Tony Jaa screams along Pyrmont Bridge as curious pedestrians look on, bemused. Like a gymnast attacking the vault, the martial arts actor mounts the shoulders of two leather-clad ruffians, slicing and kicking the air before landing nimbly behind them.

Seconds later, a figure in black calls out, shaking his head: "Cut." But Jaa is undeterred, grinning and bounding back for another take. His can-do attitude impresses onlookers. There are no stunt doubles here, no artificial devices such as wires, lifts and trampolines to be digitally removed in the editing suite. Tony Jaa does his own special effects.

The 29-year-old Jaa was in Sydney in November to shoot Tom Yum Goong, a film scheduled for release later this year. But it's his breakout performance in Ong-Bak, which opened in cinemas yesterday, that has earmarked him as an international star and, if you believe the buzz, Thailand's answer to Bruce Lee.
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In Ong-Bak, Jaa plays Ting, a humble villager who is sent to Bangkok to recover the stolen head of the local Buddha statue. The villagers regard the head as sacred; if the crime is not avenged, the results will be catastrophic.

Like most martial arts films, however, the plot is a thin pretext for action. Jaa brandishes a distinctive combat style known as muay thai, pounding baddies with his elbows and kneecaps and butting them with his forehead.

Not satisfied? Then gape at hair-raising pursuits where he leaps across barbed wire and boiling oil, runs across the shoulders of a crowd of pedestrians, and beats off thugs while balancing atop a fleet of tuktuks (three-wheeled taxis).

Remarkably, each of these gravity-defying feats is achieved without "wire work", computer-generated imagery or camera tricks. Even the lighting is minimalist. Such purism is what distinguishes Ong-Bak from digitally enhanced blockbusters such as The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers, and its star insists on nothing less.

"Doing the [scenes] by myself without special help is much more challenging," Jaa says through an interpreter. "I like to give an awe factor to the audience, so they can see it and think, 'Wow, this can really be done.'"

He has the scars to prove it, having scorched his eyebrows and lashes while filming a scene where his character kickboxes through flames.

"I wasn't hurt, just burned," he says with a smile.

He had a more debilitating injury when he sprained his ankle, ironically, while filming a non-combat scene. The entire shoot had to be postponed for two weeks.

Prachya Pinkaew, the director of Ong-Bak and Tom Yum Goong, is proud of his star, but resists a swipe at other filmmakers who use a lot of special effects.

"I'm not criticising them," he says. "They are a special kind of art which people like. The scenes in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon were so neat, so well done.

Or even the stuff in The Matrix. [But] the selling point of my film with Tony is ... just doing things 'real' for a change."

Jaa grew up in a poor, rural area in north-east Thailand in the early 1980s. A civil war was brewing and the Khmer Rouge sometimes lobbed mortars across the Cambodian border. But such incidents were tame compared with the scraps among the village kids.

The actor, whose English is sparse despite years of lessons, says his obsession with martial arts started at age 10. He used to sit entranced by Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan films, which were screened at outdoor temple fairs. Then he'd wake before dawn to practise, doing somersaults off the elephants in his family's rice paddy.

"All my relatives and all the people in the village perceived me as crazy," he says. "But when I started out, I just copied [my] movements from the movies."

Jaa admired Chan, but his main inspiration was Panna Rittikrai, an actor-director whom he approached at age 15 to learn more about muay thai. The pair devised dozens of new stunts and travelled across Thailand, consulting with the discipline's dying breed of masters.

Rittikrai then shot a tape of Jaa's work to show his colleague, Pinkaew.

"The clip of Tony was about 30 minutes," Pinkaew says. "After I had been through it, I think to myself, 'Well, this is a guy who dares to do stuff that no one has ever tried.' I was kind of impressed."

Jaa and Pinkaew collaborated on Ong-Bak for four years before releasing the film in 2003.

A smash in Asia, it was also shown at film festivals in Melbourne and Toronto last year. Last month it opened in the US to largely positive reviews.

"Jaa, blessed with astonishing muscle definition and a stoical, sensitive face, clearly has the potential to be an international action movie star," wrote New York Times critic A.O. Scott.

"Ong-Bak feels like the start of a scrappy, potent franchise."

Such endorsements elevate Jaa above others with pretensions to be the next big action hero. He is already a star in South-East Asia; his recent Australian shoot was covered by about 60 rabid Thai reporters.

Jaa seems at peace with his new status. He says his family no longer think he's crazy, but are happy he's living the high life. He admits he's open to a Hollywood career, but that it is "not his dream".

