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MAKING MOVIES
I realize now that I’ve talked a lot about making Jackie Chan movies,
without really explaining what it’s like actually to make a Jackie Chan movie.
If you’ve seen one of my films, and you probably have if you’re reading
this book, then you may have some idea of the things that make my movies
different from American action movies. (If you haven’t, put this book down and
go rent one now! You can find them at your local video store.) (Hopefully.)
In most action movies, the hero is usually a perfect fighting machine—a
killer who never loses a battle and who hardly ever gets hurt.
In my movies, I get beaten up all the time. It’s not that I like
looking like a loser; it’s just that that’s the way life is. You
lose, and lose, and lose, and then, with any kind of luck, you eventually find
a way to win. Life isn’t about winning every battle; it’s about
winning the ones that count. It’s like the difference between martial arts
tournaments and real fighting.
In a tournament, the winner is the person who tallies up the most
points.
In real fighting, the winner is the person who throws the last
punch. You can be beaten to a pulp and about to fall over, but if you can
reach inside yourself for the energy to throw the final blow that knocks your
opponent out before you’re knocked out yourself, you win.
My characters aren’t perfect, and usually they don’t even like to
fight. But they fight when they have to, and they win when they have
to. That’s what counts.
The second thing you’ll notice is that American movies always cut away
from the action during stunts. Someone will be falling out a window, and
then the camera will go to a reaction shot— “Oh, my god, you threw him out the
window!”—and then down to the ground, to show the broken body. It’s
obvious why they’re doing this: no Hollywood actor is really going to jump out
a three-story window for the sake of a movie. Every stunt is done with
doubles, or special protective equipment, or computer animation. It’s
safer that way, but it’s fake—and no matter how good the effects are, people
can tell.
In my movies, the camera shows the fall. All the way down.
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There’s no way of faking it, and no way of switching in a stunt
double. What you see on the camera is exactly what we did. Even if it
almost killed us to do it!
And American fight scenes are quick and deadly. Someone like a
Steven Seagal will kill or maim dozens of people in one scene, bang bang bang,
one after the next, like he’s eating candy. Not even Bruce Lee went
through opponents that quickly. But in America, the idea seems to be that
the longer it takes to beat someone, the weaker the hero seems to be; a
hero has to be a superman, able to take out normal people in the wink of an
eye.
Compared to that, in my movies, the fights go on forever! Part of
the reason for this is reality—fights are hardly ever decided by a single
punch; they keep going until someone gets lucky or wears the opponent
down. But most of the reason is that the fighting in my movies isn’t just
a means to an end. People watch my films to see good fights, not to see
people get knocked out. I do with my fistfights what my old friend John
Woo does with his gun battles—make them into a thing of beauty, an intricately
choreographed dance.
And this leads to another important difference between American movies
and my movies. As I mentioned earlier, the action scenes in American films
are pretty much scripted out every step of the way. Every punch and kick
and tumble has to be storyboarded in advance, because the stuntmen or special
effects people have to be prepared for what’s going to happen.
In the scripts for my films, the fights are barely described—it’s just, “Jackie
fights the henchman as they climb the scaffolding.” How the fight goes is
completely up in the air, because it’s all decided right before the cameras
roll. I think of different props I want to use, and my stuntmen suggest
different fighting stunts to incorporate. We’ll stand and brainstorm
around the location, trying out different techniques. It’s slow work,
maybe, but the results are worth it—every screen fight that I’ve ever shot is
completely integrated with the scenery, the props, and even the
bystanders. It’s like jazz: I never know what’s going to come out until
the mood and the environment come together.
A garden rake can be used to pull out someone’s legs or to vault up to a
ledge, can be spun like a staff or swung like a club. A rope becomes a
whip, a restraining device, a tangling net. A barrel, a ladder, a chain-link
fence—all can be thrown together in a dozen different ways, and until I’m
actually there with my stunt team, weaving the scene together, I don’t know
which way will look best on screen.
You can see how difficult this would be to do on a Hollywood set, where
every second lost is a hundred dollars wasted. There isn’t much room for
inspiration, and even less for innovation.
