I Am Bruce Lee Page #4

You'd grab him

and, you know, out the window.

And that isn't to put him down.

He was an entertainer, and the best.

If he wanted to become

an MMA fighter today,

he would easily have been

that fighter that everyone fears.

His technique was beautiful,

perfect technique.

I don't care how good you are,

you fight Brock Lesnar,

you're gonna lose.

The bigger guy equally trained

is always gonna beat the littler guy.

But the fact is, it wasn't about mass.

He would just put it down

no matter how big you were.

But, then again,

everybody's chin is different, you know?

Whether Bruce Lee was a great fighter

or wasn't a great fighter

doesn't make any difference to

his cultural and historical importance,

because his films changed the world.

You got the job on The Green Hornet,

where you played Kato, the chauffeur,

mainly because

you're the only Chinese-looking guy

who could pronounce the name

of the leading character, Britt Reid.

I made that as a joke, of course.

And it's a heck of a name, man.

Every time I said it at that time,

I was superconscious.

Mr Reid's residence.

As a kid,

we watched Green Hornet for him.

We could care less about Green Hornet.

He had a fly car,

I'll give him props for the car,

but Kato was incredible.

Everybody in the neighbourhood

was fighting to be Bruce Lee,

not the Green Hornet.

A lot of stunt guys

didn't know how to react.

You do the old John Wayne,

you throw a punch and the guy goes down.

With him, it's boom, boom, boom, boom,

lightning fast.

There's a shot of Bruce

and he's doing a kick,

and his thigh, his inner thigh,

is flat against his chest.

And we would just look at that kick

like, "Are you kidding me?"

"Look how incredible this guy can kick. "

I think about what my dad said

about his first foray into Hollywood.

There were all these seasoned actors

doing their thing,

and he felt like

the only robot in the room.

That's something I can really relate to

in my life, back when I was acting,

and I was trying so hard

to impress the right people.

When I did The Green Hornet,

I was not being myself

and I'm trying to accumulate

external security,

external technique,

but never to ask

what Bruce Lee would have done.

The beauty was that he immediately said,

"I'm not gonna do that any more. "

Sort of an awakening moment for him.

By the way, I did a really terrible job

in that, I have to say.

Really? You didn't like yourself?

I didn't see it.

He was always trying to be

a holistic person,

the fight, the philosophy,

the better human being.

Martial art has a very, very deep

meaning as far as my life is concerned.

And he was a very literate guy.

He really did read

and really did study

and really did think.

All type of knowledge

ultimately means self-knowledge.

He had a huge library of books in

his den from the ceiling to the floor.

Any book I'd pick up, there were

notations about what was good,

what was functional, what was no good.

As an actor, as a martial artist,

as a human being,

all these I have learned

from martial art.

Most of the writings in the Tao

of Jeet Kune Do are Western influenced

and they come directly

from fencing and boxing books.

And you can take

most of the passages in that book

and trace them to their roots, verbatim.

He might have changed "fighter" from

"fencer", but pretty much it's intact.

People will say,

"Hey, that's not Bruce's philosophy. "

"That was this author or that author. "

That doesn't matter.

These people are missing the point.

Bruce Lee's writings are very fun

to read, but they were notes.

You get these quotes

where he may change one word

and substitute jeet kune do for tao.

So therefore it's not pure naturalness

or unnaturalness.

The ideal is unnatural naturalness

or natural unnaturalness.

- Yin yang.

- You're right, man, that's it.

Because of Bruce Lee,

now I read up on Alan Watts.

JD Krishnamurti, of course Lao Tsu,

Tao Te Ching.

Bruce Lee dissected those philosophies,

making them straight and direct

and to the point.

That's what real philosophy's about,

something that you can apply

to day-to-day living.

That's what Bruce Lee did.

This is where he was a genius.

It might sound too philosophical,

but it's unacting acting

or acting unacting if you...

- You've lost me.

- I have, huh?

So Bruce Lee as a philosopher

introduces nothing new

but introduces a radicalism

into martial art.

He's speaking the ideology

of the counterculture.

He speaks the zeitgeist.

So you get an interest in Buddhism,

in yoga, in all things Eastern.

Bruce Lee shows you

meditation in movement.

You set up a school in Hollywood

for people like James Garner,

Steve McQueen and the others.

Why would they want to learn Chinese

martial art? Because of a movie role?

Not really.

Most of them, you see, they are coming

in to ask me to teach them

not so much how to defend themselves,

they want to learn to express themselves

through some movement, be it anger,

be it determination or whatsoever.

He is paying me to show him

in combative form

the art of expressing the human body.

Our back yard was always

a back yard school,

so for Jim Coburn to come over

or Steve McQueen to come over

was like not that big a deal.

Of all your students, famous,

James Garner, Steve McQueen,

James Coburn, Roman Polanski,

which was the best?

Depending, OK? Now, as a fighter,

Steve McQueen, that son of a gun,

got the toughness in him.

Now, James Coburn is a peace-loving man.

- I've met him.

- You've met him.

He's really, really nice.

Super mellow and all that,

you know what I mean?

Now, he appreciates

the philosophical part of it,

therefore his understanding of it

is deeper than Steve's.

He often told me,

"I would like to see Steve McQueen

be a little bit more like Coburn

and Coburn to be

a little bit more like Steve McQueen. "

Actually, you see,

it's a combination of both.

I mean, here is the natural instinct

and here is control.

You are to combine the two in harmony.

Not if you have one to the extreme,

you will be very unscientific.

If you have another to the extreme,

you become all of a sudden

a mechanical man.

All the big, big names

in tournament fighting came to Bruce

because they wanted

to refine their skills.

Joe Lewis, Bob Wall, Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris was probably

the greatest kicker I've ever seen.

- Chuck Norris is unbelievable.

- Bruce didn't want to teach beginners.

He did have some in his own schools.

But he took the top martial artists

and he felt he could make them better.

"One more time. You don't get it,

we move to something else. "

"You gonna get it?"

That's how he would teach.

He knew a lot. He taught me gung fu.

Joe Lewis

was highly influenced by Bruce Lee.

Joe Lewis was a world champion

when he met Bruce,

but it was a lot more of Bruce

being the instructor to Joe.

I don't think he had boxing hands

until he met Bruce Lee,

but his side kick was phenomenal.

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