BROTHERS ABROAD [295 a 297]

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BROTHERS ABROAD

After the success of Project A, Golden Harvest was eager to greenlight more adventures of the Three Brothers, and we quickly found ourselves with Leonard’s blessing to increase our expected budget to an unexpected level—about U.S.$3.5 million, which seems like nothing compared to Hollywood spending (just one fifty-seventh of a Titanic). To us, though, it was a blockbuster amount. Leonard had told me that I’d never have to approve a budget for one of my movies, but he still got increasingly nervous as the money added up, especially after the failure of Dragon Lord. This time he was saying, “Go ahead and spend; I trust you.” It probably helped that the director for our next project was Samo, who had a good reputation inside Golden Harvest for making films on time and under cost. 

Unlike me, I guess. 

But Samo had some big ideas of his own for Meals on Wheels, our next film project. Instead of filming it in Hong Kong—or even elsewhere in Asia—he wanted to bring a crew to Spain, to shoot on location there. 

“Chinese people in Spain?” I asked him, confused as to his logic. 

“Hey, Bruce shot in Rome, right?” he said. “There are Chinese people everywhere. It’s a pain in the ass to shoot in Hong Kong anyway—too ​​crowded, too many bureaucrats. Think of it as breaking new ground. We’re bringing Hong Kong cinema to the world!” 

Samo was right about one thing: by using new and different locations, not to mention non-Asian costars, we were able to make a film that looked like more than just a Chinese picture. It looked and felt like an international film, something that anyone could watch and understand, with a little translation. 

The worldwide success of Wheels on Meals—a superstitious executive had made us reverse the words, claiming that movies beginning with M had always failed for the studio—made Golden Harvest sit up and take notice.

Golden Harvest had made English-language films for the U.S. market, and sometimes featured Asian stars (like me) alongside American ones. It had made Chinese films for the Asian market, and distributed these films in a small way in the U.S. and in Europe. 

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But it had never made Chinese films that were intended from the very beginning to be released around the world. 

The appeal of Cantonese cinema was considered to be limited, due to its low production values, the difficulty of translation, and its lack of internationally recognized stars. 

Samo’s movies showed a way we might be able to get around these barriers. And, even though I knew that our major market would be Asia for a very long time, it started me thinking about the future and what it might hold. Hong Kong’s movie industry had been considered a little cousin to Hollywood too long, I thought. If America could export its product around the world, why couldn’t Hong Kong do so, too? 

We didn’t have the money, or the technical expertise, or the marketing and distribution clout of the American studios, but we had things that Hollywood didn’t have—including the kind of raw, yet beautifully choreographed action that required intense training and “unacceptable” risks to create. The training Yuen Biao and Samo and I went through would be considered child abuse in the U.S. And the risks that we take on the set, day after day, would cause us to be shut down by the unions or by insurance companies. (No one has been willing to insure a Jackie Chan film since Dragon Lord. Whenever someone gets hurt on one of my sets, I pay for all of the treatment myself, out of my own pocket.)

But that’s what makes our movies unique. 

Ten years later, take a look at Hollywood today. Every major Hong Kong action film director has been recruited to shoot American pictures—from John Woo to Tsui Hark to Ringo Lam, and more. Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, and I, we’ve all recently done Hollywood films. And even the pictures that aren’t shot by Hong Kong directors and that don’t feature a Hong Kong star—every frame, every sequence, every choreographed turn, twist, and leap—you couldn’t copy a Hong Kong film more closely if you used a Xerox machine. 

Things sure do change, don’t they? 

Samo and Yuen Biao and I continued to make films together—some more installments in the Lucky Stars series, until it ran out of gas, and then a dramatic change of pace called Heart of Dragon, in which I played a Hong Kong police officer and Samo played my retarded older brother. Samo’s relationship with me in the movie was similar in some ways to the relationship between Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise in Rain Man. Of course, Heart of Dragon came out two years earlier—not that I’m saying that Barry Levinson copied me and Samo! 

But Heart of Dragon was as risky a project for Hong Kong as Rain Man was for Hollywood. Compared to our other films, it had very little action. Golden Harvest wasn’t sure that people wanted to see me as a dramatic actor. 

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I wasn’t so sure they did either. But Samo was insistent—the film was a way for us to break new ground, he maintained. Wheels on Meals proved that a real Hong Kong film could be made on foreign soil using a mixed cast. Heart of Dragon would prove that a rich, powerful story and complex characters could coexist with action—unlike most other movies, where the martial arts came first and the dialogue and characters were usually added later.

The film did moderately well in Hong Kong, though it was a disappointment compared to our other films. Golden Harvest even made Samo shoot additional fight scenes, which were added for the film’s release in Japan. The movie’s failure to take off left Samo morose and irritable, and he and I soon fell back into our squabbling ways. 

It was time for a break, a chance to give us time away from each other. 

Coincidentally, time away from my brothers—and Hong Kong in general—was exactly what Golden Harvest had planned for me. Having proven that my star was still bright in Asia, they wanted me to try one more time to break through to a new set of audiences. 

Well, not so new, actually. I’d tried, and failed, to succeed there in the past. And I wasn’t enthusiastic about returning, especially in the middle of my successful run in Hong Kong. 

“I’m sorry, Jackie,” said Willie as he broke the news. “I can understand why you’re reluctant, but there’s no help for it. You’re going to have to go back.” 

Back to America.