Evolving the Female Action Hero with Jade Ang Jackman

When PRETTYBIRD’s director Jade Ang Jackman isn’t learning more about the “hostile girl and action director lifestyle” or training kickboxing or muay thai, she is busy filming women with swords and researching women on revenge hunts. You can also catch her buying more items to fit her health-goth aesthetic. She might just be the embodiment of ‘cool’.

Her grandfather, Victor, lived through the Russian revolution and fled through Siberia, later becoming a prisoner of war captured by the Japanese. “When I was a kid, he was best friends with this Japanese guy which was mega rare for people of their generation. To forget the pain of war like that,” she says. “His friend was actually part of one of the last samurai families.” 

From this, comes Jade’s vivid memory of asking her grandfather to meticulously write down all his stories, when she was only eight years old. She loved going through all the dusty boxes of black and white photos from generations past too. “I loved my grandma’s archive from Malaysia, so I think an interest in people and their stories, or just being curious, was the beginning of everything.”

Another buried memory resurfaces - a story told by her aunt, Chooi Ling. “When [my aunt] was visiting from Malaysia, I was trying to direct a play when I was only eight. My mum was the sole cast member, but apparently it didn’t matter. I actually don’t remember any of this, but I guess I was either looking for an excuse to tell my mum what to do, or I always wanted to direct.”

Another early inspiration for Jade was Michelle Yeoh in ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’. She was blown away by the film and especially the amount of wire work in the fight sequences. “I'm sure that probably influenced me wanting to hang someone upside down in my advert for Tofoo (‘Like Nothing Else’, a TV debut for the tofu company) that aired on Channel 4,” Jade adds. 

“Otherwise, I’m still colour blocking and centring women in action. Speaking about swords rather than men. In a lot of ways, my uncle, Vincent, also subconsciously influenced my aesthetic. He ran a sportshop, so he introduced me to sneaker culture, built bikes and told me about ‘Kill Bill’.”

Today, one of Jade’s specialties is directing sport - a discipline that, she believes, suspends reality completely. “Time freezes when you’re focussed on the goal, the run, or landing the punch. It brings people together from all walks of life and there is always a new technical challenge when capturing different forms of movement. I recently worked on a job with Football.Co and UEFA.”

Indeed, movement is one of the most memorable qualities of Jade’s artistic expression. It becomes a fully-formed and independent part of the story. “For instance, when shooting Ysaora Thibus, world-champion fencer, I really wanted to isolate her movement and show the hummingbird-like poise and grace of the fencing lunge. So, we shot on a phantom camera at 1000 frames per second and really isolated the movement.”

Shooting movement goes both ways, though: “Conversely, with Carina Edlinger, who is a paralympic gold medallist and skis at 80 kmph with 2% vision, the approach was more sonic. However, We slowed the shutter speed to somewhat replicate moments of her vision and left blank spaces in the cut.”

However you want to shoot movement though, there is one thing you need to get right - the colour and light. “If you’ve ever exposed anything wrong, you realise that light is literally everything in filmmaking,” explains Jade. “I don’t know if I was subconsciously influenced by my grandma’s red lipstick or receiving Ang Pao [red envelopes], but red definitely does have a special place in my work. It never feels like a conscious choice, but I love a red, green and sometimes orange colour pop.”

While it seems like the natural course of things, Jade didn’t always know she would end up doing this. In fact, she studied law at the London School of Economics and firmly believed she’d become an investigative journalist with a focus on conflict,women’s health or gender-based violence, as those were her interests from a legal standpoint.

“My first official media job was at VICE, where I was a shooting researcher,” she says. “I think I was 22. In 2018, I won an award from the BFI Future Film Festival for my creative documentary ‘Calling Home’. It amplified the voices of women in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, but as it was illegal to film there, I had to get creative. I recorded my phone calls and built a set as well as working with a performance artist to heighten the women’s voices. Looking back, that probably catapulted me into the industry as a documentary, funded by Gucci, came about shortly after.”

The Yarl’s Wood story, told through Jade’s lens, is truly an exercise in brilliant documentary-making and an example of how the media can successfully lend its voice to those who’ve been deprived of their own. Through the film, one can clearly see the importance of portraying women in new, unseen ways in Jade’s work.

“Filming and storytelling feels instinctual to me, so I think I’ve gravitated a lot to a certain type of woman in my work, but also in a social setting too,” she says. “On a structural level, we’ve got some work to do,” continues Jade, talking about how the rest of the industry portrays women. “Sure, we’ve come some way from a hot baddie with weapons but no words. But still, only 14% of action features have female leads. That statistic is from 2021.”

“If society was different, I might not feel so passionately about it, but until then, I see it as part of my creative duty to contribute to that meaningful shift in representation. At the moment, I’m working on my debut narrative feature. For the past few months, I’ve been researching character arcs of women either in action or on the hunt for revenge. A lot of storylines are woefully similar, so it’ll be fun to innovate within this space.”

Speaking of her narrative feature, Jade also believes it might be her most challenging project so far. A period drama-action film, the genre mix lends itself to peculiar tasks such as finding ‘Victorian boxing boots’. 

“Luckily, I’ve had the best team who made the craziest of ideas a reality - shout out Helen Dulay and Nat Baring. Enticed by the brilliant Canon team, who funded the project, with stories of me raiding my grandparents’ knife and sword collection as a kid and Fabian Wagner, who shot ‘Game of Thrones’ and other huge projects, was an invaluable line of support. We got some brilliant fight sequences on wet cobblestone thanks to the iconic stunt team: Nick Chopping, Ayesha Hussain and Olly Lloyd. They made a challenge, a dream.”

Jade tries hard to not quantify her work or ‘pick favourites‘. She knows no creative journey is linear, so when asked about the project that plunged her career to new heights, she struggles to pick one. There is one that comes to mind in this context though - ‘Slay It’, a spot Jade directed with We Are Impero for supermarket clothing line George, at Asda. 

“My producer, Manoela Chiabai, made sure that I could get the top shots that I really wanted in the video. Conceptually, it was based around movement and the upward kicks, or death drops, from dancer Jay Jay. They looked spectacular at that height,” she says about the project.

“It imbued the cut with a fresh sense of energy, as we could see the choreography and sparkle of the clothes from all angles. Photos from the shoot were up around Old Street on billboards and we had good rehearsal time with the cast and our brilliant lead Jabari. The project means a lot to me, especially as there was a crazy online backlash, which made me feel even more passionate about it.”

For Jade so far, change has been the only constant. While some colours and themes stick around and shine through the seams of all of her work, she’s no stranger to exploring. A vein that runs through her entire cinematic world is character exploration -especially through extreme situations. “This is what has drawn me to sports and action too,” she shares. 

This is what Jade Ang Jackman is made of. A rich background of references for both colour and character. An insatiable hunger for showing parts of womanhood that overlap with spaces in the world from which women have been shunned for too long. And just pure coolness. Watch what she does next.