Directed by Gordon Chan and Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan's vehicle The Medallion has suffered from many production problemes. Bey Logan elaborates on the chaotic production of the movie and try to analyse what made The Medallion the film it is.

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- Part 2: Thunderbolt - Gordon Chan & Sammo Hung - A Positive experience
- Part 1: Script and project - Cuts from Columbia Tristar - Original concept - What went wrong

HKCinemagic.com: You mentioned Thunderbolt. How would you compare that film to The Medallion?
Bey Logan: To me, Thunderbolt, is, like ‘The Medallion’, almost 2 films. One is a kind of road racing film, where I think they were trying to do something like the Andy Lau film Full Throttle. I think that, as I did, creative people always start, with Jackie, to try and do something different, like Kirk Wong did in Crime Story, but, because Jackie’s such a brand now, you get pulled back, like a magnet, to what he’s known for... It’s a shame, because I think he’s a much better actor that people think. And it’s happened again and again. When the film is announced, it sounds interesting and then, when you see the finished film, it’s become kind of predictable. I think his best film, dramatically, is still Crime Story. It wasn’t as edgy as Kirk Wong would have liked it, but it’s still a lot better than First Strike or Mr Nice Guy.

With Thunderbolt they started to move away from Gordon’s concept. There are these two amazing fights, the one in the pachinko parlour and the one in the garage. If you need one reason to watch the film, it’s really those 2 fights, even though they really have no place in this specific film! The second one, particularly, kind of defies logic because we established the guy as a car racer who did a little bit of martial arts training, and the first fight is kind of semi realistic, but the one in the pachinko parlour is totally out there! To me, that scene shows how Jackie should have fought as a Highbinder! Sammo always asked me "What’s a Highbinder gonna be like? He uses like one hit and can knock everybody down?". So, if you look at Thunderbolt, between the first fight and the second fight, this is the difference between a normal human and a Highbinder! The first fight is kind of on the ground, fighting people relatively realistically, and in the second fight he’s always moving around, jumping here and there...

It’s the same in Romeo Must Die. It seems ridiculous because they never say Jet Li is a super hero, but he sure fights like one! He’s defying gravity to give two kicks in opposite directions! If that was Jackie as a Highbinder, that would make sense, and I think it would be fun to watch! But, going back to the Thunderbolt comparison, we never quite got that consistency in the quality of the action from Sammo, which I thought was a shame. If the end fight of The Medallion had been anything close to the pachinko fight, we might have gone over a little better with the fans. We never quite had that at the end, we just had Julian doing his best. Julian is a wonderful actor but not a martial artist. Amazingly, of all the people in the world who should be Sammo’s houseguest in LA, there’s a guy called Reuben Langdon who looks exactly like Julian Sands. He could have looked like anybody, but he looks like Julian! So he had a good double and we could kind of got away with it. If we had followed the original plan it would have been a mass throwdown, much more action. It would have been great! My feeling is that, thematically, what happened on Thunderbolt, happened again with The Medallion.

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HKCinemagic.com: What happened with the originally announced director, Reginald Hudlin?
Bey Logan: Well, the official version was ‘creative differences’, but he just left because he was asking for more money! Everyone told me not to mention it, but this is the truth! He was on board, and, had his agent not tried to put us over a barrel, he’d have directed the film. We were having all these issues behind the scenes, with the studios, and, out of the blue, his agent said, "We think we should get more money", and we were like "You know, this really is not the time..." So he negotiated his way out of it, and there was this thing in Variety where he was saying he was leaving because he was worried about whether EMG could come up with the budget needed to fulfil his vision. At the end of the day, we spent US$40 million, so I don’t know how much more he’d have needed. I don’t know how much was spent on that comic masterpiece ‘Serving Sara’…

HKCinemagic.com: Can you tell us more precisely the level of implication of Gordon Chan and Samo Hung, which things they really directed themself ?
Bey Logan: I think we can divide the film into three stages. When we were in Ireland, Gordon was shooting the film. He was directing the movie. Everybody was, as it should be, forming one line behind him! In Hong Kong, he was still pretty much running the shop, but, because of the scheduling, Sammo was shooting more and more of his own stuff, more action stuff. Then in Thailand it became incredibly tense, we were like I in Hearts Of Darkness... I think part of the problem was that everyone was going in different directions, and there was a sense that the film was going off track. I think that if everything is really moving smoothly, everybody knows their place, everybody follows the director, into the valley of death! As soon as there is a sense that the film may have gone off course, everybody jumps up with their opinion, and usually to the detriment of the finished film. That was certainly so in this case.

HKCinemagic.com: What’s your lasting impression of Gordon Chan?
Bey Logan: He’s such a nice man, and people work with him again and again because he’s just a joy to work with. I think, whatever the results of this film are worldwide, he should do an American movie. I think Americans would love to work with him. They certainly did on this film. I also think, not just with Gordon, but you look at every collaboration Jackie has had with a Chinese director, they all ended up with the situation where Jackie kind of took over elements of the film, and it became a different movie than it was supposed to be. Stanley Tong is a bit different, but still the films he made with Jackie are very different to the ones he does on his own. So Jackie has an influence.

It may be with a visionary like Tsui Hark or Ringo Lam, but they all end up making a ‘Jackie Chan movie’. There were different comments that I heard about Gordon, saying that the film was disappointing, but I think he did the best job that he could have done in these increasingly difficult conditions. And he’s still a wonderful man and a great filmmaker. It’s funny because there are other people in the industry who are bona fide geniuses and if they said to me "Let’s do a film", I would think "Yeah, he’s a genius but he’s such hard work. I’m gonna lose years of my life!". And you look at people like Gordon or Benny Chan or Dante Lam, and working with them is such a pleasure that tomorrow I would be glad to join them, for the fun of it, but also because I would like to help Dante, or whoever, and I know I will have a good experience.

