Bruce Lee's Daughter Says Quentin Tarantino "Could Just Shut Up or Apologize" Over Lee's Portrayal

The controversy surrounding Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood continues. It was originally reported that upon viewing the film, Bruce Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee, expressed that she felt her father was portrayed as an “arrogant asshole” in the film. Here’s exactly what she had to say:

“He comes across as an arrogant asshole who was full of hot air, and not someone who had to fight triple as hard as any of those people did to accomplish what was naturally given to so many others.”

Both Tarantino and Mike Moh, who played Lee in the film, responded to the reaction with compassion, but steadfastness in the integrity and fictional nature of the film. Tarantino commented that “Bruce Lee was kind of an arrogant guy. The way he was talking, I didn’t just make a lot of that up. I heard him say things like that, to that effect.” And Moh justified the scene by chalking it up to the fact that it’s a Tarantino film. You should expect the unexpected! And he believed that the scene did the job of showing how dangerous the character Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) was, while cutting the scene off before the fight hit its final round, where Moh is confident Lee would have won.

But neither of those responses were satisfactory to Shannon Lee. Variety reported that when they asked her what Tarantino could do to rectify the situation, Lee replied:

“He could shut up about it. That would be really nice. Or he could apologize or he could say, ‘I don’t really know what Bruce Lee was like. I just wrote it for my movie. But that shouldn’t be taken as how he really was.'“

She went on to respond specifically to Tarantino saying Lee was kind of an arrogant guy, and added:

“One of the things that’s troubling in his response is that, on the one hand, he wants to put this forward as fact and, on the other hand, he wants to stay in fiction.

“[Tarantino] can portray Bruce Lee however he wanted to, and he did. But it’s a little disingenuous for him to say, ‘Well, this is how he was, but this is a fictional movie, so don’t worry too much about it.’”

I get what she is saying. And I also loved the movie. I loved the portrayal because Moh looked and sounded so much like Bruce Lee. It was cool to see him onscreen. But I hope Shannon Lee can find peace in it all. Whether that means Tarantino apologizes or she is able to move on, I hope it all works out. I know it wasn’t done out of malice, and it was just a cog in a film that told the fairytale of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.