Jackie Chan is desperate to play a love interest and has put a call out for directors and producers to consider him as the romantic lead in their films.
Speaking in Sydney where his latest actioner, Bleeding Steel, has just started production, the 62-year-old icon partly joked that now he’s in a position to do anything he wants, he wants to do romance.
Chan explained that after an accident forty years ago while filming in Yugoslavia, a number of conditions were put on him.
“No love scenes, no kissing… I couldn’t cut my hair or die in a movie, as Chinese are very superstitious,” he said. “So the first movie where I wrote my own script, my character died. Now I do whatever I want, so please hire me to do a love story. A love story is so easy.”
Love stories aside, Chan, still insist on doing his own stunts, or at least main set pieces. For Bleeding Steel, he’s readying a fight sequence against his nemesis in the film (played by Australian actress Tess Haubrich) that sees them jumping off the roof of the Sydney Opera House, a stunt never before done for a film..
“These kinds of things I still want to do myself,” he says.
After 54 years of flying kicks and jumping through windows, Chan does admits that he puts a little more padding in his shoes, and now uses support wires to soften his landings.
Bleeding Steel, written and directed by Chinese helmer Leo Zhang, Chan is starring in his first ever sci-fi film.
“I’m still young but I’m not as young as I used to be and I still want to do new things,” he explains. “With the directors, the technology, with my real stunts and real action, I wanted to do a sci-fi movie.”
The feature, billed as the biggest budget Chinese film ever to be shot in Australia, is being co-produced by Village Roadshow Pictures Asia and Heyi Pictures, with the support of Screen Australia and Screen NSW. Additional filming will take place in Taipei and Beijing.
The film is being shot in both English and Mandarin in order to appeal to the widest possible market and features a relatively young cast, including newcomer Erica Xia-Hou, who co-wrote the script, 16-year old Taiwanese cellist Nana Ou-Yang, who is starring in her fifth feature film and Chinese TV star Show Luo, as well as Australians Haubrich and Callan Mulvey.
Chan plays a hardened special forces agent who becomes embroiled a major conspiracy while fighting to protect an important witness for a major case. Years later, after the publication of an epic sci-fi novel, the parties behind the conspiracy come to the surface.
, then people from all over the world who study film will learn Chinese instead of us learning English,” the action star said during the Shanghai Film Festival. “]
