By Quentin Tarantino has copped some flak for the version of Bruce Lee that appears in his Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood, but he's defended it as both truthful and an exercise in dramatic license.
People close to Lee himself are irked, suggesting that the film sees the martial arts god as part Scrappy Doo and part that IT guy from The Office who reckons the bloke running Superkarts told him to go professional but he decided not to because he's making shitloads out of computers.
Reacting to Lee's training partner and protégé Dan Inosanto's insistence that Lee wasn't "cocky" and "would have never said anything derogatory about Muhammad Ali because he worshiped the ground Muhammad Ali walked on," Tarantino said that Lee was in fact "kind of an arrogant guy".
"The way he was talking, I didn’t just make a lot of that up," Tarantino said during a press junket in Moscow. "I heard him say things like that, to that effect. If people are saying, 'Well he never said he could beat up Muhammad Ali,' well yeah, he did. Not only did he say that, but his wife, Linda Lee, said that in her first biography I ever read. She absolutely said that."
Lee's daughter Shannon Lee took issue with the way that her dad is portrayed in the film too. "He was continuously marginalised and treated like kind of a nuisance of a human being by white Hollywood, which is how he's treated in the film by Quentin Tarantino," she told Variety.
Tarantino, though, defended his treatment of Lee and went into more detail about the scene in which Lee meets Brad Pitt's stuntman Cliff Booth and comes off second best.
"Could Cliff beat up Bruce Lee? Brad would not be able to beat up Bruce Lee, but Cliff maybe could," he said. "If you ask me the question, 'Who would win in a fight: Bruce Lee or Dracula?' It’s the same question. It's a fictional character. If I say Cliff can beat Bruce Lee up, he's a fictional character so he could beat Bruce Lee up.
"The reality of the situation is this: Cliff is a Green Beret. He has killed many men in WWII in hand-to-hand combat. What Bruce Lee is talking about in the whole thing is that he admires warriors. He admires combat, and boxing is a closer approximation of combat as a sport. Cliff is not part of the sport that is like combat, he is a warrior. He is a combat person."
Tarantino went on: "If Cliff were fighting Bruce Lee in a martial arts tournament in Madison Square Garden, Bruce would kill him. But if Cliff and Bruce were fighting in the jungles of the Philippines in a hand-to-hand combat fight, Cliff would kill him."
Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox
