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What Quentin Tarantino Got Wrong About Bruce Lee
The martial arts star was deeper and greater than the director suggests
I’ll never forget the first time I watched martial artist Bruce Lee (1940–1973) being interviewed.
In a sepia-toned, black-and-white 1971 television interview, host Pierre Berton asked the action star about whether American movie values surpassed the quality of those in Hong Kong, whose movies Bruce hoped to introduce to the world scene.
The star’s relaxed response, offered with an easy smile and pensive tone, was humility itself: “Quality-wise, I have to admit that it’s not quite up to the standard. However, it is growing and it is getting higher and higher, and going toward that standard, than what I would [now] term quality.”
I never forgot it. Although I am not a martial artist, I learned more and more about Bruce as a person: his interest in the unclassifiable spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986); his dedication to the motivational classic Think and Grow Rich (a personal favorite of mine); his study of the ancient Chinese ethical work the Tao Te Ching; and his unwillingness to accept orthodoxy, either in martial arts or any other area of life.
In 2016, more than 40 years after Bruce’s death at age 32, I reintroduced my book One Simple Idea, a history and analysis of the positive-mind movement, with a quote of his: “Research your own experience; absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is essentially your own.” It was core Bruce: a philosophy of honoring one’s lived experience above all else.
Given all this, I watched with a rush of excitement as actor Mike Moh first appeared on screen as Bruce in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Let me say that I love Tarantino’s bro-fairy tale; I have watched it twice. I initially curled up with laughter when I heard Moh lampoon Bruce’s impeccable diction. I don’t place myself above seeing a hero poked fun of, and I don’t believe Bruce would’ve…
