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Jackie Chan at the Crossroads
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It takes a little while for the non-action movie fan to come around to Jackie Chan's mode of cool. He's had genre devotees (even disciples) for a while, but as his popularity continues to swell, it's plain that his fan base now extends far beyond the reach of any genre. Just who is this guy? Small and cheery, he belongs to no visible evolutionary line of action heroes-not the stoic-Existential branch (Eastwood, Willis) or the sheetmetal cyborg line (Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwarzeneggar). His movies eschew gunplay and dismemberment, bigass explosions and cool apocalypse. He catches no rides on low boil noir-no jutting cigarette, no habit-acquired squint. And if there are erotic sub-plots, even of the for-the-sake-of-it sort Bruce Lee settled on, they must be rare. You won't catch Chan stroking himself with baleful wit or raising tension to the maximum by waiting forever to act (American action heroes are almost always slower than everyone else on screen). Jackie's the opposite of all that. He's the opposite of the strategic pace, of the good/bad/ugly heroics, of irony, of height and the cool aside. He's Jackie, clean and boyish-and although he may or may not nail a scene with his acting, hand him a pool cue and before you can say "superhero" he's embodied the smarts and elan of a Cole Porter lyric.
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| First Strike (1996); Rumble in the Bronx (1995);Rush Hour (1998) |
The new school involved no reading or writing, only endless days of drill in gymnastics, acrobatics, singing and tumbling that would prepare him for the Peking Opera. The discipline was such that to this day he can remember picking up kernels of rice with moistened finger-tips as he ate to avoid being caned. (He still sweeps on his film sets just to stay busy between takes.) He spent a decade at the China Drama Academy before graduating to the opera, which was beginning to fade as a popular entertainment in the late 1960s. He started working as a stuntman to make extra money, and it would be years after that, in the early '70s, before Jackie found his way into the movies.
He writes that his head swelled when money and fame first came his way. But in person today he is unfailingly polite and courteous. He's also, very visibly, Jackie the cute martial arts hero who made his name playing the anti-Bruce Lee. Where Lee starred in revenger tragedies, Chan became a player in comedies that showcased his amazing quickness, his resourceful improvisational fighting. This is not the guy who once wore endless loops of gold on his wrists and neck announcing himself. Today, at the height of his fame, he's modest, and dressed so he could pass for a million other tourists, in plain white running shoes, white trousers and a sucrose-colored wind-breaker that makes the sound of a thousand zippers when he moves. He's the kind of guy you could lose in a crowd. Until he sits down, that is, and you catch a wave of that jittery energy he describes in the biography. He sits on the couch talking animatedly, with quick, chopping sentences and a tendency to accompany descriptions of his fighting scenes with his own little-boy sound-effects.
Here to talk about Rush Hour, which has just broken New Line's weekend box office record, Chan doesn't mind a little dish about Hollywood. Rush Hour is the first film he's made in the U.S. since 1981, when he initially tried to break into the North American market, and he seems a little surprised the film is doing so well. Why? Movies take so long to make here! Every little thing takes so much time! "After I show them stunts they take four hour to set up!" He confided this to his friend, the director Stanley Tong, too. Tong confirms that Chan bristles when the process prevents him from doing what he does best, which is fight for 10 or 12 minutes while the cameras run.
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| Rumble in the Bronx (1995) |
Tong has been part of this revolution for Chan, too. For years, Chan's basic film plots beat even "Xena: Warrior Princess" for simplicity. There was some vague challenge to a temple, a kung-fu club, a what have you. The task for Jackie (and sometimes he is known in these films as Jackie Chan) was to get things back to normal, to rid the town of its pollution. He achieved eye-popping effects with his body alone. But as Tong explains, by the mid-'80s you could tell when a Chan movie was coming to a close: Jackie entered a warehouse crawling with bad guys. "Very predictable," Tong says dryly.
You can fault pretty much every Chan script for its threadbare plotting. But his fans hardly regard the lack of a Hitchcock-style McGuffin as a minus. His films have just about no cultural ambition of the sort that made The Terminator great in the 1980s, or North by Northwest great a generation ago, for that matter. But a Jackie Chan movie holds your attention for reasons much closer to the surface. Famous for using no stuntmen, his work often involves less acting than sheer performative daring that combines the circus, improvisational theater, and seat-of-your pants vaudeville. Chan is only a serviceable actor, but his movies can be breathtaking because of the performances. With Jackie it's him, it's his body-the trick is that there's no trick at all. In Hong Kong, the stunt trade is simple, Chan says. "You do the stunt, and if you die, you die." That's been the appeal, too. Check the Chan websites, talk to the fans. What do they admire? List after thrilling list X-rays the heart of the martial arts fighting that Chan knows (Shaolin, Snake, Crane, Drunken Fist, Dragon, etc.) against the style of fighting he uses on film (a combination!). Writers separate the 1970s "chopsocky" movies from the ones he began to make in the '80s (Dragon Lord, Project A), when he brought comedy and more spectacular stunts into play. There are obsessive FAQs that keep track of the top 10 stunts (lots from Rumble in the Bronx and Police Story) and cover the Asian market versions of films versus the American versions (those who know say to always get the Chinese language versions, though be careful that the distributor is giving you the real thing.)
