Jackie Chan: My Stunts

Are you a fan of Jackie Chan film's out takes? If yes, this is a must watch for you. In this documentary workshop, Jackie Chan takes you behind the scenes of some of the most exciting stunts he ever performed. He opens up the tricks and techniques used to create his own unique style. This is a great guide to those who want to start their career as an action choreographer. He explains how important is every small details. Even after two decades, this is worth watching.

I learned a lot about the film making techniques in this documentary. Jackie's use of props and camera angles is very clever. But Jackie does seem to pat himself on the back too much.

When he talks about the stuntmen who were seriously hurt in the bus sequence of POLICE STORY, he refers to it in a joking manner. I'm pretty sure those men didn't appreciate being crippled and made fun of.

The scene where Jackie is coreographing Ron Smoorenberg in WHO AM I is insulting. Somehow, it's a common practice in Hong Kong to double actors not because of saftey concerns or because an actor can't do a move, but because an actor can not perform the way the coreographer wants them to perform. Ron was very capable of doing his own action in WHO AM I, but when Jackie was directign his fight with him, he was getting mad at him for not following his rythym. People may say that Ron was the one not keeping up with Jackie, but the fact was that Jackie could not keep up with Ron. As a martial artist, it's a very bad thing if you can't keep up with an opponent's movements, and that reflects badly on Jackie. Rather than work with Ron's skills and limitations, Jackie had him doubled by Bradley James Allen. It seemed pointless to hire Ron for WHO AM I if he was just going ot be doubled for scenes he could easily pulled off, but Jackie showed off how selfish he is in this segment.

Yuen Biao, Jackie's longtime friend in Peking Opera and HK cinema is much more deserving of Jackie's success. He is a better actor, more charming, a better martial artist, and a better stuntman. If only he was willing to learn English, he could be much bigger in the US.

Extremely involved and informative behind the scenes look at Jackie Chan's filmmaking and stuntmaking. He is indeed a perfectionist, very reminiscent of Gene Kelley.

Make sure and watch the Cantonese version unless you absolutely cannot stand subtitles. Jackie is much more fluent and entertaining in his native language (As well as his explanations are much better)

I saw this last night and it was very interesting. He takes you behind the scenes at how he chorographs his fight scenes and stunts. The two films that get the most exposure are Police Story and Who Am I?. He shows you how the bus scene in Police Story (which I consider his greatest stunt of all time) was done by using a modified umbrella. He revisits the Hong Kong mall to show you how everything was done in the film. The films clips also have the original music score, rather than J. Peter Robinson's score used in the U.S. edit. We also see how the fight scene with Dutch fighter Ron Smoorenberg was accomplished. Smoorenberg could not keep up the pace Jackie needed to make the scene work, so he uses his own stuntman Bradley James Allan (considerably smaller than the Dutchman) for some of the scenes. Allan (who has developed a cult status among Jackie fans) gets to show his stuff in his own fight scene made for the video. The only debit for this was Jackie's broken English. Still, he is able to show how it is all done. No question about it, Jackie Chan means action.

If you are at all into the "wow, how did they do that" aspect of filmmaking, this is great stuff. JC shows the technique, training and pure gumption that make these films work. In an increasingly CGI movie environment, JC remains fairly steadfast to what has worked in the past, and talks about it : "hey, we don't have the budget to fake this, so we just gotta do it".