Well, it looks like the controversy surrounding Quentin Tarantino’s portrayal of legendary martial artist Bruce Lee in Once Upon and Time in Hollywood has still got some steam.
It was originally reported that upon viewing the film, that Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee, expressed that she felt her father was portrayed as an “arrogant asshole” in the film. Both Tarantino and Mike Moh, who played Lee in the film, responded to the reaction by saying, “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.” As for Moh, he justified the scene by chalking it up to the fact that it’s a Tarantino film.
Shannon then snapped back at the filmmaker saying, he “could just shut up or apologize.” We’ll he’s not doing either of those things. During a recent interview on the Joe Rogan Podcast, Tarantino was asked about Lee portrayal and he said:
“I can understand his daughter having a problem with it. It’s her fucking father, alright, I get that. Everybody else: Go suck a dick.”
Tarantino certainly has a way with words. The filmmaker goes on to explain that film makes it “obvious that Cliff tricked him” and won the fight, and also said the scene is further explained in his novelization of the film.
“He gives Bruce no resistance whatsoever and Bruce knocks Cliff on his ass. There are four different ways Bruce could’ve come at him the second time, and Cliff would’ve had little defense. But most of the time if a guy has a particular move and it looks like the other dude is a big mouth who can’t defend himself, they do the first move again a second time. But now Cliff knows what it is. He prepares for it and throws [Bruce’s] ass into the car. He just tricked him. Bruce realizes he got tricked.”
Tarantino also added that the stuntmen hated Lee on the set of The Green Hornet, and cites Matthew Polly’s book about Lee for reference. This section of the interview has garnered a lot of criticism because in the last sentence Tarantino seems to not acknowledge that Lee was himself American. He shared:
“Bruce had nothing but disrespect for stuntmen. He was always hitting them with his feet, he was always tagging — it’s called tagging when you hit a stuntman for real. And he was always tagging them with his feet, he was always tagging them with his fist, and it got to be the point where, ‘I refuse to work with him.’ And he had nothing but disrespect for American stuntmen.”
So, Tarantino took those things that he learned about Lee and incorporated them into his version of the actor and martial artist in his film. For me, while it involves real people, it’s just fan fiction involving those people. I don’t know, I’m just a huge fan of Bruce Lee, and it didn’t bother me. I just enjoyed the story!