Supercop interview
This summer, mainstream America got its first taste of Michelle Khan when Miramax released a dubbed and edited version of 1992's Supercop (the third installment of Jackie Chan's popular Police Story films). The Hong Kong hit has Chan sent to China, where he and Khan go undercover to break up a crime syndicate. Their assignment ends with a chase involving Chan leaping from a building to a rope ladder dangling from a helicopter and Khan jumping a motorcycle onto a moving train.
The film's director, ex-stunt man Stanley Tong, thought it would be a good idea to team up Khan with Chan. "Never before in a Jackie Chan movie can you see a girl who can fight," he explained. "It became competitive, and the film benefits because you're not just seeing him; you're seeing another action star who's female and they're both raising each other up one notch." She and Chan risk life and limb with such reckless abandon that it's easy to forget how truly dangerous the stunts really are.
Although Miramax tried to package Khan as something new, the Hong Kong film industry and its fans have been enjoying Khan's work for years. Khan first gained attention as a tough cop in Yes, Madam! (1985). Then, after only a few films, she married producer Dickson Poon, but they divorced. Afterward, Supercop marked her comeback.
In addition to playing the cop role in Yes, Madam!, Khan displayed her martial arts skills in such period films as The Tai Chi Master (1993), Wing Chun (1994) and futuristic fantasies such as The Heroic Trio (1993) and its dark sequel, The Executioners (1994). Her stuntwork in Supercop earned her a spin-off, Project S (1993), and most recently, she played a dramatic role alongside Maggie Cheung and Cherie Chung in a historic epic, The Soong Sisters (1995).
Giant Robot met Khan at Miramax's Los Angeles office when she was in town to dub Supercop into English. It was hard to believe that this petite, good-humored, one-time beauty queen was the same lethal lady who tears up the screen with such focus and intensity.
GIANT ROBOT: Okay, So how does a Miss Malaysia Beauty contest winner become the top female action star in Hong Kong?
MICHELLE KHAN: I knew it was gonna come back to me one day. I studied in England and when I graduated I was home for my holidays and I was waiting to go back to England to finish my masters in dance. For some reason, my mom and her friends thought that it was going to be a great experience and basically good fun for me to be in a beauty contest. So they entered me without my knowledge. For a year I was Miss Malaysia and as the year came to an end, I was offered to do a commercial in Hong Kong. Somebody had Jackie Chan agree to do this commercial and he was trying to find the right girl. And my friend suggested me. So I hopped on a plane, got there and did the commercial and then they offered me a film contract for two years. Twelve years ago, if someone had come up to me and said one day you are going to be an actress, I would have laughed my head off. I had always wanted to be a dancer, I had always wanted to be a choreographer, I had always wanted to be a teacher, anything to do with dance. Anything to do with drama was the furthest thing from my mind. Because when I did my bachelor of arts degree, I minored in drama because I figured drama would help me with my expression, but the English take drama very seriously, in the sense that you are always studying Shakespeare and Ibsen, and oh my god, it just went on and on. I used to hate it with such a passion. But that's how I went from being a beauty queen to doing a commercial, and the next thing I knew I was an actress.
GIANT ROBOT: You had been trained as a ballet dancer...so how was it moving into martial arts work?
MICHELLE KHAN: It was a tremendous asset. Every little girl should have the opportunity to have ballet training because it teaches you such control of your body. But for me, ever since I could walk, I mean I think I danced before I walked. At the age of four I had been going to ballet classes because I loved movement. I was very sporty when I was a kid. I was always on the athletics team, I was a swimmer, I was a diver, I was a squash player, everything to do with movement. So when they approached me to do an action movie, it felt like the next right thing to do. It was more movement and more challenges and new things to do. So I got very obsessed in a way with it. Which was good, because it was necessary. You had to be very dedicated, and having a dance background helped because I was very focused mentally and physically on a certain art form, and now it was a new art form. It was similar, yet different. So having that as a background made it easier in the transition. But then of course, once I was there, I discovered that dance was very different from martial arts (laughs). And it took me a long time, it took a lot of hard work. It took many hours just to get the little details. Getting the power and the force and the energy, you just have to practice very hard, punching into a bag, having someone to spar with you and holding a punch bag up for you. You're doing like a few hundred kicks this way and that way. As long as you're dedicated, it will come to you. But what I had to learn was that being a martial artist is a very specific kind of look‹it's the little details, the little movements of the shoulder, of the hand, of the head, that completed the whole image. I don't profess to be, I can't profess to be, a martial artist because I've never been formally trained. I've never gone through the belts system because I never had the time in that way. Once I started a movie, I was literally thrown in the deep end. Learning has been a lot of pain (laughs) but fortunately it's been fun.
