I Am Bruce Lee Page #8

know it or not.

- A motion picture is motion.

- Yeah.

I mean, you gotta keep

the dialogue down.

We came over to Hong Kong

and that was when they showed

the premiere of The Big Boss.

The theatre was packed.

Bruce and I sat there towards the back.

When Bruce Lee's first movie

showed in Hollywood,

I was so elated, I was so emotional,

seeing my friend, my teacher,

on the screen.

When the movie finishes,

it is so quiet...

you could hear a pin drop.

And Bruce is like,

"Oh, no. They hate it. " You know.

And all of a sudden...

a huge roar goes up.

And they're cheering and laughing

and clapping. It was wonderful.

Every time he came on and did

his fight scene, everybody applauded.

That's when we knew

he was a movie star now.

And then they started to spot Bruce

in the audience.

They carried him out on their shoulders.

Oh, it was thrilling.

It was thrilling to him.

"Finally I have been appreciated

in my work. "

It was wonderful,

a very high moment in his life.

It's The Pierre Berton Show,

the programme that comes to you

from the major capitals of the world.

This edition comes to you

from Hong Kong.

And Pierre's guest,

the newest Mandarin superstar.

His name is Bruce Lee

and he doesn't even speak Mandarin.

Here's Pierre.

There's a pretty good chance

that you'll get a TV series

in the States called The Warrior

in which you use, what,

the martial arts in a Western setting?

That was the original idea.

Bruce Lee had an idea for a TV show

called The Warrior,

which later became the series Kung Fu,

which we all know and love.

David Carradine did a good job,

but Kung Fu, the TV series,

was Bruce Lee's role.

The better guy doesn't always

get the job in the movie business.

There's a lot of politics involved.

Have people come up in the industry

and said,

"We don't know how the audience

are going to take a non-American?"

Well, such question has been raised.

In fact, it is being discussed,

and that is why The Warrior

probably is not gonna be on.

- I see.

- You see?

Because unfortunately

such thing does exist in this world.

Bruce Lee was a bigger star,

both in Asia and America.

He was a world-class martial artist.

He had already done The Green Hornet.

And then he did not get the role

for being too Asian.

He had such disdain for Hollywood

and all those old movies

having Caucasian people

play the parts of Chinese characters.

I have already made up my mind

that in the United States

I think something about the Oriental,

I mean, the true Oriental,

should be shown.

- Hollywood sure as heck hasn't.

- You better believe it, man.

It's always the pigtail

and bouncing around, chop-chop,

with the eyes slanted and all of that.

There's nothing worse

in a movie than when all of a sudden

some horrific stereotype shows up.

You're like, "Why? Just leave us out.

Just leave us out. "

"We'd rather not exist in your world

than exist in your world

in some buffoonery coonery. "

He had a lot of celebrity students

and he was teaching them

philosophy and martial arts,

so he sold them.

But when it came down to it for Bruce

and Hollywood, they didn't get it.

They didn't take the time

to know who Bruce was.

This was his struggle.

You want to get ahead?

Here you have a bright future,

if you apply yourself.

I will, sir.

Hollywood was

a terrible disappointment to him,

especially because then you throw in

the racial factor as well,

that studios did not want to back

a major Chinese star.

Asian stereotypes for women

are pretty bad. For men it's much worse.

And I think he was railing against that

his whole life.

When that little thing of disrespect

crept into my life again,

which was the movie business,

I got really angry.

It is kind of shocking, isn't it,

that that much time, 40 years,

has passed and there hasn't been

one Asian-American romantic lead,

or even just a movie star on that scale,

an Asian-American movie star?

Not one.

I don't think

I could name

an Asian romantic lead male.

There hasn't really been anyone since my

uncle here, particularly in Hollywood.

Obviously out of China you have Jet Li,

you have Donnie Yen.

There have been no great Asian male

leads in Hollywood who are sexy.

Er, a lead male, Asian-American?

Erm...

I don't even look at him as being Asian.

He's like Bruce Lee. He's like my idol.

And that's something I guess I don't

think of so much, but I guess, yeah.

A Chinese nationalist

watching Bruce Lee films

will see Chinese nationalism.

A white Westerner

may not even notice the ethnicity.

Maybe Dean Cain, right?

Isn't he part Asian?

At certain times

there were prejudices against my skin,

but I never let it bother me, because

in the back of my mind I used to think,

"I'll take care out in the parking lot

and I'll beat your head in. "

Bruce Lee became a complete

star making films in his own country.

So if you wanna see

another star like that,

it has to happen

in films made outside of the system.

My first memory of Bruce Lee

is in the movie Chinese Connection.

The last scene in the movie

there's a firing squad.

When he came out and ran up

and jumped and they froze it.

I was like, "Mom, what happened?"

And she said,

"He wanted to go that way. "

And that just...

that just stuck with me.

If you look at Chinese Connection,

it's a movie about cultural nationalism,

as expressed through action sequences,

but that's no different than Swan Lake.

There's no difference between a ballet

and a kung fu movie,

expressing the ideas and the emotion

through movement.

When the Japanese bring

the sick man of Asia framed picture,

this is speaking to a long period

of Chinese suppression and subordination

that was within living memory of those

If you play the film

with the dubbed English

and then in the original Cantonese,

you see that they're essentially

different films.

So, for example, one of the characters

goes up to Mr Wu, the translator,

and in the English dubbed version

he says:

Look, here,

now what's the point of this?

The translator goes:

In the Cantonese version he says:

So in the English version

he's not Chinese,

but in the subtitled Cantonese version,

he says, "Yes, I'm Chinese,

but I've chosen to go with the Japanese,

the powerful. "

So there's a world of difference.

We're consuming different films

depending on the nature of the decisions

they make in translating.

Westerners have thought

that they're slapstick,

but the Chinese audience are watching

highly politically charged films

with quite recent history, animosities

and resentments coursing through them.

Now, you listen to me,

and I'll only say it once.

We are not sick men.

What he gave was so real and so raw

because he lived it

every day of his life.

Bruce did not get along well with the

director of the first two films, Lo Wei.

Lo Wei thought that

he could put his thumb on Bruce

as one of his simple actors.

Well, he was old school and wouldn't

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