Random Thoughts

Anyone who's a fan of Jackie’s movies knows that if he watches the films to the very end, he'll get a sort of ghoulish treat: a selection of his "no-goods," out-takes from stunts and fight sequences that just didn't work out right. A lot of times the result is an injury, and sometimes a bad one. His very worst injury ever, the one that almost killed him, actually occurred on a very routine stunt. He was shooting “Armour of God” in Yugoslavia, and was still recovering from the jet lag of flying twenty hours to get there. The stunt was simple-just jumping down from a castle wall to a tree below. The first time he tried it, the stunt went perfectly, but he wasn't satisfied with the take. He tried it again, and the second time, he somehow missed the branch he was trying to grab. He fell past the tree and onto the ground below. Actually, there was a cameraman down there trying to capture a low angle, and if he hadn't scrambled out of the way, Jackie would have probably landed on him. They would both have been hurt, but not badly. Instead, he hit the rocky ground, head first. A piece of his skull cracked and shot up into his brain, and blood poured from his ears. The production team quickly got on the phones to try to find the nearest hospital that could do emergency brain surgery, and eight hours later, he was going under the knife. The operation was successful, and Jackie recovered quickly - even though there's a permanent hole in his head now, with a plastic plug there to keep his brains in.
The “Armour of God” fall also left him hard-of-hearing in one ear.

As far as action is concerned, “Police Story” is Jackie’s favorite movie that he ever made, a real whirlwind of slam-bang stunts and wild fights from beginning to end.
There is a point in the movie where he finally puts the drop on the gangsters once and for all. Of course, he had to put the drop on himself in order to do it--literally. After a glass-shattering fight inside a shopping mall, he spotted his target several floors below, on the ground level of an open atrium. The only way to get down from his perch in time to do his policeman's duty was to take a flying leap into the air, grab a hold of a pole wrapped in twinkling Christmas lights, and slide a hundred feet to the ground--through a glass-and-wood partition, onto the hard marble tile. He had to do this in one take, so he crossed his fingers and prayed that he'd hit the stunt the first time (and that he'd hit the ground softly). He made his jump, grabbed the pole, and watched the twinkling lights crack and pop all the way down, in an explosion of shattering glass and electrical sparks. Then he hit the glass. And then he hit the floor. Somehow he managed to survive with a collection of ugly bruises ... and second-degree burns on the skin of his fingers and palms. He has had a lot of back injuries doing his movies, but the pole-slide scene in “Police Story” almost paralyzed him when he nearly broke the seventh and eighth vertebrae in his spine.

After a wild bicycle chase through Hong Kong's back alleys, Jackie finds himself high in the air, dangling from the hands of a giant clock face. With no other way to get down than fall, he let go--and crashed through a series of cloth canopies before smashing into the ground. He had to do this one three times before he was satisfied with the way it looked. “I wouldn't want to do it a fourth time”, he says smiling. Jackie has hurt his neck a lot, but one of his worst neck injuries happened during the clock-tower fall in “Project A.”

No Way to Ride a Bus, “Police Story II”

Going Down ... in “Who Am I?”