Chan is acutely aware of his fan base. Before Rush Hour he was offered many movie jobs in the U.S., which he refused. "They are not a Jackie Chan movie," he says, listing the bad Asian guy roles he was offered for a long time. And while he complains about Rush Hour, one gets the impression he accepted it because it's part of the evolving style. It works harder than his last few movies to bring together plot and action, for one thing. As brilliant as his previous films were as collections of stunts, Rush Hour evolved into a sort of concept album (think of early Elvis versus later Elvis).
He can credit Stanley Tong, who directed him in Super Cop, Rumble in the Bronx and First Strike with some of that new innovative thinking. Tong claims that he basically introduced Jackie Chan, the man and the movie star, to North American-style eye-popping effects. Where Jackie objected to any stunt that didn't focus on his physical abilities, Tong argued that he had to face the fact that sometimes the bad guys wear guns and shoot bullets. Sometimes it was worth it, Tong said, for Chan to skedaddle out of the frame to save his own skin. Before Tong, the typical Chan feature closed on a toe-to-toe karate-fest. The stuff now had to have larger motifs: Tong first introduced Chan to the thrills of skiing (water and snow, neither of which Jackie had ever done days before he shot the scenes); to the pleasures of hanging from a helicopter, to scuba diving, to Bond, James Bond; to fighting with sharks, to the hovercraft (which Tong had to talk Chan into: "anyone can drive a hovercraft," Chan protested.)
It's in this decade that his work has gathered itself into a playful, witty physical eloquence. Rush Hour trades giddily on the skills that critics have increasingly noticed Chan sharing with silent film comedians Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and with the silky beauty of Fred Astaire. In the long opening sequence in which Chan arrives in the U.S., he works without dialogue. Playing Inspector Lee, Hong Kong's finest stunt detective-or whatever-he gets flown to L.A. when the Chinese ambassador's daughter has been kidnaped and the ambassador will trust her discovery to no one else. Disturbed, the FBI recruits a large, verbally oppressive L.A. cop (Chris Tucker) to keep Inspector Lee away from the FBI's investigation of the kidnaping.
This sets the stage for Chan/Lee's arrival in America. Trying to elude Tucker, Lee threads and unthreads himself out of a series of moving vehicles like so many slipknots until he arrives in the middle of the bureau's work. On top of a tour bus, Lee hangs off a street sign (which reads "Hollywood"), drops onto the back of a truck carrying rugs, tumbles through the sunroof of a mildly surprised family's mobile home, and then tucks and rolls from there into a moving taxicab. It's a dazzling set of stunts, linked like pieces in a manual-wind watch. Throughout, Chan's face is expressionless, very much the silent film star. Whatever else you may think of the film's flimsy plot or slapstick dialogue, this sequence is undeniably in the master's groove.
Chan's silence is a shrewd comment on what has become a bromide about him, that he is the last of a breed that began with Keaton, Chaplin, et. al. They were, Chan writes in his biography, "the first action heroes." But what did he learn, specifically? From Keaton and Chaplin, he says, he learned "situation comedy," by which he means letting the audience feel the danger of a stunt rather than telegraphing it through his character's facial expressions. And the dancers, Astaire and Gene Kelly? "I see them, I say, this kind of tempo, this kind of rhythm is good for fighting.' Because if you're just fighting-bong-bong-bong pah-pow–bong–bong," says Chan, chopping at the air, "it is boring."
"I want to show something in my movies, some technique," he continues. "American movies show you how to fight and break arms and necks. I want to make action in my movies like dancing."
Chan's been honing that technique for three decades. Since the late '60s he's worked as the stunt choreographer on almost all his films. In the early days the cool of that was almost unspeakable. And it's not like a giant math problem for him, either. He's naturally good at it. "Everybody knows that first meeting with me I give them all the ideas like that," he says. He reads a scene, asks the director if there should be action, and when he gets a yes, like automatic writing he comes up with whole sequences on the spot. "Ask anybody in Hollywood-they say, 'Jackie, wait. Hold on! I have to write this down.' But you can ask me tomorrow again. I remember."
That finale stunt in Rush Hour, where Chan hangs from an air duct 16 or 17 stories from the ground? Chan thought about that for a half second.
