The daughter of Bruce Lee has seen Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, and is not impressed by the director’s depiction of the late martial arts star.
In Tarantino’s latest, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt play, respectively, fading TV star Rick Dalton and his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth as they make their way through a rapidly changing Hollywood that seems to be leaving them behind.
In one scene, Pitt’s character runs into Lee (played by Mike Moh), who picks a fight with the stuntman — and ends up getting his butt kicked.
“I can understand all the reasoning behind what is portrayed in the movie,” Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee, tells The Wrap. “I understand that the two characters are antiheroes and this is sort of like a rage fantasy of what would happen… and they’re portraying a period of time that clearly had a lot of racism and exclusion.
“I understand they want to make the Brad Pitt character this super bada** who could beat up Bruce Lee. But they didn’t need to treat him in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive.”
While Lee says she gets that Tarantino may have been trying to make a point about how Lee was stereotyped by the film industry because of his ethnicity, she also says that “it doesn’t come across that way. He comes across as an arrogant a**hole who was full of hot air. And not someone who had to fight triple as hard as any of those people did to accomplish what was naturally given to so many others.
“It was really uncomfortable to sit in the theatre and listen to people laugh at my father,” she explains, noting that he was often challenged to fights, which he preferred to avoid.
“Here, he’s the one with all the puffery and he’s the one challenging Brad Pitt. Which is not how he was.”
“What I’m interested in is raising the consciousness of who Bruce Lee was as a human being and how he lived his life. All of that was flushed down the toilet in this portrayal, and made my father into this arrogant punching bag.”
Lee’s widow Linda Lee Cadwell was also upset with the depiction, according to reports from the Los Angeles Times. Cadwell said it was “just awful” and told Shannon, “I thought the character was like a caricature of himself and made him look stupid, silly and made to be insultingly ‘Chinesey.’ It strayed so far from the truth of who he was and of any actual encounter he had.”
A representative for Tarantino has yet to respond to The Wrap‘s request for comment.