HKCinemagic.com: Can you cite an example of the opposite?
Bey Logan: Sure! I worked, as an actor, on Colour of the Truth, directed by former editor Marco Mak. His Chinese name is ‘Mak Chi-sin’, which sounds like ‘Chi Seen’, which is ‘crazy’ in Cantonese, and I think this is a good name for him! He was so rude, so arrogant. However, the scene I was in was, I think, the best sequence of the movie, when this chess game is going on and its intercut with a gunfight with Anthony Wong. When I saw it I was really surprised, because it’s really a good scene, very smart, the way he intercuts the chess game with the gunplay. (Mak) was a former editor so you can see how he’s putting it all together, but the experience of working with him was so unpleasant, that tomorrow if his people called me up to work on his film, in any capacity, I would think about it first. If it was Gordon, I’d just ask what time I had to be there.

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HKCinemagic.com: Did Sammo got the final cut on the fight scenes ?
Bey Logan: I think the final final cut was entirely in the hands of Bill Borden, and Columbia. I can’t say enough about Bill, because he had an impossible situation. He had this movie, which took three years to be made, and Columbia says, "Ok, it’s not good enough for our US market, we need to do reshoots, we need to reedit. We will appoint a white American producer to come to Hong Kong". And it could easily lead to disaster, with all the resentment. You know: "They send a guy to tell us how to do a movie?". And he was such a diplomat, such a good filmmaker. I’m not saying that I thought the final film was a work of genius, I think he did the best he could. There are some things, creatively; I would have done in a different way. We were actually working out of the same office at EMG, I was producing The Twins Effect, he The Medallion, and I told him "If you need me, I’m here", but I never got involved unless I was asked. At the premiere, the only actual Medallion survivors were myself, Gordon, Bill Borden and Jackie, and that was it!

HKCinemagic.com: In conclusion, what positive experience do you retain from this work on The Medallion ?
Bey Logan: Just constantly being challenged, it’s like the old cliché "You burn before you grow" but it’s so true! In that sense, it was really a good experience. There isn’t much you can throw me at now. If someone complains and says "I’m a big star !", I say "Ok, I’ve worked with Jackie Chan, don’t tell me back you’re a big star!". If someone says "Wow, it’s gonna be a very expensive film", I can say "Ok, I’ve made the most expensive film in Hong Kong history! So don’t tell me about that…"! I took all that experience and used it to good effect on The Twins Effect, and on the films I’m working on now with my own company, Shankara Productions. When I go to any film company in Hong Kong, I can say "When I tell you about distributing a film successfully internationally, I did it with Twins Effect. When I tell you about the problems that can happen working with a Hollywood studio, I had that with Medallion and Columbia. I’m not guessing. I have a proven track record." That’s why I left EMG and founded my own company.

After Medallion, I had that confidence, where before I didn’t. In life, at a certain point, you know what you can do, you must be self-aware. If you asked me, back at the time when I was in Media Asia, "What do you want to do?", I would have answered "I want to be a script writer, to be involved in making films somehow". The Medallion was like a film producing school and the experience led to my producing The Twins Effect. It was funny because, when I was first at EMG, there was a woman who ran the distribution department, and she was very keen for me to come and work for her. Not with her, but for her, like a secretary, I think! I admit that I came into the industry a little late and it made it funny when this lady, who is younger than I, asked me "What you want to do in your life?", and my response was "Well I kind of know because I’ve been doing it and I will be doing it in the future!". She felt very hurt that I didn’t want to work for her, but there was just no way. You have to find a balance between your ambition and business, what you want to do for yourself, your own development artistically and what the demands of the industry are, and also being on good films with good people. And I’ve learned it the hard way, in terms of the Hong Kong movie business.

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HKCinemagic.com: You have some serious critics, especially on the Internet…
Bey Logan: You can have the best intentions, try to be nice to everybody, work with them the best you can and still be criticised. It used to bother me, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s like with Quentin (Tarantino) who is demonstratively a genius, so brilliant. What do you want from the guy? He has made Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Kill Bill ! Sometimes the nature of the criticism is odd... There are critics who are so divorced with the reality of the industry, like when someone blames the writer or the actor for the finished film! You just don’t understand how the industry operates! And there is also the fact that people have their own standards of what they think something should be, and they compare the finish results with the film that was in their mind. Like I said to you, I have the worst perspective on The Medallion because I’m not judging The Medallion as a piece of film by itself, but compared to the film I had in my mind. But I think I have the right to do that, because I wrote the bloody thing!

There are people who, when they go to see a film, in their mind, have already decided what the film should be, which may be completely divorced from what the film maker wanted. The biggest criticism I heard about Kill Bill was that there were not those long dialogue passages, like in the earlier films, for which Quentin is well known, but they were never there! They were never in Quentin’s mind! They were in the mind of the guy going in. To me, of course, you can criticise the film, but it’s like you should criticise a movie for what it is, not in reference to a mythical movie in your mind, one that doesn’t exist. It’s normal he hasn’t made the movie in your mind because I think he’s done the movie that was in his mind! To me the latter is the primary responsibility of an artist and, hopefully, what’s in their mind sparks people’s imagination and they think it’s cool as well !

Many thanks to Bey Logan for his help and kindness.
Interview made by Arnaud Lanuque in Hong Kong at "Shankara Productions" office in October 2003, subsequently edited for accuracy and content by Bey Logan.

Interview (c) HKCinemagic.com.
Pictures courtesy EMG & Columbia Tristar.

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