Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and me

BEY Logan blames Bruce Lee. The ex-Uppingham public schoolboy (whose current project is co-scripting Jackie Chan's new $35 million movie Highbinders) became obsessed with martial arts when he was a teenager.

He'd been taken to the cinema to see Born Free, and while waiting in the lobby, he noticed a black-and-white still of Lee.

"There were pictures of Raquel Welch and John Wayne, people I vaguely recognised, and next to them, there was this amazing shot of this little Chinese guy," Logan remembers.

He had no idea who Lee was, but the photograph caught his imagination. "The pose and energy just leapt out."

Logan was far too young to see Lee's movies. Instead, he read every available book about him. He high-kicked his way through late adolescence, practising his moves in the local church hall with Peterborough's most eminent kung fu coach, Nigel Thompson. "He was teaching a style called Lau Gar, a combined system with lots of elements of northern and southern Chinese martial arts: northern leg and southern fist."

In person, Logan doesn't look much like a Shaolin warrior - hence his preference for southern fist.

"Northern leg guys tend to be skinny and wiry, jumping all over the place - not really my forte," he concedes.

Clean-cut, easygoing, dressed in a dark suit, he could just about pass for the lawyer his father wanted him to become. Now, close to 40, he is more thickset than his idol.

"I don't think I was a natural athlete the way some guys are, but I stuck at it year in, year out. If, every day, you've practised throwing chalk in a cup on the other side of the room, no matter how bad you were when you started, 20 years later, dammit, you'd be getting the chalk in the cup. It's the same thing with me.

I keep plugging away."

The summer Logan left school, he got on a plane to Hong Kong for the first time. He was immediately hooked by the city and vowed to return for good one day. Back in the UK, he spent much of his twenties in Birmingham editing Combat, Britain's biggest-selling martial-arts magazine.

His break in the movie business came when he landed a job as line- producer on Guns and Roses, a Hong Kong-produced movie shot in Birmingham and Paris.

"Originally it was called Maple On Fire, but they'd misspelled the title on the script.

They'd called it Mabel On Fire. I asked them who Mabel was and why she was on fire. They told me that they originally planned to shoot in Canada and that Mabel was the national symbol of the country."

Logan's second movie was Misty, the directorial debut of Peter Pau (the cinematographer on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Eventually, he moved to Hong Kong for good. His debut as an actor came by accident. He had been fired as producer from his previous film; he was receiving death threats from his erstwhile collaborators, none of whom had been paid, and he was close to leaving the island. Out of the blue, a friend, actor/ producer Donnie bad guys, Logan never came close to emulating Bruce Lee.

His greatest moment was his turn as the Russian heavy in the TV remake of Lee's classic, Fist Of Fury. To make him look sinister, the makeup artists had to stick tufts of hair on his chin. ("I'm cursed with a friendly face," Logan laments.

"I always have to put on a scar or a beard to look evil.") The Russian is killed early on in the movie, but Logan reappears in the final reel as the British ambassador.

When he complained that audiences would recognise one actor in two different roles, the director told him, "don't worry, you white guys all look the same".

Logan's swan song as a martial-arts performer came a couple of years ago in It's A Mad, Mad, Kung Fu World. He now works as a writer and producer for EMG, Jackie Chan's production outfit, and is currently in Ireland for the shooting of the new Chan film, in which comedian Lee Evans is also performing.

No, he doesn't go back to Peterborough much, but not so long ago, he attended an Old Boys' reunion at Uppingham. "Every- body was trying to impress each other, saying they were head of their accountancy firm or had a senior position in the City," he remembers. "I told them I was doing kung fu movies in Hong Kong. On one level, they were shocked, but I could tell they thought it sounded like fun. As I went out, they got into their Lamborghinis and I got on the bus. I thought, at least I'm having fun with my life - and I staggered back to Hong Kong."

A special collector's edition of the Bruce Lee version of Fist Of Fury, with an audio commentary by Bey Logan, is available on DVD.

Copyright 2001
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