I’m in the middle of making my first Hollywood film in over a decade
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right now—Rush Hour, which costars a young comedian named Chris
Tucker. He’s very good, definitely coming up fast. He gets the funny
lines, but I get the big action scenes, so I guess it’s pretty even.
The studio is sparing nothing to make me feel like I’m a star. I
have a beautiful rented mansion, a luxurious trailer on the set, a personal
trainer, and a car standing by at all times. Even my stuntmen have their own
private rooms. In my Hong Kong movies, we squeeze together, share what we
have to, and eat lunch together all out of the same big pot. I do
everything and anything I want to—I’m the director, the producer, the
cameraman, the prop guy, the janitor. Anything. Here, they won’t let
me do anything except act. They won’t even let me stand around so they can
check the lighting—they have a stand-in,
my height, my color, wearing my clothes, come in, and they check the lighting
off of him while I sit in my trailer.
Dialogue scenes seem to take forever. Fighting scenes go by very
quickly. We spend ten days doing dialogue, and two days doing
action. In Hong Kong, we spend twenty days doing action, and two days
doing dialogue.
I guess it’s because Americans like to talk so much. But at least
this time, I can do the stunts and fights my way. Or as close to my way as
I can, in one-tenth the time, and under all of Hollywood’s rules.
The first day of the production, we went to a location to examine how it
might be used in a later scene. There was a window on the second story that I
was supposed to climb into, and the director wanted to know how I’d be able to
do it. Luckily, there were a few trees around the house, so I pointed out
that I’d run up one tree, jump to another tree, and then jump from there to the
window, about twenty feet off the ground. The director didn’t understand,
so I took off my shoes and showed him—up the tree, over to the other tree, and
over to the window.
Well, that caused the director’s jaw to drop open. Once he realized
I could do it, he penciled in the location as a shooting site. A day
later, we did a rehearsal, and I did the stunt again and again to frame the
shot for the cameras. And then, a day after that, the actual day of
shooting came. I went over to the first tree, got about halfway up, and
then someone shouted out, “Cut! Stop filming!”
Three insurance guys were standing around the director, shouting at
him. “He can’t do that,” they were saying. “What if he falls and gets
hurt?” The director tried to explain to them that I’d already done it five
or six times, but they wouldn’t listen.
It took several hours for them to rig padded mats so that they’d catch
me if I fell, and all the camera angles had to be changed to hide them from
view.
I’m not saying it’s wrong to take precautions, especially when actors’ lives are at stake.
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But in Hong Kong, we trust
our training to protect us even where a padded mattress won’t. No one’s
ever gotten killed on one of my movies—there are always injuries, but never
anything that’s ended a life or a career. We just have different systems,
and going from the Hong Kong way to the Hollywood way has taken some getting
used to.
The really great thing
about the Hollywood way, of course, is that you can get just about anything you
need—equipment, locations, props—without worrying about cost or time. If
you need a Steadicam, it’s yours. When we need that kind of a shot on my
movies, we rig something up with bungee cords and try to walk in as smoothly as
possible. What about a crane for a sweeping overhead shot? No
problem. In Hong Kong, we take a ladder, put one guy on top with the
camera, and get ten people to lift the ladder and turn it around.
The quality of our results
is worse than Hollywood films, but not by as much as you’d think. And
besides, look at what that means for Hollywood: Speed 2. Batman and Robin.
Titanic. $100 million, $200 million budgets. Out of all three,
only Titanic made money, because it’s a good film. But in most of
Asia, my latest film beat Titanic at the box office.
I just wonder what kind of
movie I’d make if someone gave me $100 million to play with. My most
expensive film cost U.S.$20 million to make. If I had $100 million, I bet
I could make a movie that looked like $300 million. No private jets, no
mansions, no luxurious trailers, no fancy food. Everything up on the
screen. Nothing but ideas and pictures.
And action.
