Quentin Tarantino says he respects Shannon Lee’s right to criticize his portrayal of her dad, Bruce Lee, in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, but that other critics of the fictionalized portrayal can “suck a dick.”
He was responding to the criticism of the portrayal, yet again, on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. He joined the show to promote his brand-new novelization of the film. Tarantino cautioned that he was hesitant to address the matter because “I don’t want this to be the only thing people pull from this show.”
“Where I am coming from is, I can understand his daughter having a problem with it. It’s her fucking father, alright? I get that,” Tarantino said. “But anybody else? Go suck a dick.”
The scene in the movie — which Tarantino expands on in the novel — begins with Bruce Lee, standing on a backlot, praising the fighting skills of Muhammad Ali. When someone asks who would win if he and Ali fought, he says it would never happen. But when pressed, he confidently declares, “I’d make him a cripple.”
Cliff Booth, the stuntman played by Brad Pitt, finds this funny. Lee takes offense, and they agree to a best two-out-of-three-falls fight. Lee knocks Booth down first, easily, and Booth then surprises Lee by hurling him into a car. The fight is broken up before the third fall, so it’s essentially a draw.
Shannon Lee first criticized the scene nearly two years ago.
Tarantino said “I understand they want to make the Brad Pitt character this super bad-ass who could beat up Bruce Lee. But they didn’t need to treat him in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive,” Shannon Lee said. “He comes across as an arrogant asshole who was full of hot air. … And not someone who had to fight triple as hard as any of those people did to accomplish what was naturally given to so many others.”
Tarantino explains in the novelization — and explained to Rogan — that in the fictional fight, Cliff Booth tricks Bruce Lee, by letting Lee knock him down first, giving Lee a sense of overconfidence. This lulls Lee into repeating the move, which gives Booth the opportunity to throw him into the car.
The book also makes clear that Lee is taking care not to hurt Booth too badly — but that Booth isn’t returning the courtesy.
Tarantino says the fight was inspired in part by actual beef between Lee and the stuntmen on The Green Hornet, the 1960s TV show in which he played Kato. The Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood fight takes place on the Green Hornet backlot.
The stuntmen hated Bruce on Green Hornet,’” Tarantino told Rogan. “It’s in Matthew Polly’s book [Bruce Lee: A Life] and before that, it’s always been known. That’s why [stuntman] Gene Labelle was brought on, to teach Bruce respect for American stuntmen.”
The book also makes Lee more sympathetic than the movie does, making clear that Booth is the bigger aggressor in their contest. Even before he meets Lee, he describes him in homophobic and jealous terms.
Finally, Tarantino’s love of Bruce Lee should be obvious: Uma Thurman’s yellow suit in Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 is similar to one that Lee wore in Game of Death. Roman Polanski, one of Lee’s Hollywood martial arts students,bought it for Lee on a ski trip to Gstaad, Switzerland. (That trip gets a brief mention in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novelization.)