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Derek Cheung

At a training course organised by the Hong Kong Stuntman Association, instructor Derek Cheung Chi-Chuen is fighting a desperate battle to pump fresh blood into the craft. Of the association's 300 original members in 1991, fewer than seventy are still working as stuntmen. The others have retired, moved on, died or been promoted to stunt choreographers or film directors. It has been several years since the association recruited new members.

Cheung's course in June last year attracted more than 700 young applicants but just sixty were granted places - and organisers had to lower the entrance standard to make up the numbers. "There weren't more than two who could do somersaults," Cheung says. "Young people don't exercise nowadays. It's impossible to train a great stuntman out of someone who spends all day playing video games and chatting on ICQ. It used to be that (in the 1970s and '80's) you couldn't just show up at a master's door with no previous training. You needed to have been training kung fu since you were very young. At that time, most boys had that kind of exposure because action movies were so popular and everyone was dreaming about becoming the next Bruce Lee"

Only twenty recruits 'survived' the first four-month course, training four times a week, and qualified for the advanced classes, which started on October 3rd. What lies ahead of them is hardly the promising path illuminated by the Hollywood success stories of Hong Kong stuntmen like Yuen Woo-Ping, who worked on The Matrix. "When I started in the business ten years ago, most stuntmen got as many as ten assignments a day," Cheung says. "The heavy workload could turn a medicore trainee into a good stuntman. These days, with so few films being made, new stuntmen don't get the on-set training oppertunities they need before they can begin working on their own, let alone enough work for them to make as a living."

Cheung gave up working as a stuntman himself in 1997, "when the film industry was just about to crumble [and] stuntmen who used to work seven-day weeks found themselves with nothing to do". Since then, he has been teaching martial arts and acrobatics at youth centres.

For further information, I put up this info about the school where Derek is teaching.

Written on April 16th 2002

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