Project
A

Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao are collectively known as the Three Brothers — or the Three Dragons — a title earned through their shared training at Master Yu Jim-yuen's China Drama Academy in Hong Kong during the 1960s and early '70s. The Academy was a rigorous Peking Opera training school where students trained under physically punishing conditions from childhood: acrobatics, martial arts, singing, comedy, and performance, six to twelve hours a day. Chan, Hung, and Biao were among the school's most talented students and formed a lifelong bond there. Their ability to perform together without rehearsal — anticipating each other's movements, building off each other's improvisations — is a direct product of that shared training. They are the three most influential figures in Hong Kong action cinema and their collaborations in the 1980s represent the apex of the genre.

Chan performed the clock-tower fall three times — once for each camera angle used in the sequence. The fall is approximately sixty feet onto a cobblestone surface, broken only by two canvas awnings that slow the descent slightly. There was no safety net, no crash mat, and no stunt double. The production crew placed cameras at different angles to capture the fall, and Chan repeated the stunt for each setup. The end credits of Project A include outtake footage showing some of the takes that did not go cleanly, which is standard practice for Chan films of this era. Chan sustained bruising and minor injuries across the three attempts but was not seriously hurt — which, given the nature of the stunt, is itself remarkable.

Yes. Project A Part II was released in 1987, again written and directed by Jackie Chan. However, neither Sammo Hung nor Yuen Biao returned for the sequel — their absence is one of the reasons the film, while still excellent by most standards, does not reach the heights of the original. The sequel follows Dragon Ma deeper into colonial Hong Kong's political corruption, introduces Maggie Cheung in a significant role, and contains some of Chan's most impressive action set-pieces of the late 1980s. It is recommended viewing after the first film, but the magic of the Three Brothers working together is irreplaceable and the original remains the superior film.

The clock-tower sequence is a direct homage to Harold Lloyd's famous building-climbing sequence in Safety Last! (1923) — one of the most iconic images in silent cinema history, in which Lloyd's character hangs from the hands of a clock face high above a city street. Jackie Chan has cited Harold Lloyd, alongside Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, as a foundational influence on his approach to action-comedy. Where the Hollywood silent comedians used camera tricks, forced perspective, and hidden safety platforms to create the illusion of danger, Chan's homage was performed entirely for real — a deliberate statement about the nature of Hong Kong stunt culture and Chan's personal philosophy that audiences deserve the genuine article. The juxtaposition between Lloyd's carefully constructed illusion and Chan's literal recreation of the same danger is central to understanding what made 1980s Hong Kong action cinema so extraordinary.