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I'm sure that Zhang Lanxin could be an outstanding action movie actress. For one thing, she wouldn't require a stand-in. As for Yao Xingtong, she might be an excellent action performer in her next life.
Every time I make an American film I just trust the American director and American writer. Myself, I would never make this kind of film. For me, those kinds of films are ridiculous. They don't make sense.
Making a Hollywood film you don't have a very big movie because they have a Safety Captain and insurance people on the set. They have to check first. 'Don't do it. Let me check. Make sure everything is safe.'
I allowed myself to be bullied because I was scared and didn't know how to defend myself. I was bullied until I prevented a new student from being bullied. By standing up for him, I learned to stand up for myself.
When I go out, people look at me with a puzzled expression on their faces thinking, "You're Jackie Chan?". When people stare at me, it makes me uncomfortable. More and more I find that I just stay in my hotel when I am working.
I really like to be by myself and if I do go out to look around, I dress in jeans. My secretary is constantly telling me to dress up, shave and look your best because people know you. That bothers me. I just want to be natural.
Actually, the few good Chinese movies that foreign countries choose to import are Zhang Yimou's, and mine, a few directors, but how many movies can we make in a year? We can only make a few, while they turn them out continuously.
The action star's life is very short. Back in Asia, I can do whatever I want to do. I'm the producer, I'm the director, I can do so many things, but in Hollywood any time I present a script they say: "No, no, no, Rush Hour 3, Rush Hour 4."
As a father, I always want my son to be perfect. When he was young, I tried to train him in martial arts, but he said, 'I don't want to become like Bruce Lee's son, with everybody telling me how good my father was.' I just think my son is too lazy.
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American stuntmen are smart - they think about safety. When they do a jump in a car, they calculate everything: the speed, the distance... But in Hong Kong, we don't know how to count. Everything we do is a guess. If you've got the guts, you do it. All of my stuntmen have gotten hurt.
Even during the promotion I told people that I didn't like Rush Hour. The jokes I didn't understand and the fighting, compared to my Hong Kong films was terrible. A lot of people didn't like it. But mostly people did like it, they really liked it. Rush Hour really brought me to the American family audience.
It is totally different making films in the East than in the West. In the East, I make my own Jackie Chan films, and it's like my family. Sometimes I pick up the camera because I choreograph all the fighting scenes, even when I'm not fighting. I don't have my own chair. I just sit on the set with everybody.
In the past decade, there have been a lot of friends or directors, either gossiping or telling me directly, "What you're doing now is the right thing, your main concern should be taking care of yourself, and not doing action at your age." Well, after first feeling angry, I'd think, to be honest, I really am older. So I thought, all right, but before I retire I'd like to make one last major action film, one good one.
I asked each if [Yao Xingtong and Zhang Lanxin] was afraid of heights. Each said no, and although they had never had the action movie experience they were willing to be trained. Then I asked if they could swim, and each said yes, but she (gestures toward YX) is better. She said, I can also dive, in fact I once won a diving championship in an international competition. Then she said, "But big brother, I'm not very strong," and I said that's all right.
One thing we haven't mentioned is something everyone should understand very clearly. Look at the budget that was invested in 'Avatar': who in China has that kind of money to spend on making a movie? So we as Chinese filmmakers should work together to make Chinese movies that can compete as best we can for Chinese audiences, not make lousy movies, but make the best we can for that audience. Concentrate the money, the talent we have on making good movies [for China].
Most of the time I'm not even working, I'm just helping people, because I feel that I am too lucky. If there really is a god, then he really looks after me. All these years he's taken care of me, my career keeps getting better and better. Whatever I want just seems to come. And it keeps coming. So I promised myself that I have to pay for this, payback society. So this is why I started my Jackie Chan Foundation to help children and sick kids and people in hospitals.
First, there are many who can fight, but they're small in stature; Zhang Lanxin is 177 cm [5'9"+] tall, with very long hands and legs, and very quick. In the scenes, I tried to show all of her special strengths and qualities. Plus, Zhang Lanxin has extraordinary staying power: it was only yesterday at the airport that I saw her cell phone photos from the hospital where she was having blood clots in her knee being cleared up, and I hadn't known till then that she had this problem.
I'm very pessimistic about that, no matter how hard we may try. The Chinese market is huge, but out of last year's $2 billion box office, $1.8 billion was taken in by foreign movies, and just $200 million by our own movies, no matter how much we have learned of their techniques, or their good practices. The Hollywood movies imported into China are all good movies; does the U.S. make lousy movies? Yes, too many lousy movies, but the imports are good films, so how can they not be box office hits? They're all hits.
Back in the Bruce Lee era, and in my era, Kung-Fu stirred up a kind of frenzy, and many people were learning martial arts from us. But about a decade ago, Hollywood began bringing in a number of our action choreographers, including two from my own stunt crew, where they became martial arts directors. Now, a decade later, Hollywood has learned it all, so when you look at the action films they're making now, they all use our action, our martial arts, and then add to that their own technology which is ten times better than ours, and it has to leave us dumbfounded: how did they film that?