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So BRANDON LEE, son of the near-mythic BRUCE Lee, learned early on to grab the bully by the horns.
"We moved around a lot when I was a kid," recalls Lee, now 27. "It seemed like every new school I went to there was somebody who felt the need to come up to me and try to beat me up for being my dad's son. After a while, I kind of got used to it. I learned that what you had to do was really mess them up, humiliate them and then no one would mess with you after that. Strangely enough, a couple of them ended up being my pals afterwards."
Lee's soft-spoken voice has a bitter edge to it as he reminisces during an interview at the small, cluttered Spanish-style bungalow he rents on an estate in the Hollywood foothills. It's evidence of the angry young man lurking beneath the calm, controlled exterior.
These days, however, Lee only beats people up for the cameras. His first Hollywood film was "Showdown in Little Tokyo," a cheesy chop-'em-up released last summer in which he teamed with Dolph Lundgren. His latest is "Rapid Fire," the first of three movies he has contracted to make with Twentieth Century Fox.
While Lee dismisses "Showdown" as "a comic book - lots of guns and women with no clothes on," he's more confident about "Rapid Fire," both as an actor and the film's fight choreographer. "Rapid Fire" features Lee as a troubled young man who witnesses a murder and is forced to run for his life when the crooked feds assigned to protect him try to make shredded pork of him instead.
"I get a real kick out of fight choreography for a film," he says, apparently unaware of his pun. "You can do some pretty amazing stuff. I get a kick out of doing things in one (take), without edits. American films have really fallen prey to a style that involves a lot of choppy edits to cover up the fact people who are supposed to be doing stuff don't know what they're doing."
He refuses to name names, but he can't hide his disdain for the current legion of BRUCE Lee wannabes. Brandon has now added himself to the list and must bare the inevitable comparisons. It is potentially an act of supreme masochism, but the young actor claims that since the first day he set foot on one of his father's sets his fate was sealed. His family encouraged his interest, starring him in Super 8 home movies starting at the age of 5.
The actor's publicist had warned me that he wouldn't want to talk about his legendary father, who starred in such classic films as "Fists of Fury" and "Enter the Dragon" as well as playing Kato on the TV series "Green Hornet." When the subject is broached, however, Lee's square-jawed face displays few outward signs of discomfort.
"I used to train with my dad when I was a little tiny toddler," he volunteers, then points to a large framed photograph on the wall. "That's me when I was five." The picture - the only visible memento of his Hong Kong years - shows a smiling BRUCE Lee seated on the grass in bell-bottom trousers and sandals, his arms outstreched holding two halves of a board which the young Brandon has just split in two with a sideways kick.
Lee confides that he and his father were extremely close. BRUCE Lee's death in 1973 - three years after the picture was taken - dealt a devastating blow. The official cause of death was "cerebral edema" but rumors of drug overdose and conspiracy whirled around the family for years. Brandon moved with his Swedish-American mother LINDA and sister Shannon to Los Angeles shortly thereafter. The anger he'd harbored made adjusting to life in the States difficult. After attending "just about every school in the South Bay area" of Los Angeles, he was finally kicked out for good at the age of 17.
After a couple of years on the road exploring the western United States in an ancient Cadillac hearse and an aborted year at a small East Coast liberal arts college, Lee settled down and started to develop his acting skills in theater productions in New York and Los Angeles. He also continued to hone his martial arts skills, working out 3-4 hours a day. A practice which he continues.
Like his father, who referred to most martial arts as "the classical mess," Brandon doesn't like to put a name on what he does. Instead he has blended a mixture of disciplines into his own personal style.
An ardent fan of his father's films as well as such rapid-fire Hong Kong filmmakers as Jackie Chan and John Woo, Lee's immediate goal is to combine Asian action sensibilities with Hollywood's flair for storytelling.
"They do some stunt work over there that's great stuff," he explains. "I'd like to bring some of that style of action into an Amerian film. That's what we're doing with 'Rapid Fire."
Eventually he would like to branch out into straight dramatic roles, something his father was never able to do. He will take a step in that direction with his next film "The Crow," a Warner Bros. project shooting this fall in which he portrays a rock musician "who plays guitar, quotes Edgar Allen Poe freely and returns from the dead."
"There's some action in it, but it's not a martial arts film like 'Rapid Fire,"' he says. "It's supernatural so I will do some really over the top martial arts stuff."
Brandon openly admits that his last name has given him an easy entree into the film world. But it has also set impossibly high expectations. Expectations that he wasn't always able to live up to as a boy. Does the dragon continue to pursue him as an adult?
"No, I don't feel any competition," he answers. "But I would very much like to spend an hour alone in a room with my father as a man because there are some things I would like to talk to him about ..."
"It can be hard to have a comma after your name all your life," he continues, emotion creeping into his careful phrasing. "But I think it's something you have to reconcile yourself with at some point in your life. You can't carry a chip around all the time. It just causes too many problems."
by James Ryan
BPI Wire News, July 22, 1992
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