Jackie Chan on his early days as a stuntman, learning the hard way and impressing John Woo
- Chan worked as a stuntman for very little pay, but moved into fight choreography when he saw how powerful a film’s stunt coordinator was
- At just 19, he choreographed stunts and fight scenes for John Woo’s The Young Dragons, and Chan says he ‘knew all the tricks’ by then and exuded confidence
Everyone professes to have a rags-to-riches story, but for Jackie Chan it’s actually true – he really did work his way up from doing stunts to become a martial arts superstar.
You started off working as a stuntman. What made you decide to move into stunt coordination and fight choreography?
Being a stuntman was a low profession in those days. We would just sit there on the set, and the stunt coordinator would say, “We need two people to be dead,” and then they would put some fake blood on us.
I didn’t know the camera angles, I only knew how to do the stunts, like a stuntman. But I thought about how to improve myself
All I had to do was lie there not breathe – that was the job. I was doing things like that every day. But each day on the set, I would watch the stunt coordinator, and I gradually realised how powerful he was.
Everybody took notice of the stunt coordinator. He would direct the actors in the fight scenes, and even operate the camera sometimes. He chose what the actors would do, whether it was a knife-fight, or a somersault – he controlled the whole set.