TO KUNG FU THANKS FOR EVERYTHING

HE"S JUMPED off the top of buildings, hung from a flying helicopter, had a fight with Bruce Lee, and broken every bone in his body - all to "put the comedy" into his films.  Jackie Chan explains his strange idea of fun.

One night in Hong Kong, three teenage boys are aimlessly wandering the streets of Kowloon when they come across six men on motorcycles.  They are very impressed.  Wow! they think, what great motorcycles!  They look more closely, and one of the bikers stares them down, "What the fuck," he asks, "do you think you're looking at?"

It is 1968.  Fourteen-year-old Jackie Chan and his friends Samo Hung and Yuen Biao have spent 19 hours a day for the last seven years in the harshest martial arts training school on earth.  This is their first street fight, and it is over in 30 seconds.  The six men go down.  The three boys sprint away.  As Jackie does so, he can hear a rhythmic squelching sound.  His shoes are full of blood.  He has been stabbed in the thigh.  As he goes into Whitestone's store to buy some new trousers and clean shoes, he notices something white protruding from his hand.  He assumes it is his own knuckle.  It is, in fact, someone else's tooth.

"After that," says Chan, at 42 the most successful martial arts movie star in the world, "I realized fighting is no good.  Fighting in the movies is like a ballet.  But when the real thing happens, if you hurt somebody else, you hurt yourself too.  I hate violence.  I'm just not that kind of person.  That's why when I'm making a movie I put a lot of comedy into it."

Chan has never used his skills in real life since.  Samo Hung and Yuen Biao have become Hong Kong action icons.  Jackie still doesn't know if any of the six men on the bikes knew any martial arts at all.

Jackie Chan is the biggest film star in the world.  Not in Hollywood money terms of course -- he doesn't have a chain of burger restaurants or a wife who takes her clothes off on Letterman.  But all over Asia, millions of people zealously follow his movie career, and have done for the better part of two decades.  On cinema attendance alone, that makes him bigger than Schwarzenegger, Willis, Carrey...anyone, really.

But in the West, he's merely the best-known and most widely loved hero of straight-to-video chop-socky films.  He's the man whose Police Story, Project A and Drunken Master are acknowledged as classics by martial arts fans, but whose closest brush with the mainstream was in the Burt Reynolds chase fiasco The Cannonball Run back in 1981.  Legendary for his awe-inspiring stunts employed in the interests of breathtaking slapstick, he's only just beginning to emerge from cult status in Europe and America.  He's baffled and not a little hurt that it's taken this long.  With the American cinema release last year of Rumble in The Bronx - which takes his Police Story Hong Kong cop persona on his holiday to New York, where he helps defend his uncle against a marauding biker gang - he's begun to make a sizable impact at the US box office.  American distributor New Line has bought up the rights to the bulk of his past work, and has begun a program releasing one Jackie Chan spectacular every six months.  There's enough there to keep them going for several years yet.  Adding to the new, belated, excitement around Chan, Tarantino is writing a script for him and Stallone already has one that he's changing to make space for Jackie to co-star in.  There's another movie that's ready to go for Chan and Wesley Snipes.  But nothing's happening yet.  "I don't know," he says, genuinely puzzled by the problem, "which one to choose."

Chan was born in the French Embassy in Hong Kong in 1954.  Both of his parents did poorly-paid work there - his father as a cook, his mother as a maid.  Jackie was brought up with all the other embassy kids, and by the time he was three could speak good French.  But this rather cozy upbringing came to an abrupt end when he was six.  Some stories maintain that his parents sold him to Sifu of the Peking Opera School for a nominal fee.  Jackie's version is slightly different: his parents were offered work in the US Embassy in Sydney, Australia, and weren't allowed to take a child with them.  But the pay was too good to turn down, so they sent him to live at the notorious Hong Kong-based performing arts school.  "You've seen the movie Fame?" he asks.  "It was kind of like that."  Only with a few crucial differences.  The school day started at five in the morning and didn't finish until midnight.  Discipline was enforced by random beatings with wooden staves.  You didn't have to do anything wrong to get struck across the head, back or arms with a three-foot baton - it was just something to toughen you up.

Before entry, every child and their parents had to sign a contract with the school, which absolved them of all responsibility should children in their care be injured or, indeed, killed during the course of tuition.

Jackie was taught everything - singing, dancing, and playing traditional Chinese instruments for the opera itself.  But also comedy, acting and, naturally, every conceivable kind of martial art.  He tried to specialize in singing to begin with - the training wasn't as tough.  But he was not really good enough, and was soon put back in with everyone else.  Of the 100 children with him, many dropped out - announcing that their parents had to come to take them out to buy some shoes and then never coming back.  But Jackie's parents were in Australia; he wasn't going anywhere.  After the first year, Jackie got used to the beatings and the 19-hour regimen.  He took things day to day, learning, learning - even though he had no idea what he was learning for.  He decided he should just become very good at fighting.  It seemed as good as anything else.  But in his second year, a film director came to the school to hire six child actors.  Jackie was one of the kids he picked.

