'Blood was spilling like a shower spray': Donnie Yen reminisces filming with Jet Li, nearly getting blinded by him twice

If you got injured by someone at your job, would you dare to work with them again?

For Donnie Yen, that was just part and parcel of filming action movies with fellow martial arts actor Jet Li, who accidentally injured him on set twice, exactly a decade apart.

Donnie told GQ about his iconic role in Once Upon a Time in China II (1992), and that the "most significant experience" he had working on the movie was the time Jet almost blinded him.

"There was a shot where Jet Li was wired up and we both had these bamboo poles, about this thick," Donnie said, making a circle with his hands, "and they were quite heavy. If they hit you on the head, they'd knock you out."

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He explained that there was a sequence where Jet would spin around and hit Donnie, and he would block it, but Jet missed "after about 30 takes".

"He whacked me right on my eyebrow, and I got knocked back about eight feet," the 59-year-old recalled. "Five seconds later, I said, 'Wait,' dropped my hands and blood was spilling. I kid you not, it was spilling like a shower spray, it was like Kill Bill!"

He had to be transported via ambulance and got six or seven stitches, but an injury didn't mean that the illustrious action star got a day off.

"A day later, [the director] called me and said, 'Are you okay? Can you come in for a close-up on the right side?" he said.

"I said, 'Close-up? You can see my stitches!' and he said, 'No, I'm gonna shoot you sideways, so you can't see [in] the close-ups'."

Donnie said that the day after the call, he went back to the set and they shot close-ups from his uninjured side so you couldn't see the patches covering his injury.

'Now it's a little bit more civilised'

Improvisation was the name of the game when it came to Hong Kong action movies back in the day, according to Donnie.

"Now it's a little bit more civilised. We come up with a plan, follow that plan, and we do this and that," he said. "But back in the day, it was the wild wild west, the way we made action movies.

"We'd walk on the set and say, 'Oh, this is the building, let's jump down from this building, let's crash this place, let's not shoot it this way', you know."

He even remembered many movies where he wouldn't even have a script before filming, and the director would tell him to just count numbers during the takes and "we'd dub it later".

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIj55iotnS8&ab_channel=GQ[/embed]

Once Upon a Time in China II wasn't the only time Donnie experienced Jet's wrath, albeit accidentally.

While shooting 2002's Hero, Jet hit him over the other eye during another fight scene.

"I remember there was another choreography where he was also wired up with a sword," Donnie said. "Although these are prop swords, they're still quite pointy.

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"The whole shot was one take, about 50 moves or something. So at the end of the 50 moves, maybe the 48th and 49th move, he strikes down with his sword. He went, 'Boop!' and I backed up, and Jet said, 'Donnie, there's blood spilling out of your face'."

Donnie added: "He whacked me on one side, and 10 years later, he whacked me on the other side.

"I started laughing, I said, 'Oh, this is gonna be great. This movie's gonna make so much money, because the last time we did this, it was a huge box-office success'."

Donnie also reckoned that it was good luck that he saw red because of the auspicious nature of the colour, explaining that in Chinese custom, you give red packets for the new year. Seeing blood, he thought, would mean the film was going to be successful.

"Six stitches again," he said. "Both times, close to my eyeballs.

"I could have become blind."

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drimac@asiaone.com