Bruce Lee’s daughter has spoken up to say she finds Quentin Tarantino’s take on her father exhausting.
“I’m really f – – king tired of white men in Hollywood trying to tell me who Bruce Lee was,” Shannon Lee wrote in a Hollywood Reporter guest column response to the director’s comments about her dad made on Joe Rogan’s Spotify podcast.
“Where I’m coming from is … I can understand his daughter having a problem with it, it’s her
f – – king father! I get that. But anybody else? Go suck a d – – k,” the 58-year-old auteur told Rogan in response to months of backlash about his controversial depiction of the late actor in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”
“[While] I am grateful that Mr. Tarantino has so generously acknowledged to Joe Rogan that I may have my feelings about his portrayal of my father, I am also grateful for the opportunity to express this,” Lee responded Friday.
“I’m tired of hearing from white men in Hollywood that he was arrogant and an a – – hole when they have no idea and cannot fathom what it might have taken to get work in 1960s and ’70s Hollywood as a Chinese man with (God forbid) an accent, or to try to express an opinion on a set as a perceived foreigner and person of color. I’m tired of white men in Hollywood mistaking his confidence, passion and skill for hubris and therefore finding it necessary to marginalize him and his contributions. I’m tired of white men in Hollywood finding it too challenging to believe that Bruce Lee might have really been good at what he did and maybe even knew how to do it better than them.”
And in Tarantino’s case, she wrote, he never even met her father. Still, the director “happily dressed the Bride in a knock-off of my father’s yellow jumpsuit and the Crazy 88s in Kato-style masks and outfits for ‘Kill Bill,’ which many saw as a love letter to Bruce Lee. But love letters usually address the recipient by name, and from what I could observe at the time, Mr. Tarantino tried, interestingly, to avoid saying the name Bruce Lee as much as possible back then.”
In conclusion, she tells Tarantino, while “I really don’t care if you like him or not … in the interest of respecting other cultures and experiences you may not understand, I would encourage you to take a pass on commenting further about Bruce Lee and reconsider the impact of your words in a world that doesn’t need more conflict and fewer cultural heroes.”
