Quentin Tarantino’s Bruce Lee portrayal still leaves lingering raw feelings for daughter Shannon Lee

It’s been more than 16 months since Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood stirred up huge debate for its portrayal of beloved martial arts icon Bruce Lee. The late Hong Kong legend’s daughter, Shannon Lee, certainly wasn’t impressed, publicly calling out the American filmmaker and starting a war of words that rumbled on all summer. Asked if Tarantino had reached out to her after the furore calmed down, Lee laughed. “No, no, no,” she told SCMP MMA ahead of the release of her new book, Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee. The feelings are still raw for many, not just Lee, who looks after her father’s estate and has made it her mission to protect his legacy. “My feeling is the same. I was very disappointed,” Lee said. “I’m not gonna say I wasn’t angry at all, but certainly sitting in the movie theatre and having that experience with an audience was not a fun experience for me. “It was very disheartening. It made me feel a lot of negative feelings. But my opinion has not changed. I always like to try to give the benefit of the doubt. I spoke out on why I thought the portrayal wasn’t helpful to anyone. “But I tried to approach it from a cool, collected and more calm direct point of view, and I was very disappointed to see Quentin Tarantino’s response, which was to continue to say, ‘Oh, Bruce Lee was arrogant, he was an asshole’, and to incorrectly cite my mother’s book as a defence of him. I really thought it was irresponsible of him to do what he did and have that portrayal.” “There were so many other creative ways he could have made the Cliff Booth character look cool in that film,” she said. “So many other ways he could’ve treated the Bruce Lee character that would’ve got the same plot point across without having to essentially treat Bruce Lee the way white Hollywood treated my father when he was alive.” The reason Lee is still frustrated is she feels Tarantino’s Bruce Lee – played by Mike Moh, whom she has no ill will towards – has created a lasting negative impression of her father in the minds of a new generation. Lee’s ire centres on a scene in the film featuring Moh’s Lee challenging Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth to a fight on the set of 1960s US television show The Green Hornet. “It’s unfortunate because it has started this narrative in some places where some people are saying, ‘Oh, Bruce Lee was an asshole’ – look, everybody can be an asshole sometimes,” she said. “I can be arrogant and angry in my life – is that something I would say I am like generally? No, my father was not generally like that. He was extremely passionate and driven. “He could have a temper sometimes, but he did not go around challenging people to fights. Certainly not after he was a teenager. Anyway, he didn’t behave or boast in that way. He was extremely confident. I think when people are confident and driven, people see that as aggressive in some way, and they don’t like to be challenged in terms of their own notion. “I don’t mean challenged physically in terms of a fight, but challenged in terms of their ideas. It’s often easier for us to say, ‘Oh, that person is just an asshole’ than to really open our minds and consider what someone else is saying. “My father worked extremely hard and directly toward the idea of authentic representation in Hollywood for an Asian man, so I don’t think he would’ve gone around beating up stunt people and that kind of stuff as a way of furthering his cause. “As a person of colour in the 1960s and 70s to achieve what he did, he had to be doing something right, and he had to have extreme confidence and to work 10 times harder than a lot of people, so it’s a lot to throw that all out by this silly portrayal.” Lee is also executive producer of the Cinemax television series Warrior, which has just premiered its second season. Based on an original treatment by Bruce Lee, Shannon Lee feels the show is true to her father’s legacy. “I hate to compare all of his [Tarantino’s] canon of movies, which by the way I have enjoyed a number of in my day, to Warrior. I think Warrior is something different entirely,” she said. “It relies on a much more well-rounded look at the characters that are in the show. We have an amazing Asian cast, very varied and three-dimensional characters who are powerful in their own rights and flawed, and who are dramatically struggling for recognition and power. “It’s more of an action drama, whereas Tarantino’s films are much more … our show is extremely stylish but it has a little more of a soul and a message, and his are stylish in a little bit more of a hyper exploitation of known tropes and characters. Ours is a little bit more of an inward look at these things in an attempt to flip them around in a positive way.”