GIANT ROBOT: Now you do a lot of stunt work in addition to the martial arts. How is that to do?
MICHELLE KHAN: For me it was just totally unacceptable that someone else would do my stunts. It was supposed to be me, so why should anybody else do it? It was a big barrier to break at that time for the directors and the coordinators because when I started to do action movies it was already such a new thing, a woman doing action movies? My god. My director, I swear, for a few weeks he couldn't sleep. It was going to be one of his first movies back in Hong Kong and he would be doing an action movie which he was very well known for doing, but with women, with girls, a beauty queen, a dancer. So I could imagine all the nightmares he was having. But when we started to work on the movie, he insisted that he meet me and train with me. So I think at the time when he came to watch me train, he became more convinced that I was willing to take the blows and that I wasn't going to be like a pansy and cry every single time someone took a hit at me. So that just broke open the doors for me and for women coming in to do action movies. But the stunt work is something that I choose to do myself because it is such a thrill to be able to do it. I remember the very first movie I did, I used to stand there and think, he can do it, why can't I. You know? He hasn't got an extra arm or an extra leg. It's physically possible. It's such a kick to be standing like three floors up and take a dive, you have to be a little bit crazy but when you get passed that stage, it's awesome.
GIANT ROBOT: In a lot of your films now, there is a lot of wire work. How does that compare to doing the martial arts work, the more realistic action work?
MICHELLE KHAN: Well, in period movies, because of the Chinese period history and background, you find that people at that time, people with martial arts, could fly. They could walk on water and now we can't do it without the help of wires. And actually it is not fun. Because you are just strapped into a corset the whole time and you have no control of your movements. You are trying to stay there and hoping nothing snaps around you. And in Hong Kong they have to use wires that are thin enough so that they can hide it on the screen because we can't afford to have them erased on computers. I wish we could, then we could have cables and we would be very happy hanging there for the entire day. But you are hanging there very precariously, your entire life is really on the line, on this thin little wire. And there are four or five guys on the other side of the cable who are holding on to your life. And these poor guys are running around trying to make you fly. And if one of them trips, it's quite a nasty little experience for you. And wires have been known to break. I prefer more contemporary work because it is a little bit more realistic, in a way it is harder work, but to me it is more fulfilling.
GIANT ROBOT: The first action film you did was Yes, Madam! So how was that received at the time?
MICHELLE KHAN: Well, it was so good that I've been doing action movies ever since. When we came out with it we thought, well, the women will like it. We were confident that the women would not turn their backs on us. But the most amazing thing was that the men loved it. The men were the ones who dragged their girlfriends. Yes, Madam! was also very pleasing to the eye because of the kind of martial arts that we did. We didn't want it to be too hard core, we wanted the family to be able to come in and watch it. At the same time we wanted to be able to convince these people that we were fighting for real, we were not just messing around and having a good time out there. So we did a few big stunts, but the style of fighting was a little bit more acrobatic. We took the advantage of being women, and used that grace, if a guy did it they would probably go, ummm? That looks a little funny. But with women it worked a lot better, we didn't want to be very butch and very hard in that way. So that movie just really made it for me. It made me an action star overnight. Literally in Asia. It's been like that since.
GIANT ROBOT: Do you specialize in a particular style of martial arts?
MICHELLE KHAN: I do a number of different kinds. I wouldn't dare to say that I do a particular style, it's too embarrassing. You see every time I do a movie, if you do a contemporary movie there is no particular style, you don't have to end up doing the tiger's claw or whatever, it is only people like Jet Li who does period movies who end up doing it in that way. Then that kind of martial arts was the thing to do. Like in the Jackie Chan's films Supercop, it's contemporary. If you were faced with that situation, you're not going to go (demonstrates a stylized martial arts stance), you don't have time for that. You just go in there and get out of that situation. When it comes to modern-day street fighting, you just go in there and kill the person, beat his head in.