Some of my best movies have
begun with just a strange offhand idea. When I began Police Story,
it was right after finishing The Protector. I’d decided that I
wanted to do a movie about a cop—my way. And I wanted to make it as
spectacular as possible. While walking around Hong Kong, which has gone
from being a city of small, almost suffocatingly cramped buildings into a city
of giant skyscrapers, I noticed how much of the landscape had become dominated
by steel—and glass.
I immediately arranged a
meeting with Edward Tang, and told him I wanted to do a film in which the
action played with glass—breaking it, smashing through it, falling onto
it.
It sounds a little silly,
but that was how Police Story, which my stuntmen nicknamed Glass
Story, began. There are lots of amazing stunts in the film—the opening
sequence, which features a breakneck car chase down a mountainside and through
a shantytown composed of old shacks; the scene that follows right after,
in which I use an umbrella to hook onto the back of a speeding double-decker
bus, and then use it to pull myself up and into the bus after a hectic flying
ride around the city.
But the scene that was most
dangerous and most memorable was the
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final
battle, which took place in a crowded shopping mall. Glass is everywhere,
being shot up, being shattered by fists and bodies.
To
make it look as real as possible, I ordered special breakthrough glass from a
supplier in America, asking that it be made twice as thick as ordinary “sugar
glass.” This made it twice as dangerous, of course; people were
getting bruised and cut all the time, and at one point, Willie was going back
and forth from the set to the hospital every day, taking over new injured
people and checking on the ones who were already hurt. But anything less
would not have had the same effect.
The
movie’s last stunt—the superstunt—was the pièce de résistance. To try and
catch the boss gangster, who’s trying to escape with the evidence of his
crimes, I have to make a desperate leap from five stories up, grabbing onto a
chandelier made of twinkling lights, strung along a series of thick
wires. I slide down the wires, sending sparks and broken glass flying on
my way down, and then crash through a series of glass overhangs, before finally
hitting the ground.
We
could use the shopping center only after it closed in the evening, so we had to
work fast; there were only so many hours in the night. By the time
the construction team had hung the wires and set up the layers of glass, the
sun was about to rise, so we had to hang black cloth over the mall’s atrium
roof to block out the early rays of dawn. The shops opened at 10 A.M., and we had to be
finished, cleaned up, and out of there by 9:30. There were two hundred
extras and twelve cameramen standing around waiting all night, not to mention
my costars, Brigitte Lin, who played a witness I was assigned to protect, and
Maggie Cheung, who played my longtime girlfriend.
We
had only one chance to make the stunt work, because otherwise we’d never get
the place put back in order by our deadline. The cameras started rolling,
and the mall went quiet. I leaped from the third-story balcony, and slid,
and slid, and fell, and crashed. Glass exploded in all directions, and
there I was, flat on my back on the hard floor of the ground
level. Everyone held their breath, not knowing if I was hurt, and if so,
how badly. And despite the pain throughout my body, especially my hands, I
managed to stand up.
And
the whole mall, all the extras and the cast and crew, began to clap, even
without hearing the word “cut” that would tell the cameras to stop
rolling. Brigitte and Maggie ran over to me, tears running down their
faces. The stunt was a success.
While
sliding down the light wires, I burned all the skin off my fingers and
palms. I had blood running down my face and glass sticking into my legs
and torso. But still... the stunt was a success.
Every
time I make a new film, I’m thinking about how to push the envelope—to surprise
the audience, to do something different.
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Sometimes
it’s in the stunts; how do I make them bigger, faster, harder, riskier? Sometimes
it’s in the stories; what can I do that goes against the trends? If
everyone is doing period films, I want to do a modern film. If everyone is
using guns, I want to use fists. There’s a formula to my films—people expect
certain things out of a Jackie Chan film—but within those expectations, I want
to give people a shock.
After
I’d done Project A, a period piece, I did Police Story, which was
set in the present day. Then, since Police Story took place in Hong
Kong, I decided I wanted to do something in a foreign country, so I made Armor
of God, teaming up with pop singer Alan Tam and Lola Forner, the Spanish
model who’d been my costar in Wheels on Meals.