Chan made his first screen appearance at the age of eight in a Cantonese melodrama called Big And Little Wong Tin Bar.  Things became easier: when he was working on a movie, he didn't have to train as hard.  He was allowed to sleep until eight in the morning.  At the time, Chinese movies were very quick affairs, and a whole film could be completed within a week.  Jackie would turn up on set as an extra, walk in front of the camera once, and spend the rest of the day just sitting around.  There was no training.  No one hit him.

Jackie quickly grew to love making movies.

Chan's approach to film-making is extremely simple.  No matter how complex the scene, how difficult it might be, or how potentially lethal the stunt, you simply do it again and again until you get it right.  And then, in all likelihood, you do it once more just to see if it can be better or just to show off.

Making one of his first self-directed films, Dragon Lord, in 1982, there wasn't a single scene that required fewer than 100 takes.   One scene required Jackie to conclude a whole series of kicks and blows in a fighting sequence by executing a turning kick to strike a ping-pong-sized ball at a target two inches across, from 20 feet away.  Only after 1,600 takes over two days, to shoot what was designed to be a two-second sequence, did he give up.

"Whatever I do," he says, "I want everything to be real.  Everything to be one take.

And this is the fundamental appeal of a Jackie Chan movie.  Many of the stunts themselves don't seem that spectacular when compared to, say, seeing Arnie fly a Harrier Jump Jet through a skyscraper or Bruce nearly get brained by a landing 747.  Not until you realize that - when falling from a clock tower and crashing to the ground through a series of awnings in Project A, sliding down an electrified pole hung with light bulbs in Police Story or clambering out of a truck filled with footballs as it falls from the top of a building in his latest, Rumble In The Bronx - Chan does literally everything for real.  Himself.  "We don't," he says simply, "like doing cinema tricks.  I just don't want to cheat the audience.  And besides, we can't.  We don't know anything about special effects.  We don't know anything about blue backgrounds.  And if I did, you wouldn't be bothering to interview me.  I'd just be another simple action star."

By the time he was 14, Jackie had gradated from walk-on child extra to trainee stunt man.  In Hong Kong movie-making, all action scenes are handled by an action director, who co-ordinates stunt men in separate teams of anything from 30 to 100 men; the film director is only summoned from his trailer when all the action is complete.  At the lowest level of his stunt team, Jackie would spend most of his day playing dead in the aftermath of the real action scenes: lying on the floor, covered in stage blood and trying not to breathe.  It wasn't exactly demanding or exciting work, but he still wasn't being beaten, and, more importantly, when he wasn't filming he could just sit and watch the action director at work with the stunt teams.  It soon became his dream to become an action director.  But first he had to work his way up from the bottom of the stunt team.  He learned by watching the mistakes of other stunt men.  There was no science or instruction in the increasingly dangerous things the stunt teams were called upon to do.  Most of the time stunts would simply involve getting hurt: it was just a matter of how much.  He'd watch other stunt men half cripple themselves, and make a mental note not to do it that way himself.  And then he'd do it himself.  "That hurt.  Ah.  Well I'm not doing that again."  In order to impress his superiors, no matter how much a stunt hurt, he would simply do it again and again until the director was satisfied.  "The more you learn, the more you get experience."  Within a year Jackie was number one in his stunt team.

Jackie Chan has now sustained so many injuries in his 34 years of movie-making that even he has no idea how many bones he has broken.  His manager - a dapper, mustached and Hawaiian-shirted man called Willie - considers the point for a while.  "All of them, I think," he says vaguely.  But not his neck, surely?  "Oh yes.  Three times." 

In fact, his back has been so badly damaged that the vertebrae have become welded together.  He is in constant pain.  After a stunt involving dangling from the skid of a helicopter by one arm for the Police Story, he has to get up every hour throughout the night to reset his shoulder.  Shooting the Indiana Jones analogue Armor of God in Yugoslavia in 1984, Jackie was required to leap from a castle wall into the branches of a nearby tree.  A simple stunt he executed perfectly the first time.  But then, naturally, he wanted to do it again to show off to his stunt men.  The second time, he missed his footing, slipped out of the tree, and fell head-first on to a rock 40 feet below.  It smashed his skull, punching a piece of bone into his brain, rupturing his eardrum and nearly killing him.  If you ask him, he'll let you feel the scar - a vast, tender area of tissue on the top of his head.  When Jackie's insurers saw the footage of the incident in the traditional Chan credit sequence of out-takes and blown stunts at the end of the completed film, they refused to cover him any more.  No insurance company in the world has agreed to cover either Jackie or any member of his stunt team since.

