Shannon Lee—the daughter of actor and martial arts master Bruce Lee—is still not taking Quentin Tarantino’s portrayal of her father as “the asshole” in Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood lightly. In a controversial scene from the 2019 film, a mostly fictionalized Lee (played by Mike Moh) is challenged to a fight by Brad Pitt’s protagonist, stuntman Cliff Booth. Lee comes off as severely arrogant and cocky in the scene, and while the fight eventually ends in a draw (at the rest of the cast’s behest), Lee certainly does not come out of the movie looking good.
Shannon has been vocally opposed to Tarantino’s portrayal of her father as “an arrogant asshole who was full of hot air” since the movie came out. Now, all these years later, she still can’t figure out why the director had such a bone to pick. “I’ve never met him. I don’t know what his issues are with my father,” she recently told The Telegraph. “Clearly, he thinks my father is cool, because he has borrowed from him quite a bit. But at the same time, I think he has been told a lot of stories by people who have encountered my father and had a negative reaction.”
“They found him to be overly confident or arrogant,” she continued. “I have to say, in my experience, the stories are mostly from white men. I think Quentin may have been told a lot of those stories and believes them. I think a lot of people looked at my father as uppity, you know?”
For his part, Tarantino “can understand his daughter having a problem with it. It’s her fucking father. Everyone else: go suck a dick,” as he shared on a 2021 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. This dismissal is in line with the attitude the director has always taken to the portrayal, which is that “Bruce Lee was kind of an arrogant guy,” as he told the press in a 2019 junket. At the time, he explained that he “didn’t just make a lot of that up” for the movie, and that Lee’s wife Linda had written similar things “in her first biography I ever read.”
Of course, none of this has impacted Shannon’s opinion of the man she knew. “At the end of the day, I feel very confident about who my father was and who I am, and that, on the whole, his presence on this planet has been extremely positive and had a great impact on a lot of people,” she told The A.V. Club in 2020. “I feel like I’m doing my work to put out a portrait of the person I know.”