This
time, my character was a daredevil treasure hunter named Asian Hawk, hired by a
wealthy man to recover the pieces of a mystical artifact. The character
and story line were inspired by Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones, but the
action was Jackie Chan action—fists and flying bodies, not guns and flying
bullets.
I’ll
always remember Armor of God as the movie that brought me closer to
dying than I’ve ever been. As you might guess, the stunts in the film were
pretty spectacular, but the one that almost killed me was actually a very
simple one, jumping from the top of a wall onto the limb of a tree. The
branch wouldn’t hold my weight, and I ended up falling to the ground, smashing
my head against a rock so hard that blood began pouring from my ears.
We
were filming on location in Yugoslavia, and the hospitals there were not as
advanced as one might hope. Luck, as usual, was on my side, however: it
just so happened that the city we were closest to was also the home of the
country’s most famous brain specialist.
After
having surgery to remove the piece of bone that had been pushed into my cranium
by the rock, I spent six weeks recovering, and was soon ready to begin filming
once more. Determined to conquer my fears, I went back and did the jump
again. This time, the stunt was a success—as was the movie, which became
the third biggest grossing film in the history of Hong Kong cinema.
Maybe
the news stories about my near-death experience helped to sell the film; I
don’t know. (If that’s true, I want to go on the record as saying that, as
dedicated as I am to making movies, there are some things I don’t ever
want to go through again, even for the sake of success.)
After
Armor of God, I reunited with my brothers again for the sequel Project
A II, and then for a film called Dragons Forever—an ironic title,
considering that it was the last film in which we three “dragons” have appeared
on screen the costars.
In
some ways, it was our finest cinematic moment, with memorable characters and
terrific fight sequences, including the first-ever battle
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In other ways, it was a sad
sendoff: the tensions that lay just beneath the surface of our relationships
finally exploded during that production, and when the shoot wrapped, we went
our separate ways. It was a few years before we talked again, and a few
more years before we worked with one another again—did a cameo appearance in
Yuen Biao’s directorial debut, The Kid from Tibet, and asked Samo to be
my action director for the movie Thunderbolt. He followed that up
by directing me in Mr. Nice Guy, one of my most recent films.
I think that, after a
decade of being irritated and resentful toward one another, Samo and Yuen Biao
and I have finally come to a point where we’re past the differences that
pulled us apart. We’ve even talked about projects that might put us
together again, in front of the cameras. Still talking. Still waiting
for the right time and the right project.
Our awkward breakup and our
recent reconciliation is just more proof to me that things change. Even
the best friendships occasionally run aground. Tastes and trends and
fashions are always shifting. And, at forty-four years old, I can’t afford
to let myself feel too comfortable, too trapped in my habits.
I’ve always said that all I
want to do is make Jackie Chan films, but I’ve reinvented the Jackie Chan film
over and over again during my career. I don’t like to think about it too
much—it hurts more than all of the injuries I’ve suffered over the years—but
there will eventually come a time when I physically won’t be able to do what
Jackie Chan does, at least this version of Jackie Chan.
Can a fifty-year-old man
still jump off buildings? At fifty-five, will I be fast enough and nimble
enough to move and fight the way I want to, and the way my audiences expect me
to? What kind of stunts could a sixty-year-old Jackie Chan perform?
I know that eventually I’ll
have to start a new phase in my life, one in which I’ll actually need to get
medical insurance!
Over the years, I’ve tried
to prepare myself for that time. Through Golden Way, the production company
I created under the mantle of Golden Harvest, I’ve produced dozens of films—from
action movies like Naughty Boys and The Inspector Wears Skirts,
to romances and historical dramas like Rouge and Centre Stage. I’ve
helped to launch the careers of other performers—giving my good friend Anita
Mui a chance to step from singing into the movies with Rouge; providing
a platform for Michelle Yeoh to make her action comeback in Supercop;
showcasing new, young talent in most of my recent films, from Rumble in
the Bronx to my just-completed Who Am I?
And I’ve also put my
efforts behind businesses and pursuits that have nothing to do with movies at
all.