In 1972, at the age of 18, Jackie did stunt work on Bruce Lee's Fist of Fury, being kicked through a wall by Lee.  The following year he worked with Lee again in Enter the Dragon.  Jackie liked Bruce.  He was always good to stunt men - knowing, as he relied heavily on doubles, how important they were to making him look good on screen.  When they were filming the final fight sequence in which Jackie appears in Dragon, knocked through a window by Lee, Bruce mistimed his hit and struck Chan full in the side of the face with a stick.  Rather than stopping, Jackie reacted as he was supposed to, went down and lay there until the take was completed.  Mortified by his mistake, Lee spent the rest of the day apologizing to Jackie and then ensured he stayed around the set into the evening, earning him double and triple pay.  "Two-hundred dollars US.  That was a lot.  A lot."

Six months later, in July 1978, Jackie was on his way to a bowling alley in Kowloon when he bumped into Bruce, walking down the street.  Lee wanted to know what Jackie was doing.  he asked if he could come bowling too.

"Then I'm so proud, Bruce Lee go with me to the bowling alley.  The whole alley, everyone there wanted him to sign something, so I was like a bodyguard.  No, no, no, go away.  Stay away from Bruce Lee."

But Bruce didn't want to bowl.  He just stood at the back of the alley and watched Jackie play.  Jackie was pretty good at bowling and wanted to show off to Lee.  But every time he turned around to see how impressed Bruce looked, the star's eyes were blank, unfocused.  Eventually Bruce announced that he had to leave and hailed a cab.  As he got into the taxi, Jackie saw the leg of Bruce's flared jeans ride up to show his stack-heeled boots.  Jackie had never noticed how short he was before.  "I've always remembered those high shoes.  It was," says Jackie, "very strange."

It was the last time Jackie saw Bruce Lee.  A few days later, he was dead.

Jackie has never stopped short of doing a stunt because he thinks it's too dangerous.  He says he knows the limits.

"We don't do big American stunts - jumping from 20 stories.  We don't do that.  We do what is human, what is physical."

He stands and gestures through the window, to a building 20 feet away.  

"From here to there, we can jump.  Maybe for you, it's too far.  But for me, it's too close.  So we find another building, maybe higher, maybe further away.  I look at it and think, hmm, maybe I can do that.  That's dangerous enough.  Yes.  I want to jump what ordinary people can't jump.  Just on the limit.  Something that might kill me.  I might die, I might survive."

It isn't getting injured that frightens him.  It is the possibility that he might need an injection, or stitches.  If he cuts himself, he simply sits down and pinches the edges of the wound together until they stick.  Sometimes it takes 20 minutes, sometimes an hour.  If a gash is particularly bad, he uses gaffer tape.  "But my blood," he says, "is very strong."

After Bruce Lee's death, the Hong Kong movie industry threw all its efforts into finding a new king of kung fu.  A complete variety pack of Bruce Lees were put into action as quickly as the notoriously cut-throat buccaneers of the HK industry could knock them out: Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Liang, Bruce Leung.  And despite his name, Jackie Chan - by then the youngest action director in Asia.  "A director said, 'You can acting, you can stunt, you don't need a double.  You want to be a star?'  And I say, 'No!  Can I?'"

Unfortunately he couldn't.  The lead role he had was in Cub Tiger Of Canton.  The film was such a disaster it wasn't even released.  Asian film audiences were growing tired of plotless, acting-free chop-socky travelogues: even Enter the Dragon bombed in HK.  Added to that, Jackie Chan wasn't a really a very good actor.  

So Jackie went to Australia to live with his father.  By day he worked on a building site.  By night, he learned how to cook.  Back in Hong Kong, the search for the new Bruce continued.  Jackie was asked back to star in Fist Of Fury 2.  "Of course - no success.  How can I be better than Bruce Lee?  So I told my father, 'Give me two years.  And if in two years I'm still nothing, then I'm coming back to cook.'"

In one final pitch for success before taking up a career at the wok, he decided to go with the kind of film he wanted to make: kung fu comedy.  The results were Half A Loaf Kung Fu and Snake In The Eagle's Shadow.  Jackie, a keen student of Benny Hill, introduced slapstick into the traditionally po-faced genre, revolutionizing martial arts movies, and, in the process, becoming a star.  By the time he began introducing superhuman set-piece stunts into the formula with Project A in 1984, he had left the competition standing.  Now he controls every aspect of his productions.

As he stands to leave, Jackie is still discussing his fighting technique.  There are, he says, two different types of fighting in his movies.  There is fantasy fighting - where fridges, pinball machines and planks of wood are choreographed into combat sequences.  And then there is the other kind.  The kind when he wants contact.  Real fighting.  But does that mean there's no stage punching in his films?  That it's either prop fighting or full contact?  There are no fake blows pulled at all?

Jackie Chan turns around, still talking, "Oh, we do have a fake punch.  Yes," he says affable.  "Like this?"

His fist flies out from his side at such astonishing speed that I don't see it move.  All there is to indicate the movement is a terrifying cracking sound that echoes around the room like a gunshot, and the air millimeters from my nose being suddenly sucked away.  Jackie Chan smiles pleasantly at my expression of rigid terror.  "Ow," he says, and rubs his shoulder again.  "Ow".