The two actors are Peter Ustinov and Jackie Chan and the reason they are together is that I read one book after another and thought it would be interesting to juxtapose them. I am more familiar with Jackie’s work as I have not seen many movies by Ustinov but his Hercule Poirot was remarkable and I was hoping he would talk about this role in his book but for some reason, he completely ignores it.
Ustinov’s parents arrived in the United Kingdom from Russia during the Russian Revolution, his mother was pregnant, and Peter was born in London in 1921. Peter was a healthy boy at 12 pounds who liked to smile almost constantly.
Ustinov’s father Klop was a German citizen when he arrived in England and worked for the German embassy in London. Around 1938, he renounced his German citizenship and became a British citizen. He was working for the British intelligence and Ustinov remembers strange elderly gentleman visiting their home at odd hours.
Ustinov was active in the acting classes in his school and had already started writing plays. During one of the summer holidays, he appeared in public for the first time in The Wood Demon which was the first version of Uncle Vanya by Chekhov. During this time, he would get letters from his great-uncle Alexandre Benois, who had directed Molière and Goldoni plays at the Moscow Arts Theatre and who used to have frequent quarrels with the great Stanislavsky. The reason? Because Stanislavsky insisted on treating every work of art by the norms he had established for Chekhov.
As the story unfolds, Ustinov digresses from time to time to offer brilliant insights in acting, characterisation and art. Here’s an example,
… the most interesting parts to play are those in which there is a wide span of often divergent characteristics, so that the reactions are unpredictable and only consistent in the end.
On the problem of how many complexities of character you can show in two and half hours, he says,
Chekhov solved the problem by suggesting a constellation of unsaid things, Pirandello spelled out the paradoxes with glacial precision. Shakespeare gave his actors more elbow-room than they really needed.
In 1942, Ustinov’s first professional play, House of Regrets was published and received great praise. At the same time, he received his papers to serve in the military. His time in the military is full of funny and absurd anecdotes, not dissimilar to Catch-22. Fortunately, his fame as a upcoming playwright reached the higher powers in the army and he was reassigned to making documentaries and inspirational movies for rookie soldiers.
An unusual feature of this memoir is that from time to time, there is a dialogue between the author and his spirit or ego. The conversation revolves around his life, why he is leaving out certain parts etc. It makes an interesting reading, often going in tangents on philosophy, psychology, and human nature.
Ustinov was a hugely talented playwright, author, actor, and filmmaker. He did not seem to have suffered the usual torturous road of struggle and rejection that many artists are forced to take. He wrote his first play without any struggle and was on his way to success. Was it an inborn talent alone or did he put in efforts that were hidden, like a seemingly serene duck paddling furiously underwater? Unfortunately, he does provide any insights into his creative process.
This was in stark contrast with the next memoir that I read, of Jackie Chan. Jackie had to struggle so hard for everything, his story sounds superhuman.
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After I got a taste of martial arts movies, I went on the usual pilgrimage that every martial arts fan makes, although the order may vary – from Fist of Fury, Enter the Dragon, 36 Chambers of Shaolin to The Karate Kid and The Drunken Master, with many movies in between. When I saw Jackie Chan on screen for the first time, it was obvious that he stood apart from everyone else.
Jackie Chan fans already know this. Watching a Jackie Chan movie is like going to a restaurant to eat a famous dish. That restaurant is well known for that dish and that’s the reason why you are going there. Rest of the menu is secondary.
When you watch Jackie on screen, you know that he is doing all the action scenes himself, no matter how difficult or impossible they may look. And they do look quite impossible. There are no tricks. In fact, Jackie made it a point to shoot his action scenes in continuous shots without any cuts so that if he is jumping from a building, the camera will follow him from start to finish. The other remarkable feature is his physical ability to jump, contort, have super fast reflexes and great presence of mind. And you don’t necessarily need to watch his action scenes for this. For instance, in Police Story, the ease with which he jumps over a locked gate or from a balcony, it is obvious that he has been doing it all his life.
Jackie was born in Hong Kong. His father was a cook for the French ambassador and his mother managed the ambassador’s household. Jackie was never interested in school, something that he regretted later on. When his father got a better job offer in Australia, he needed time to settle before he could bring his family with him. So he decided to enroll little Jackie, seven years old, in the China Drama Academy. Jackie’s father signed a contract with his teacher that stated that the teacher had full control over Jackie for the next 10 years.
Life at the drama academy was hard, to say the least. The students used to get up at five, and barring breaks for lunch, dinner etc. used to train continuously till 12 am followed by five hours sleep and repeat. The punishments would be considered barbaric by today’s PTA conscious standards.
Incidentally, this process of sending the child to his teacher’s home for education has a long tradition in India. It was called the Gurukul system where the child would stay at the teacher’s house, do all the chores and learn. If we assume that the child received an average of 12 hours training everyday, a period of 10 years takes the cumulative training period to 40,000+ hours, well beyond the 10,000 hours that are needed to achieve excellence in a particular field. I wonder if this system traveled from India to China, along with Buddhism.
Jackie’s life at the drama school was unbearably tough, with days often ending in punishments and physical pain. While the suffering was immense, Jackie is grateful for the discipline and the training that he received there. Even today in his office at the Jackie Chan group, Jackie sweeps the floor when no one is around.
The objective of the Chinese Drama academy was to train the students for Chinese opera. This involved training in martial arts, aerobics, dance, acting, singing etc. By the time Jackie was 17, Chines opera was in decline so that all the students in the academy began working as stuntmen in the movie studios. This was the time when the era of the great Bruce Lee began.
In order to stand out, Jackie used to work long hours, and take up dangerous assignments that no one else would take. This cemented his reputation as a go-to guy who performed impossible stunts. Jackie worked as one of the guys who gets beaten up in Fist of Fury, and later on in Enter the Dragon. He watched Bruce closely and learned from him as much as he could.
The untimely death of Bruce left the Hong Kong movie industry in a lurch. Everyone was trying to find the next Bruce Lee and it did not work. During this time, Jackie was offered few movies where he had to be a serious, aggressive protagonist based on Bruce Lee. The movies did not work. Jackie did not envision himself as a ruthless, revenge seeking protagonist. His favourite artists were Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. He based his goofy character on the physical comedy of Buster Keaton and it took off. Jackie started a new trend in martial arts movies where the protagonist could be goofy, do comedy, get hit – in other words, be human.
Jackie specially mentions Michelle Yeoh with whom he worked in the 1992 movie Police Story 3 : Supercop. Michelle insisted on doing all the stunts herself, including the jaw-dropping sequence where she drives a motorcycle onto a fast moving train. Jackie was super impressed with her and felt that he had to up the ante. So he performed the breathtaking stunt of jumping on a ladder attached to a flying helicopter.
Jackie never storyboarded his action scenes. Before shooting, he would get together with the stunt coordinator, stuntmen and fellow actors and brainstorm on how to do the scene and which props can be used. This did not work when he started working in Hollywood where every action scene was choreographed meticulously. His later Hollywood scripts had this description for action scenes, “Let Jackie Chan design this.”
Jackie is brutally honest in speaking about his faults and that just makes him more human. He comes across as a hardworking, honest guy who surmounted unbelievable obstacles to get to the top. Despite being hugely talented, he had to struggle at every step and his story is an inspiration for all.
