Jackie Chan works on a fight sequence for Drunken Master II in 1993. Chan served as stunt coordinator as well as starring in the film.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.
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. I was just 18, so I was the youngest stunt coordinator in Hong Kong, and I admit I was not very good at it to start with.
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, and after my next movie, I felt I had improved a lot.Then John Woo called you for The Young Dragons… By now, I had learned to speak loud, to speak up for myself. I had also started smoking, and I spoke with a cigarette hanging down from my lip to look older.