words yvonne teh

“Hong Kong audiences are smart,” says singer-actor Jaycee Chan, scion of none other than Jackie Chan and Lin Fong Chiao. “They won’t go to watch a stupid movie to show support. But if it’s a good movie, they’ll go to support it, like my dad’s movies, Chow Sing Chi’s movies, Mo Gan Toh (Infernal Affairs).”

That doesn’t mean to say Chan knows whether his latest movie Invisible Target will draw the audiences or not. The actioner is the latest from director Benny Chan (Big Bullet; New Police Story) and has Jaycee, Nicholas Tse and Shawn Yue playing a young police trio who team up to thwart and bring to justice a band of notorious robbers know as the Ronin Gang. “But,” he hastens to add, “it’s a movie we used our hearts to make. We put our lives on the line; we jumped from buildings and into fires.”

Come on! Real fires? “Yes, there’s no CG,” he says. “It was all real and we jumped into it! That’s why I said we used our hearts.” As they make a bid for the hearts of the audience, Chan says, the film is not just all blood and thunder – it has its share of touching scenes as well. Indeed, when asked what he would like the audience to know as they enter the cinema he says, “First, the stunts are real but also action is not the most important thing about the movie. Actually, it’s half of the most important part but the other half is drama.” And that is how he personally likes it.

Lest we forget, Jaycee Chan actually began his entertainment career as a singer. With the Godfather of Taiwanese pop music, Jonathan Lee, as his sifu, he released an album of 13 songs (10 of which he composed himself) entitled Jaycee in 2004. Following that, although he did venture into action (fantasy) films with an appearance in The Twins Effect II, 2004 was also marked by a starring role in 2 Young, a tearjerker directed by Derek Yee (C’est la Vie, Mon Cherie; Protégé) that has more in common with the Taiwanese weepies Chan’s mother starred in back in the ’70s than the action offerings his father is known for.

For the record, Chan has actually completed work on three other films, yet to be released. Invisible Target will thus make for his fourth official movie appearance and it’s understandable someone so early in his career would declare, “I don’t want to be typecast at all.” And, if anything, his leanings are towards drama rather than action. “At first, when I heard that Invisible Target was an action movie, it didn’t attract me at all,” he says. In fact he continues with a laugh, “I said, ‘No, bye, bye!’” to those, including director Benny Chan, who sought him out for the role of Wai King Ho, the dedicated, by-the-book cop who’s “always on duty, in police mode, never just a normal citizen”.

He tends to find action work “so annoying that I might not do another action movie... or maybe [just do] a movie with less action”. And then elaborates with an example on why working on actioners are so trying: “Even before jumping into a fire, I had to put a cold glue or wax onto my body. It was like 4 degrees [Celsius] in Hong Kong and I had to put on that freezing liquid!” As a result, the cold of the protective coating ended up hurting more than the heat from the fire!

Yet, at the same time, the exertions aren’t only physical. Rather, as Chan points out, “It was also mental because you have to really think. Every single shot we did, I needed to get all tensed up because I could get injured really easily if I was not focused. So that actually takes more energy than anything.” Additionally, even before shooting began, actors had to devote a significant amount of time and energy preparing for the action work by “doing a lot of exercise and getting our muscles used to impact, taking impact and stuff like that”.

So what then got him to agree to appear in Invisible Target? For one thing, he found himself unable to resist the persuasive skills of its director. As Jaycee laughingly admits, “Benny Chan just charmed me to death”; so well that, for all of the younger man’s protestations that his work “wasn’t showy, it wasn’t tricky, it wasn’t slick and cool, it was just something that had to be done”, he ended up jumping off a building and into a fire!

Benny Chan also got Jaycee to see himself as the character he plays in the movie. Which was important to the singer-actor because, as he discloses, his approach to acting is natural to the point that “I just change my name to whatever character the director wants”. With that in mind, Chan’s following thoughts about his Invisible Target character can only take on added resonance: “My character is sort of teaching the other two ‘I might not be as tough physically as you guys, I might not be smarter than you guys, and I’m by the book, but I’ve got a will, I’m a more honourable person’ – and that hits them and sorts of changes them at the end.”