‘Why in Hollywood don't they have style anymore? It's all special effects nowadays. They don't try to improve the stunt work. Nowadays, all they improve is the computer. When I was younger I learned a lot from Hollywood -- now everyone learns from me.' Maybe this is the East -- West divide, the divorce of actor and explosion, of star and danger/ death. Chan, with reference to the gangsters involved in the Hong Kong movie industry, once insisted:' It is is better to deal with a Godfather than an accountant'. In Hollywood they often equate as the same thing. But the bottom line in whatever culture is money: what brings in the audience. And Jackie Chan's derring-do does. His most outlandish stunt involved jumping from a building to a rope ladder hanging beneath a hovering helicopter and then riding it around for half an hour of extraordinary action in ‘Police Story 3': ‘I decide all the stunts so if I think I can do it I'll try it. Everything fits into the movie. A long time ago the movies didn't have much flow: there was just fighting. Now, the story has some logic'. As he explains during his Hong Kong/ Hollywood commuting trips:' If I am not doing a certain stunt in this or that movie I don't know when I'll be able to do it. The helicopter was in that one so I must jump. I'm thinking I might not have a helicopter stunt in the next movie so if I don't do it here, I don't know when I will. Of course, I'm scared.Before a practice you tell the helicopter how far you can jump, put them in the right place. But the helicopter pilot couldn't see exactly where I was telling him to go -- the helicopter pilot told me if I had jumped onto the ladder and something went wrong with the ‘copter he would have pushed a button releasing the ladder and down I would go. That's scary. ‘He said: “ I'll have to let you go otherwise my ‘copter would go down”. ‘Of course, there's a mat down there but I'm ten stories high. A mat would be like putting a sponge down there'. On ‘Supercop' he got hit by a helicopter. He was hanging on a pole that was supposed to swing over a passing train while the helicopter flew by. But the crew didn't secure the rope to the pole and when they tried to pull the pole our over the train it stayed in place. ‘And the helicopter came along and boom!', says Chan apparently amused by the story. ‘I was out, totally out. It always happens this kind of thing. It makes me very angry. What an experience! I had nowhere to go.' He nearly died on 1986's ‘Armour of God' during a ‘routine' stunt: he leaped onto a tree which snapped dropping him forty feet onto a rock which smashed his skull. ‘I had just jumped a seven story fall.This was only fifteen feet, nothing. I did it OK but I didn't think it looked good enough. I did it again and the tree broke.......' |
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