‘Shut up’ Tarantino
Bruce Lee’s daughter unhappy about dad’s portrayal in new film
Bruce Lee ‘s daughter has heard enough from Quentin Tarantino, thank you very much. It’s time for the director to be quiet or be apologetic.
“He could shut up about it,” Shannon Lee said when asked by Variety about how the director could quell the brouhaha over Bruce Lee’s portrayal in Once
Upon a Time... in Hollywood, which has topped $110 million (Dh404 million) at the box office since opening July 26.
The martial-arts icon’s depiction in the film, set in 1969 Hollywood, has been criticised as “disrespectful” and “a mockery” of the late Lee’s legacy. Lee is shown as a cocky man who brags that his fists are “registered as lethal weapons” and that he could “cripple” Muhammad Ali, only to be thrown into the side of a car by Brad Pitt’s stuntman character, Cliff Booth.
“While I understand that the mechanism in the story is to make Brad Pitt’s character out to be such a badass that he can beat up Bruce Lee, the script treatment of my father as this arrogant, egotistical punching bag was really disheartening — and, I feel, unnecessary,” Shannon Lee said in July, adding that Tarantino seemed to have “gone out of the way to make fun of my father and to portray him as kind of a buffoon.”
The martial artist’s daughter is chief executive of the Bruce Lee Family Co and heads her father’s namesake charity.
Tarantino spoke up in defense of his portrayal last week at a Moscow press event, labeling Bruce Lee “kind of an arrogant guy”.
“The way he was talking, I didn’t just make a lot of that up,” Tarantino said. “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 it.”
The director, now 56, was 10 when Bruce Lee died in July 1973.