GIANT ROBOT: One thing that impressed me about the Hong Kong films is that there are many strong female action stars. In America you can point to Aliens and T2 for female action roles, but that's about it.
MICHELLE KHAN: But I think it's gonna change here in the states. Hopefully, Supercop is gonna make a difference. I also think here with action movies, with the safety standard, many things are not allowed to be done on a set. Whereas in Hong Kong, it's so much more flexible. So I think that makes a big difference here. Maybe it's because some producers think the audience here is not ready or was not ready to accept that. But when you approach a subject like this, you can't test it with a little tap. You can't have the woman come out and do two things and then think, okay, let's see if that's gonna work. You have to hit them in the face and get them going with that and take them by the hand, and let's run together and have fun, and hopefully this is what's going to happen.
GIANT ROBOT: Can you describe some of the stunts you did for Supercop?
MICHELLE KHAN: Oh, my God. Actually when I was dubbing the film, I was standing there with my mouth open going, "I can't believe I did that." Both Jackie and myself we do some really mind-boggling stunts. The audience must remember that we don't work with and did not work with blue screens or green screens, no digital effects, the moving train, the helicopter, the bike scenes that you see are for real. It was so funny because I had someone watch this movie with me and they were going, "Wow, the blue screen effects in Hong Kong are really good." I was going, "There's none. That's a real train, that's the real background. That train is really chugging along." I'm actually amazed that I actually walked out from that movie and was still in one piece. I do an incredible bike stunt and I think the most incredible thing is that I learned to ride the bike about two weeks before I was supposed to do the stunt. And until today, I still haven't learned how to stop a bike. I just know how to get on the bike, rev it up, make it go really fast, get to where I want to go and jump off. I could have really hurt myself really bad in that movie. I was rolling off the top of a van and onto another moving car which Jackie was driving. And I had fallen...well, you know when things are moving around, you sometimes can't find the right spot to land, and at that time I just completely missed it. I was very lucky that Jackie was there and he literally saved my neck. If not, I would have just slid off the car and gone crashing head down onto the road. And that is an outtake that you will be able to see at the end of the movie.
GIANT ROBOT: Now how was Jackie to work with? I had interviewed Stanley Tong and he said there was a good sense of competitiveness between the two of you.
MICHELLE KHAN: I think competition is good, but it was very healthy competition because Jackie has always been like my big brother. He was always the gentleman, he was always trying to watch out for me. He was always going up to Stanley saying "She's not going to do that. It's too dangerous." Then he would come up to me and say, "It's okay, Michelle, I already told Stanley that it's too dangerous for you to do. You don't have to be hanging off the side of the van for that shot." Stanley and I have also known each other for a long time, ever since Stanley was a stunt man in one of my previous movies. So we all go back a long ways. So we all know each other's character and personalities very, very well. Too well! At the beginning of the movie, it was Stanley who persuaded me to do this movie because I had taken like a three or four year break from the industry. And it was him who came to me with this movie and said that it would be his first major big movie and he had Jackie Chan, the biggest male action star. He was very sweet to say that I was the biggest female action star, though retired at that time. I chose to work with them because it was good to come out on a new movie with friends that were so close. It was like family, but I had a big condition for Stanley at that time. If I came out and did this movie with Jackie, I was not going to be one of his other girls who always got bullied in the movie who never got to do any action. I wanted to be another Jackie Chan on the screen. Jackie being Jackie was like, okay let's see what you can do. And so it was great. When we got there and we started to work on the movie, it was like sparks began to hit the air. It was like you're gonna do this, then I'm gonna have to do that. And it's tougher on Jackie because for me, as a woman, you always have that edge in the sense that people don't expect that much from you. And then when I do something, Jackie has to do three times more. Just to balance it out. And it is very unfair to him. I mean I was dying to do the helicopter scene. And then Stanley would say to me, "Michelle, wake up, if you do the helicopter scene what is poor Jackie going to do?" (laughs) That was the thing. That's the intensity that you see in Supercop. It was great fun because it was not unfriendly, we were just trying to outdo each other, but in the nicest possible way. And when you are working with someone that you know so well, it just makes life so much easier. You can go up to that person and say, "I'm gonna kill you," and then two seconds later everything is going to be okay.
Copyrights of Michelle's Studio 1998
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