More important is that Ong-Bak and Tom Yum Goong spread awareness of Thai martial arts, which have long come a poor second in the cinema to Chinese kung-fu.

Pinkaew believes his protege has what it takes.

"I think Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li have opened the way for Asian actors to go international," he says. "Tony can and should follow their path. He just needs to build a steady fan base and be careful in the way he [approaches] it."

Careful? Try telling that to Tony Jaa.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Film/Jaa-rule/2...l?oneclick=true

Martial arts cinema has a new legend. Philippa Hawker talks to Thailand's Tony Jaa, who's put bruising reality back on the big screen.

In a flurry of knees and elbows, with breathtaking athletic leaps, a killer punch and stout faith in Buddha, Tony Jaa has arrived. On the martial arts scene, he's a new figure who reminds people of old movie values.

He's been hailed as the next Bruce Lee, the heir to Jackie Chan, the natural successor to Jet Li - although he's adamant he's nothing more nor less than himself. Authenticity is an important part of his appeal. "No stunt doubles, no computer graphics, no strings attached," proclaims the website of his new movie, Ong Bak.

Jaa comes from Thailand. He's a country boy who trained in a traditional martial arts style known as Muay Thai. Speaking through an interpreter, he says he knew the films of Lee and Chan from childhood. He watched their movies and those of his trainer, martial artist Phanna Ritthikrai. "I had an idea since I was a boy," he said of his career. "My father was a boxer, and we had elephants. But I'm the only one of my family in the movies."
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He studied Muay Thai, did odd jobs on movie sets, became a stunt extra (his credits include Mortal Kombat 2) and took supporting roles until Ong Bak launched him on the international scene.

Jaa plays a rural boy called Ting. The title of the film comes from the name given to a Buddha sacred to his village. When the head of the Buddha statue is stolen, Ting promises to bring it back. He travels to Bangkok, where the city has plenty of traps for a naive boy who's vowed to his teacher never to use his skills to cause harm.

From the opening scene, a gruelling village competition, Jaa shows his physical mettle. There's a chase scene through a Bangkok market, full of hurdling jumps and aerial somersaults, as he vaults bicycles, dodges knives, dives through a moving hoop of barbed wire and dances across people's heads. Ting is forced to take on all kinds of bruising opponents in a gambling joint where patrons bet on bouts. He's crunched with fridges and tables and set aflame, he's involved in a high-speed tuk-tuk chase, and faces a Burmese boxer pumped into madness on drugs, and a crazed villain who thinks he's God. For one bout, he wraps his wrists and knuckles with rope, in the traditional Muay Thai style. He's constantly bruised and battered: Ong Bak presents, in bone-rattling detail, the mortification of the martial artist's body.

Jaa has a soft voice and a cherubic face, but in action he's a whirling, balletic piledriver who delivers a coup de grace with a gravity-defying leap and a crunching fist or elbow that knocks his opponent senseless. His feats are sometimes replayed, swiftly, to give us the opportunity to again marvel at what he's capable of.

Ong Bak, Jaa says, was eight months of planning and eight months of shooting, preparing meticulously with his trainer, Phanna, and director Pinkaew Prachya. He adapted the Muay Thai style, he explains, with its emphasis on knees and elbows, and included new elements for the movie. These grew very naturally, he says, out of the careful preparation of the film, "from concentration and accumulated experience".

"In this movie, I did not want just to show martial arts," he says, "but also other parts of life: Thai culture and Buddhism."

He's adamant he's not interested in the possibilities that CGI has to offer. Part of his appeal is the authenticity and jarring immediacy of his martial artistry, which eschews special effects and the aerial flights of Hong Kong wire work. "To do real action is to show what martial arts is all about," Jaa says.

Ong Bak has been released in the US and received enthusiastic reviews. But Jaa is in no rush to go to Hollywood. "At the moment I would rather be based in Thailand; there is lots more to be done here. In the future, we'll see." He is making a new movie, Tom Yum Gong, some of which was shot in Australia. "It is more modern than Ong Bak," he says, "and it involves elephants." But that's all he wants to give away at this stage.

Does he represent a revival of the martial arts genre? American film writer David Chute, who regularly writes about Asian cinema, says he welcomes Jaa's arrival. "It's nice to see that a self-made star like Jaa is still possible now. Jackie Chan and others have been saying for a while that the true martial arts film is dying out because the new generation of kung fu students is too lazy to practice hard enough!"

ONG BAK
WHERE On general release
WHEN Opens today
DETAILS http://www.ongbak.com.au http://www.tonyjaa.org

Don't worry Melanie I'm sure there will be a big premiere for Tom Yum Gong

I like his shoes.