Tired: Muhammad Ali vs. Bruce Lee.
Wired: Quentin Tarantino vs Bruce Lee’s family.
Shannon Lee, the daughter of the famed actor and martial artist, was not amused by how her father was depicted in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, saying, “He comes across as an arrogant asshole who was full of hot air… It was really uncomfortable to sit in the theater and listen to people laugh at my father.” But Tarantino, who wrote and directed the film, and Moh, who played Lee, both defended the performance, with QT telling reporters, “Bruce Lee was kind of an arrogant guy. The way he was talking, I didn’t just make a lot of that up. I heard him say things like that to that effect. If people are saying, ‘Well, he never said he could beat up Muhammad Ali,’ yeah, he did. Alright? Not only did he say that but his wife, Linda Lee, said that in her first biography I ever read.”
Shannon Lee’s response: maybe try sharing some silence.
“He could shut up about it,” she told Variety about how Tarantino can make the controversy go away. “That would be really nice. Or he could apologize or he could say, ‘I don’t really know what Bruce Lee was like. I just wrote it for my movie. But that shouldn’t be taken as how he really was.’ One of the things that’s troubling in his response is that, on the one hand, he wants to put this forward as fact and, on the other hand, he wants to stay in fiction.” She added that her father wasn’t a perfect man and Tarantino can portray him however he wants to, and “he did,” but “it’s a little disingenuous for him to say, well, this is how he was, but this is a fictional movie, so don’t worry too much about it.”
The passage in his wife Linda Lee Cadwell’s book, Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew, that Tarantino appears to refer to is a quote from a critic, who wrote that “Those who watched [Bruce] Lee would bet on Lee to render Cassius Clay senseless,” and not from the author herself.
Meanwhile, Sharon Tate’s family throughly enjoyed Hollywood.
“Most people know that Bruce Lee was an action film star and a martial artist. And that’s true, but some thing people don’t know about my father is that he was a deep thinker. He was a philosopher.” pic.twitter.com/LoIjiCCdhK
— Bruce Lee (@brucelee) August 6, 2019
(Via Variety)
