Richard Norton
"Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars" HKL Interview:
For anyone who's never worked on Hong Kong movies, it's different than
you can ever imagine shooting a movie can ever be. So I ended up in HK,
a few choreography ideas in my head and everything, we shoot a few
scenes and then I'm sitting around for 3 weeks before the actual
fighting starts. I ended up doing a couple of small fight scenes with
Jackie, but he injured his shoulder doing another movie, because often
they shoot 2 movies simultaneously. So the big fight was left to myself
and Sammo Hung. Of course he is a legend in martial art movies. Well, I
remember after the first night of shooting, first of all we shoot 18
hours a day, for 3 and a half weeks straight, seven days a week, in the
studio it never was under 115 degrees, no airconditioning, I'm dying. I
weight a little less than I do now, I still lost 18 pounds in 3 1/2
weeks. Because the fighting was just full on, vertually full body
contact, a certain amount of facial contact, and I'm fighting with
Sammo Hung... To anyone who have seen Sammo, you'd think this guy
couldn't possibly move to save his life, and one of the first things he
did, he wanted me to swing a chair at his feet and he said "I'm going
to do a half somersault flip off the floor, land on my feet bla bla
bla..." And I'm kinda like "Uhm", and he did this maybe a dozen times,
it just blew me away. And that was my first introduction to Sammo Hung
and Jackie Chan. I had no idea that it would involve that sort of
contact. There was a particular scene with Sammo whehere he's giving me
a ..............so I'm thinking OK, they'll put the camera here, we'll
cheat it like we would do it in America, and he'll be this far away...
Mm. Wrong. So I had to fight with a little bit of cotton wool, the
camera is kind of like here and I had to put my head in this big old
fist that comes and hits me under the chin. I mean he's smacking me for
real. I fought with a bit of cotton wool put in my teeth and caught
this for maybe half a dozen times... Specially back then what was
seemingly happening was really happening.