Bruce Lee’s Daughter Has More Questions About Quentin Tarantino’s “Troubling” Depiction of Her Father

Had Tarantino “been truly creative,” Shannon Lee told Vanity Fair, “he could have accomplished the goal of his narrative without taking down my father in the process.”
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Mike Moh as Bruce Lee in Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood.Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

On Monday Shannon Lee publicly criticized the way Quentin Tarantino depicts her father, Bruce Lee—the legendary martial arts instructor and actor—in his new film, Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. Shannon, custodian of her father’s legacy, saw the Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt–starring film on Sunday, and was disturbed by its “caricature”-like portrayal of Bruce. As played by Mike Moh, the character is depicted as a brash, arrogant action star eager to prove his masculinity by fighting Pitt’s stunt-performer character, Cliff Booth, on set. After Moh’s Bruce picks on Cliff repeatedly, Cliff finally gives in—and throws Bruce into the side of a car before a crowd of bystanders.

“For me, there was a lot wrong” with the scene, Shannon told Vanity Fair Tuesday night, explaining that she feels especially obligated to correct the narrative about her father, given how much of the film blurs fact and fiction. “I think part of what is so troubling to me is that it places a lot of responsibility on the audience to interpret what’s factual and what’s not factual.”

The ending of the film—a Tarantino-esque spin on the Manson family murders—is clearly fiction. But for audiences unacquainted with Bruce Lee’s life off-screen, Shannon wants to make it clear that her father was not the fight-picking antagonist shown in the scene—which some posited could be a flashback or fantasy. Her only theory about the filmmaker’s motivation—aside from wanting to frame Cliff Booth as a Hollywood badass—is that “maybe Tarantino took all the things that he knew or heard about Bruce Lee and smashed them into one encounter.”

Shannon admitted that her father “used to be much more brash” when he was a teenager living in Hong Kong, where “he would get into these sort of rooftop matches where one style [of fighter] would go up against another style—stuff like that.” But by 1969—the year that Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood takes place—Bruce was married with a son, and had thoughtfully developed his own style of hybrid martial arts, with a philosophical base. “As time went on, he would be challenged more and more,” she said. “But he didn’t want to fight those fights, and he would try not to.”

Shannon said that there was a real-life incident in which Bruce fought a stuntman, on the set of 1973’s Enter the Dragon. But the circumstances were vastly different: “This [stunt]man continued to provoke him day after day after day, calling him a paper tiger and saying he wasn’t really a martial artist and wanting to challenge him,” Shannon recalled. “My dad kept brushing him aside. But he started getting the extras riled up, saying, ‘See, he’s nobody. He can’t do it. He’s afraid.’”

By that point in Bruce’s career, according to Shannon, her father believed that “the important thing about a challenge is not that you’re being challenged, but what your reaction is to the challenge.” But because “the film set was becoming a disarray,” Bruce relented. Even in accepting the challenge, however, Shannon said her father “was very gentle of a man. He took him down a few times, but he didn’t hurt him.”

It is important for Shannon to continue speaking out, she explained, because her father was regularly marginalized by the Hollywood power brokers of his era. “People said he was cocky and arrogant, when really he was confident and skilled,” said Shannon. In Tarantino’s hands, she said, her father has again been marginalized—this time onscreen: “I think when someone comes up against someone who’s passionate and confident, if they feel in any way threatened, they go right to, ‘Oh, that guy’s arrogant.’ My father has other quotes he would say, like, ‘It’s easy for me to come in, and be cocky, and put on a show, and do all kinds of fancy movements. But to honestly express myself as a human being without lying to myself, that’s a different thing.’ And that’s what he was all about.”

Shannon was also irked by the Bruce character announcing that he would have kicked Muhammad Ali’s ass if they’d ever fought. “My father revered Muhammad Ali,” Shannon said. “He watched all of his fight films to emulate him. My father loved boxing in general. He would write letters to boxers, and ask them about techniques, and express his admiration.”

Asked what she would say to Tarantino if he called her, Shannon replied, “My question would be: what does he have to say to me? I don’t really have anything to say to him.” Shannon said that she felt waves of dismay and discomfort sitting in the movie theater, “look[ing] at people laugh at my father as some kind of arrogant, obnoxious [joke].... It felt really unnecessary.... In the end, whatever the point of that portrayal of my father was in the mind of Tarantino, I feel like the portrayal he chose was unnecessary and obnoxious. Had he been truly creative, he could have accomplished the goal of his narrative without taking down my father in the process.”

“For me, what was so upsetting is—the only reason that I steward my father’s legacy is that it has touched and inspired me in my life, and it has touched, inspired, and helped many people in their lives,” continued Shannon—who keeps her father’s memory alive through the Bruce Lee Foundation, a podcast about Bruce’s philosophy, educational summer programs for children, and inspiring messages on the foundation’s social media feeds. “My goal is to amplify his philosophy and his message and his energy. And a portrayal like this just paints a picture in the minds of the people who don’t know who Bruce Lee is that is false, [and] that just makes my work harder.”

Vanity Fair has reached out to Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood’s representatives for comment.