Revealed: martial arts star Jackie Chan on Bruce Lee – ‘Everyone treated him like a god’, but I knew I could never be him
- In a previously unpublished 1997 interview with the Post’s Richard James Havis, Jackie Chan reveals what he learned from Bruce Lee and his martial arts career
- ‘I just admired him. The way he talked, the way he punched,’ Chan says. He also saw the pressure Lee was under, and learned not to ‘try and be a superhero’
Jackie Chan admired Bruce Lee, and said he learned some valuable lessons about fame from him. Read what Chan really thought about Lee in this unpublished interview with Post journalist Richard James Havis from 1997.
Richard James Havis: How did you come to work as a stunt double on Lee’s Fist of Fury?
What was Bruce Lee like to be around at that time?
There were always 30 or 40 people around Bruce Lee then, and whatever he said, they would say ‘yes’ to. I really noticed that. Everybody treated him like a king or a god. Some of my friends were good at kung fu, and they would do that, they would just say yes to him all the time.
I would think, ‘Don’t be like that, you may not be better than him, but you are still good’. But Lee was already the top guy. The whole world was praising Bruce Lee.
How did Bruce Lee influence you?
He influenced me a lot, but I knew I could never be him. He was the king of martial arts, and I just admired him. The way he talked, the way he punched, even the way he spoke was impressive. He was a really good talker!
Because he was born in the US, he was more open than us. Everyone liked him, he was very good to us, very good to the low-class people, and he didn’t really care that much about the big bosses.
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What did you think of jeet kune do as a [martial arts] style?
He did boxing, karate, judo, taekwondo and Chinese kung fu, that was basically what jeet kune do consisted of. The foundations of his style were not that different, but the combination was different. Then he got famous and everyone wanted to know jeet kune do. If I opened a school, I could call the style ‘Caesar salad do’. It would include boxing, judo, northern style martial arts, everything.
Everything started with wing chun, it seems.
Yes, Bruce Lee was mainly wing chun combined with Muhammad Ali-style boxing. It was all in the way he moved – the way he moved made him famous. He was also the first to do some things on film.
Everyone knew how to fight with the two sticks, but he was the first to use that on film, so everyone thought it was his invention. But it was actually a traditional weapon. The same for the kicking. He was the first one to put the side kick, the double kick, in a movie.
If you put something in a movie and you do it first, it becomes your thing. That’s because when you watch one of my films, you are focused on me!
What was Bruce Lee like to work with on set?
Well, when we had finished shooting in the day, he needed some more people to work at night. He looked at the stunt coordinator and said, ‘I need Jackie’. I was so happy – that meant I would get overtime pay until the next morning! So Bruce Lee got me more money. That was the first time I made US$200 in one day – it was actually double pay for me.
Bruce was great, because he got me even more money by telling the stunt coordinator it was a dangerous stunt – but it wasn’t a dangerous stunt. He was just trying to help me get paid more, and that made me so happy.
How did you feel when you saw Fist of Fury?
Bruce Lee got my one of my [fight] brothers [probably Yuen Wah] to do some somersaults, as he could not do somersaults. When the movie came out, we went to see it together in the cinema and everybody clapped when Bruce did the somersault. I said, ‘That’s not Bruce Lee, that’s you!” I also said. “That’s not the Japanese guy, it’s me!”
We were stunt doubles – our job was to make the actors look good. That’s when I realised that I wanted to be a star myself. So from then on, I wanted to let people know it was me on the screen. I didn’t want to be a double. When you look at a Jackie Chan movie, you can see it’s me. Sometimes I don’t do the stunt perfectly but it’s still me.
Do you think that superstardom was bad for Bruce Lee as a martial artist?
Well, I think you could say a lot of people killed Bruce Lee. There were so many rumours about him when he was working in Hong Kong, rumours about the incredible things that he was supposed to be able to do. People were always pushing him, pushing him too hard.
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I remember that people at first were saying he could punch at 100lbs, then straight after that they were saying he could punch at 700lbs. And he would do one kick, and everyone would say later that he actually did three kicks, not one. And then they were saying he was training to do a one-finger punch which could break a wall.
He was under so much pressure to be a superhero, and that was not good for him. That’s one thing I learned from his life – do not try and be a superhero.
