Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon has responded to Quentin Tarantino‘s latest defense of his controversial Bruce Lee depiction in his last film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In a new interview on the Joe Rogan Experience, Taranto brushed off the criticisms he’s faced for the character in classic Tarantino fashion, adding that the real Bruce Lee “had no respect for American stuntmen.” “Where I am coming from is, I can understand his daughter having a problem with it. It’s her f––ing father. I get that,” Tarantino said this week. “But anybody else, oh suck a d––!” Shannon Lee called out the director after the 2019 release of Once Upon a Time. This time, she’s doubled down on her statements in an op-ed for The Hollywood Reporter.
“While I am grateful that Mr. Tarantino has so generously acknowledged to Joe Rogan that I may have my feelings about his portrayal of my father, I am also grateful for the opportunity to express this: I’m really f––ing tired of white men in Hollywood trying to tell me who Bruce Lee was,” she wrote. She continued, adding: “Why does Quentin Tarantino speak like he knew Bruce Lee and hated him? It seems weird given he never met Bruce Lee, right? Not to mention that Mr. Tarantino happily dressed the Bride in a knock-off of my father’s yellow jumpsuit and the Crazy 88s in Kato-style masks and outfits for Kill Bill, which many saw as a love letter to Bruce Lee. But love letters usually address the recipient by name, and from what I could observe at the time, Mr. Tarantino tried, interestingly, to avoid saying the name Bruce Lee as much as possible back then.”
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Shannon’s piece largely serves as a dragging of Hollywood’s white male elite for shrinking her father’s legacy down to making him seem “arrogant and an asshole when they have no idea and cannot fathom what it might have taken to get work in 1960s and ’70s Hollywood as a Chinese man.” She adds, “I’m tired of white men in Hollywood mistaking his confidence, passion, and skill for hubris and therefore finding it necessary to marginalize him and his contributions.”
“I understand what Mr. Tarantino was trying to do,” writes Shannon in response to Tarantino’s claim that Cliff Booth would easily kill her father Bruce Lee. “Cliff Booth is such a badass and a killer that he can beat the crap out of Bruce Lee. Character development. I get it. I just think he could have done it so much better. But instead, the scene he created was just an uninteresting tear-down of Bruce Lee when it didn’t need to be. It was white Hollywood treating Bruce Lee as, well, white Hollywood treated him — as a dispensable stereotype.”
She closes her remarks saying, “Mr. Tarantino, you don’t have to like Bruce Lee. I really don’t care if you like him or not. You made your movie and now, clearly, you’re promoting a book. But in the interest of respecting other cultures and experiences you may not understand, I would encourage you to take a pass on commenting further about Bruce Lee and reconsider the impact of your words in a world that doesn’t need more conflict and fewer cultural heroes.”
