Jackie Chan didn’t hold back when he spoke to the crowd at Locarno. He straight-up called out Hollywood for caring more about profits than actually making good movies. “Honestly, the old films were better,” he said. “Studios now? They’re just businessmen.
They throw in forty million and stress about how to make it back. That’s not filmmaking. That’s business. It’s almost impossible to make something really good under those conditions.”
Jackie Chan slams Hollywood movies
During the Q&A, with Giona Nazzaro running the show, Chan took everyone on a wild ride through his career—cracking jokes, sharing stories about his early days, Hollywood struggles, and those insane stunts he survived. You could tell the guy’s all about the craft. He said he learned every single job on set—stunts, acting, sound, you name it.
Then he grinned and said, “In all of Asia, there are only two people who can do it all: Sammo Hung and me. And honestly, I’m better because I can sing.”
Jackie Chan: They just wanted me to punch and kick
He talked about how he pushed himself to learn singing, because, let’s be real, you can’t keep jumping off buildings forever. “Every time I did an American talk show, they just wanted me to punch and kick. I thought, I need to switch it up. So I started learning to sing.”
At one point, he even told himself, “I want to be the Asian Robert De Niro.” The man doesn’t lack ambition.
But he got real about Hollywood. By the early 2000s, he’d had enough. The scripts were bad, and he just didn’t click with American audiences the way he hoped. Still, he gave it one last go. That was Rush Hour. “That was my last shot. If it flopped, I was done.”
The movie wasn’t perfect—tight budgets, not enough space for action—but it worked. “Rush Hour changed things,” he said. It bridged the gap between cultures, which, for Chan, was always the dream.
He was in Locarno to pick up a lifetime achievement award, and they screened Project A and Police Story—some of his best, honestly.
