No slowing down for Jackie Chan

At 53-years-old, Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan is still doing his own stunts. Retirement, he says, is the last thing on his mind.

His latest film, "Rush Hour 3," which opens at the North American box office next week and in his native Hong Kong on August 16, sees him climbing around on the Eiffel Tower without so much as a safety net.

"I did all my stunts, even the scene full of fighting and acrobatics on top of the Eiffel Tower," he told reporters in Los Angeles this week.

"In that sequence there are no explosions, shooting, just one of the best stunt teams in the world working at the height of its abilities," he said.

"The experience was something none of us would forget, least of all me," added the former stunt man, who has now been a leading figure in the Hong Kong martial arts film scene since the early 1970s.

"I can tell my grandchildren, 'This is your grandfather. This is me. That's not a double flying around the Eiffel Tower in 100 mile-per-hour winds'," he said.

The first episode in the "Rush Hour" franchise marked a late start to Chan's international career in 1998.

While he was well known before then to martial arts film fans, many of whom consider him to be the natural heir to legend Bruce Lee, "Rush Hour" set him on a course that has since led to a string of big budget Hollywood movies.

The first two installments of the trilogy, in which Chan plays opposite US comedian Chris Tucker, took 600 million dollars between them in worldwide box office receipts.

The third part of the action-comedy series, directed by Brett Ratner with a 140 million dollar budget, sees Chan and Tucker tracking down Chinese gangsters working Paris' criminal underworld.

Famed movie director Roman Polanski plays an unpleasant police inspector, while 2.36-meter (seven-foot-nine) -tall Chinese basketball star Sun Ming Ming plays a triad.

While Ratner said that the hardest thing was to film in Paris and get Tucker on board for the project, Chan said his biggest challenge during filming was trying to understand Tucker's and Ratner's accents.

The stunts, however, were never an issue. "Sometimes I forget my age," Chan said. "You just keep moving."

"I'll do it until my body will tell me stop. I don't think about retirement," he insisted.

Chan said he spent two weeks training with basketball star Sun, who weighs more than 135 kilos (300 pounds), teaching him how to move like a martial arts actor.

"He can knock you down right away. But he's clever, he's good. Twenty some years old and twice my size, so the scene was great."

Chan, himself a director, seems to be showing no sign of slowing down.

"Now I'm so busy, I have lots of projects. One of them is a movie that we're shooting in China: "The Forbidden Kingdom" with Jet Li.

He described the film, due out next year, as a movie about cops and triads. It also features stunt choreographer Donnie Yen.

Li, the Beijing-born star of "Hero", last year vowed that his previous film "Fearless" would be his last martial arts picture. "The Forbidden Kingdom" is the first movie the two superstars have appeared in together.