice. He has never had a film screen in competition at the world's oldest film festival, but he was the head of the festival's 2004 "Secret History of Asian Film" initiative, he directed one of the three episodes of "All the Invisible Children," which screened out of competition in the festival in 2006, and he was the producer behind Alexi Tan's Blood Brothers, the closing film in Venice the following year.

The 67th Venice Film Festival, which called Friday "John Woo Day," got underway Wednesday and will conclude Sept. 11.