Jackie goes on. "I think in Hollywood the big action stars, they just training, waiting for a script. But myself, I have to survive, so I have to write."
Suddenly Chan jumps up from the couch. He calls to his assistant in Mandarin. "I show you my secret," he tells me. "Nobody knows." A cafe au lait colored leather carry-on bag appears in the room-a piece of luggage Chan bought on his first trip to the U.S.
"Every day my life is a creating," he says, unzipping the bag. He pulls out a fat wallet and gingerly draws out four or five thin sheets of paper, which he lays on the table. "Here is all my script," he says, displaying neat columns of Chinese characters. "Taken with me more than 20 years, wherever I go."
Forty or more movies on these four or five sheets? Is it code? Some kind of Mandarin haiku? What does he mean? Chan leans over the table and points to a couple of the characters. Rumble in the Bronx. And to another: Project A II."
In one or two characters? "I just write a little bit. Then I know." He points to another character. "Here it says fight in bar.'"
It's a trigger for him, helped, no doubt, by the
visual element in the Chinese characters themselves. With one image,
all of the steps, all the feints, punches, and soaring leaps come
back to him.
And for ideas, he keeps a folder of pictures and shows me collages of gizmos
and Bond-like contraptions from one glossy Hong Kong magazine. "Maybe
a story on spies. But I keep things, anything could be a prop. Wherever I go
I keep it, all the tricks, all the details. So many tiny things. Later I will
get my secretary to combine it all onto one piece of paper. It's money. It's
my secret. I never tell anybody."
Tong says later that Chan has a backlog of stunts, too. On the set of Super Cop Chan told Tong that he wanted a scene in which he drove the bad guy's truck. Tong, worried about stunts topping stunts in one film, convinced him to put that aside for another day. (It would turn up, finally, in Mr. Nice Guy.)
As for the credit-sharing, Tong allows that he conceived of major stunts in their three films, but it was Chan's roll, playing Lennon to his McCartney, to finesse the idea. A note like "fighting with refrigerators" needs to get worked out a little.
And his next creation? Despite the success of Rush Hour, Chan has returned to Hong Kong. As you read this he will likely have wrapped The Glass City. He's concerned that Rush Hour, with merely five set-piece stunts, will alienate his massive Asian audience, which demands many more fights, chases, flights down snowy mountains and netless leaps from rooftops. But there's another reason for him to return to Hong Kong. This movie will be a romance, with almost no action at all.
"I know I cannot do action movie forever," he says, almost wistfully.
At 44, Jackie admits that he's at a crossroads, and
one can't help wondering if this screen hero, whose early life
so resembles Chaplin's, hasn't considered a future that might include
peril and romance as versions of each other, a la Chaplin-romance,
maybe, as the ultimate stunt. Is there a Jackie Chan future that
includes a dozen slamming refrigerator doors and, um, yearning?
Is that too much to ask? MM
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by baggirl on 9/23/08 at 11:03 pm
Wow, Jackie Chan, a famous kongfu star in China even around the world. Watched several breathtaking movies starred by him, wonderful~~
- Comment by lUggagerUitar on 10/27/08 at 7:46 pm
No pains, no gains. I believe Jackie Chan’s hard work contributes to his ultimate success. To tell the truth, I don’t think he is handsome at all, but he has made every effort to become a good actor, that’s enough.
- Comment by Jackie Chan on 1/28/10 at 1:20 pm
Jackie Chan Is such a wonderful person , his heart is filled with kindness. No wonder he is so blessed because he shared a lot.
- Comment by Jackie Chan on 1/29/10 at 8:47 am
From action choreography to comedy; from screenwriting to production; from singing to a rib-tickling comedian – he has seen it all and more importantly, he has done it all. Visit the link to see Jackie Chan in his various flavors.
- Comment by ghazala on 4/07/10 at 10:40 pm
hi
jackie you did well in movie tuxido,rush hour and rob b hood .i.e, i came to know that your agood actor as well as kung fu star.yesterday it was 7april, happy birthday and happy returns of the day.- Comment by reshma on 4/07/10 at 10:45 pm
hey jackie ,
happy birthday to u .me and my sister we both are your fan .me and my sister wants to meet you.we both watch your movies.and always fight for seeing u in our dreams .but i know she is your big fan.- Comment by reshma on 4/07/10 at 10:51 pm
hi jackie,
ghazala is my sister .and she always remember your birthday .but she is always busy in her work .thats why she forgot to post a comment.she collected many photos of your in her personal diary.really she is your great fan.i hope you could meet her someday.she is not at all big she is only 15yrs and study in 11 class.- Comment by شات الحب on 3/21/11 at 5:16 am