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Through the JC Group, the
company that I founded with
Willie as managing director, I’ve bought real estate, launched clothing lines,
opened coffee shops—and given millions of dollars to charity.
I’m
even a partner in the restaurant chain Planet Hollywood, along with American
stars like Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone. I’m the only Asian performer
they asked to join their group, which seemed kind of unfair; that’s why I
recently agreed to invest in a new theme restaurant chain, Star East, which
will showcase Chinese entertainers in the same way that Planet Hollywood
showcases American actors and actresses. The visionary and lead investor in
Star East is Alan Tam, my old costar in Armour of God. Many of my good
friends in the industry are part of the group as well, as we’ve already opened
restaurants in Shanghai and in Pasadena, California. Who knows? We could be
opening one in your neighborhood sometime soon.
All
of these activities will probably keep me busy long after I’ve stopped doing
action films—but I’m not ready to give up making movies anytime soon. A couple
of years ago, I had a talk with Willie about my career, in which he told me how
worried he was about the pounding my body had gotten over all these years.
“Jackie,
you can’t keep this up forever,” he told me.
I
laughed at him. “Forever is a long time,” I said. “I’m not going to be around
that long anyway.”
“Be
serious, Jackie,” he said, puffing on a pipe I’d bought for him while I was
scouting locations for my newest movie. The doctor had made Willie quit smoking
cigarettes some years before, so he’d switched over to pipe tobacco—still not a
very good habit, but one that was easier on the lungs and heart. “I’m saying
this not because I want to be depressing, but because I’m tired of visiting you
in the hospital all the time. And I can’t imagine you don’t think about this
yourself.”
Well,
I did think about it... once in a while. “Look, Willie, I know that eventually,
I’ll have to change my life and my career,” I said. “But I’ve got a lot of good
years left in me yet.”
Willie
puffed and smiled. “Of course you do, Jackie,” he said. “Of course you do. The
secret is to extend your action years as long as possible. And, as much as you’re
not going to like this solution, your old Uncle Willie has an idea about how
you can keep on making movies and cut down on wear and tear.”
The
Hong Kong style of filmmaking, which was the only one I really knew, depended
too much on physical ability and personal risk, he pointed out. “The answer is
that you need to start learning another style,” he continued. “Not to replace
your style, but to add to it.”
I
leaned back in my chair and nearly fell over backward as it hit me what he was
suggesting. “You mean go back to Hollywood!” I said, almost as an accusation.
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Willie
nodded. “Whatever you may think about American movie-making, Jackie, the truth
is, an action star’s career lasts longer in Hollywood,” he said. “Look at
Harrison Ford—in his fifties, still doing action movies. Sylvester Stallone and
Arnold Schwarzenegger both are older than you, and they can still make action
movies. You learn special effects, you learn how to use blue screens, and
bingo! Ten, fifteen more years of action. And I’m not saying you can’t keep
putting yourself in the hospital whenever you want to. This just gives you an
option.”
Thoughts
raced through my mind. I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t try to jump blindly
into the American market again—that I wouldn’t let myself suffer those kinds of
humiliations. But then again, Golden Harvest was already in negotiations to
sell my current films to studios in the U.S., and Raymond was dropping
not-so-subtle hints that an extended trip to America for publicity purposes was
somewhere in my future. And the main reason I’d vowed not to go back was
because I didn’t want to be shaped into someone I wasn’t. Now that my style and
reputation and image were known throughout Asia (and much of the rest of the
world), maybe I could finally return and make a Hollywood film my way. As
Jackie Chan.
Besides,
I’d always had two lingering dreams that my previous American adventures had
not fulfilled. The first was to have a big, glitzy, gala opening night
premiere, with photographers and velvet ropes and celebrities, just like on TV.
The second was to get my hands and name printed in the cement outside of the
famous Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. By every other measure, I guess I
could consider myself a star—but somehow, those two things seemed to make all
the difference in the world.
“I
suppose it can’t hurt to explore the possibility,” I said, finally.
“Beautiful,
Jackie,” said Willie. “Once more into the breach! Or, more precisely—third time’s
the charm.”
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