The controversial saga of ‘Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood’s brief Bruce Lee scene is showing no signs of stopping, with director Quentin Tarantino now stepping in to say that he doesn’t think the scene is quite as inaccurate as some of its critics have claimed.
The scene in question involves Mike Moh’s Bruce Lee challenging Brad Pitt’s stuntman character Cliff Booth to a fight, with the match essentially ending in a stalemate before a definitive winner can be determined (though even that was apparently a last-minute decision).
Shannon Lee said that her father would never challenge someone to a fight like that, but now—sources said, Tarantino says that he doesn’t think that’s true. “Bruce Lee was kind of an arrogant guy,” Tarantino noted at a press event, adding that he “didn’t just make a lot of that up” for the movie. He also pointed out that Bruce Lee’s wife Linda Lee said similar things “in her first biography I ever read.”
Regarding the fight between Lee and Cliff Booth in the movie, Tarantino says that it’s not a big deal for him to say that Cliff could beat up Bruce Lee because Cliff’s a fictional character (he compares it to asking if Bruce Lee could beat Dracula). He also further clarifies it by saying that Lee would “kill” Cliff if they met in a martial arts tournament, but in a “hand-to-hand combat fight” in the jungles of the Philippines, “Cliff would kill him.”
Shannon Lee believes that the script treatment of her father as arrogant, egotistical punching bag was really disheartening — and was unnecessary. —AV Club
