Getting the chance of a lifetime is something we all dream of, but how would you feel if your chance was inexorably bound in what your father had done before? That's the tough side to Brandon Lee's budding film career.

For a guy who's always wanted to be an actor, getting the lead in Rapid Fire, the new action film written specifically for him, is the ultimate high. The hard part is the comparison to his legendary father, martial arts expert and actor Bruce Lee.

"I suppose that in a perfect world, I'd rather it (comparisons to his dad) didn't happen," Lee said recently during a national promotional tour for the film. "But I don't dread it, just 'cause I don't really have much to run from - do you know what I mean? I'm not really ashamed of anything in the film. In fact, I'm actually pretty proud of it; I guess we'll just leave the comparisons up to the people who see it."

Rapid Fire follows the story of Jake Lo (Lee's character), a college student who witnesses a mob rubout. From that moment, his life is at risk, as he is caught in the crossfire between warring factions of a huge drug-importing cartel. What follows is a combination of adventure, romance, and serious moments of virtuoso martial arts combat.

"Myself and a real good friend of mine, that I've know for, oh, 13 or 14 years, Jeff Imada, did all the fight choreography for the film," says Lee. "So that made it particularly rewarding, because I'd never had that experience before, of seeing something that I was involved in thinking up come to the screen, in much the way I had thought it up. So I ended up being very happy with the fights."

Their choreography has its roots in the films of Lee's first home, Hong Kong. "I'm a real big fan of Hong Kong movies myself, and I have quite a library going at home. That's my favorite stuff in this genre. The material, the stories in Hong Kong movies don't really translate to a Western audience, but if you look at the action set pieces in them as little bits of film they're really pretty amazing," Lee comments. "The stuff that comes out of the United States I've never been that big on, because it doesn't match up at all. It's really so simple compared to the stuff they do in Hong Kong. So I really wanted...it's on a much smaller scale, I suppose, but I wanted to try and bring a little bit of that flavor to Rapid Fire."

Brandon Lee has put a lot of time making sure that when he's held up against his dad's icon, he comes out on top. "I started doing martial arts as soon as I could walk," he explains. "My dad wanted me to train in martial arts and he started training me himself, literally as soon as I could walk - when I was two, one and a half, two. My dad originated a style that's called jeet kune do. He trained me in his style when he was alive. And then after he passed away, we moved to the United States (from Hong Kong) and for about five years, I didn't train at all. Then when I was 13 I re-met Danny Inosanto, who was my dad's protege when he was alive. And Danny continued my training, he's still my sifu today."

Brandon has added kickboxing and other disciplines to his repertoire over the years, all of which shows on the screen during Rapid Fire. It wasn't all easy going, though - "There was a time in my teens where I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with martial arts. There was a years where I was very, very involved, then a period of a couple of months where I said, 'Hey, I don't have to do this, I can play the violin,' or whatever it might be. About the only constant through the whole thing was acting, really."

It's been Lee's lifelong dream to be an actor, a dream that he insists was not influenced by his famous father: "My dad never told me to get into acting, and neither did my mother (Linda). From a little boy, it's all I wanted to do, I never thought about anything else. I used to make little movies on Super 8 - my mother just sent me one on videotape. I don't even remember doing it! It doesn't make any sense at all, I couldn't tell you what it's about, but - there you have it. It's my fledgling work, my 'THX-1138.'"

Lee's mother, Linda, is an American of Swedish ancestry, which accounts for Brandon's appealing physical mixture of Oriental and Occidental features. Lee sees her as a key factor in his maintaining a perspective on his growing visibility as an actor.

"My mother's very happy for me, she really is," Lee avers. "She's a great lady, we have a really good relationship. But if anyone ever told me anything about acting in my family, while I was growing up, it was my mother trying to make me very aware of what I'd be getting myself into. In terms of just the effect it can have on your personal life. Because she certainly saw that first-hand with my dad."

Lee has bypassed that problem so far by throwing himself into his career. "It's great to work, you know," he laughs. "Just in the last, like, year and a half I've started to work pretty regularly, to get paid for it for the first time. It's great - I mean it is all-consuming, but I enjoy it a lot. When you're making a movie, you don't do anything else, you just make the movie and sleep. And then I'm now finding that even when you're done with the movie, you go around and talk about it, then talk about the movie some more. This is my first time with this degree of involvement with a film, so I'm learning about that. At this point, I just want to go home and stop talking about this movie! You know that old expression 'Who do I have to pay to get off this film?' That's how I feel right now."

Notwithstanding the rigors of facing the press as the leading man in a film, Lee is basically thrilled with the opportunity he's won (he's contracted for two more pictures with Twentieth Century Fox) to be a movie star.

"I don't have any aspirations right now to right or direct. It just seems so far off right now. Who knows what the future will bring?" he muses. "Right now, I'd really like to, in five years, have a reasonable wide body of work behind me. I don't want to make...I, I liked doing Rapid Fire and, like I said, I'm a fan of fight films in general, particularly the ones that come out of Hong Kong, but I wouldn't want to just fall into that trap of making the same film over and over and over again. I don't think I could ever be satisfied with that. I imagine I will probably do another one at some point, but I mean, I look at the career of somebody like Mel Gibson. He's somebody who does what is nothing more than a big-budget action movie, whether it's Mad Max or Lethal Weapon, but then he's also got the credibility as an actor to do Mrs. Soffel or The Year of Living Dangerously and pull it off. That's my goal. I think it's just a matter of, do you have the determination to do so - and maybe it means not the same money or not as big a motorhome, but, I mean, who cares?"

Lee's esoteric side is revealed when asked to elaborate on his personal goals. "Well, I really like the people who use the proceeds from their film careers to keep a theater group going, something like that," he admits. "People like Tim Robbins with the Actor's Gang or John Malkovich with Steppenwolf - if we get to live in Brandon's perfect world in a couple of years, I'd love to do something like that. I'm a member of a theater group now in Los Angeles, same one I've been a member of for the last six years of so, called Legal Aliens. We don't have a permanent home, we move around - it depends on what theater space we can get. So it would be great if we could have a permanent home and start working on some stuff. I'd love that."

Right now, though, Brandon Lee is stasified to have a major studio launching his leading-man career with Rapid Fire, a film that closely follows in the footsteps of his famous father.

"I'm lucky," he asserts, "after all, my dad could have been Lee Harvey Oswald or something! Instead, he's sombody that most people seem to admire a lot. I've met a lot of people who've been really positively affected by his film work, people who, for example, say, 'Oh, I got into martial arts and it really changed my life after I saw one of your dad's films.' So as long as people are respectful about my dad, I try to be respectful to them as well. And if that helps me a little in my acting career, that's great, too."

by Jennifer Peters

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