August 16, 1992 | Like father, like son. Like dynamite.
Brandon Lee, son of the late, great Bruce Lee, is following in his father’s ferocious footsteps as the two-fisted star of Rapid Fire, a slam-bang action opus with a nifty supporting cast (Powers Boothe is a grizzled good guy, Nick Mancuso is a very bad guy) and an abundance of butt-kicking.
The movie, directed by Dwight H. Little (Marked for Death ), has Lee well cast as Jake Lo, a Chinese-American graduate student who’s targeted for a rub-out after he witnesses a gangland murder. It’s the first starring role for the 27-year-old actor — but not, he admits, the first time he’s been offered a part “Acting is what I always wanted to get into,” Lee said during a recent telephone interview. “What I’ve been hesitant about is exactly how to go about doing it.
“See, there always have been film offers out there for me. Unfortunately, they’ve always been of a variety that I really wasn’t interested in pursuing. Namely, really exploitative things that wanted to take advantage of the relationship between myself and my father.
“And although Rapid Fire is a film that I do martial arts in, it’s really something that’s a vehicle that I thought I could do some good work in. And, yes, also showcase the martial arts. It’s been kind of a process of trying to weed through the offers to find one where I thought I’d get the chance to work with a decent cast, some good people — and not just go out there and make a cheesy exploitation film.”
Lee laughed, but didn’t argue, when it was suggested that casting people must have been pursuing him ever since he was young enough to walk and kick at the same time.
“Actually,” he said, “I was recently asked to play my father in a film they’re making about his life. But I really don’t have any interest in doing that, because it’s a little too personal.”
Bruce Lee made only a handful of Hong Kong-produced “chop-socky” adventures before his sudden death from an acute cerebral edema at age 33. But even his demise didn’t stop producers from “casting” the late actor — the San Franciso-born son of a Cantonese opera and vaudeville performer — in a movie that blended outtakes and stock footage with newly filmed scenes.
“My father only made four complete films,” Brandon Lee said. “They eventually did release Game of Death as his fifth film, but he wasn’t really in much of that.”
Still, the first four films were successful enough to make Bruce Lee an international superstar, one of the very few Asian-Americans ever accepted as a leading man by U.S. movie audiences. His son has painfully mixed emotions about the fame and fortune that came so late, and so fleetingly, to the man who was born Lee Yuen Kam.
“I can’t honestly tell you,” Lee said, “that I remember my father having a conversation with me” regarding the elder Lee’s feelings about having to move to Hong Kong to be accepted in American movies. “But I do know he had some strong feelings about that, mostly from talking with my mother, and from having read some of the things he’d written.
“And I was certainly conscious of what my father had gone through. I mean, he did The Green Hornet (an ABC television series) around the mid-‘60s. And after that, he was real instrumental in developing the project that eventually went on to become Kung Fu, the TV show… And he was supposed to star in it. But Warner Bros. pretty much reneged on their promise to do that. In fact, from what I understand, they really never had any intention of putting him in the show. Because they didn’t see a show with a Chinese man in the lead working at that time.
“And my father, in frustration with their stupidity, ended up going overseas and becoming a big success. And the rest is history. Warner Bros. ended up coming to him on their knees, basically, to do Enter the Dragon.
“And interestingly enough, the first professional job I ever got was doing a television movie that was a spin-off of the old Kung Fu TV series, with David Carradine. I thought there was some kind of justice in that.”
Brandon Lee was born in Oakland, Calif., but spent the first eight years of his life with his parents in Hong Kong. He began martial arts instruction with his father “as soon as I could walk. My mother’s got these movies on Super-8 of me and my dad training when I was like 1 ½ or 2.”
After his father’s death, Lee moved with his mother (Linda, an American of Swedish ancestry) and sister (Shannon, now 23, a classically trained opera singer) to Los Angeles, where Lee, a bachelor, still lives.
During his school days, Lee admitted, “There was a period of time when I had that ‘fastest gun in the West’ syndrome going. I went to three different schools in my four years of high school. So each time I’d get to a new high school, there’d be somebody there who would want to try and prove themselves by taking me out. And there wasn’t much I could do about it, except kick the living hell out of them.
“Which I usually did, and that was the end of that.”
When he wasn’t dispatching would-be bullies, or hanging out with the sons of Chuck Norris (one of his late father’s buddies, and “a great guy, with a pretty solid head on his shoulders”), Lee tried his hand at school plays and community theater. Later, he attended Boston’s Emerson College as a theater major, but dropped out so he could earn while he learned in New York and Los Angeles.
Lee has appeared in plays and studied with acting coaches on both coasts. He got his first TV job at age 20 in Kung Fu: The Movie, and made his feature film debut in Legacy of Rage for D.M. Films of Hong Kong.
And speaking of Hong Kong action movies: Lee describes himself a diehard fan of Jackie Chan, the martial-arts movie star whose Hong Kong-produced melodramas have been likened to the movies of Lee’s late father. Told that Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts currently is offering a Chan retrospective, Lee sounded greatly amused and genuinely pleased.
“I think Jackie Chan’s films have some wonderful stuff in them,” Lee said. “He’s not an action-film hero in the Western sense of the term. And, frankly, that’s what I like about him.”
Indeed, Lee admitted that some of the most hypercharged action sequences in Rapid Fire were inspired by the more outrageous antics of Chan, director John Woo (The Killer, A Better Tomorrow) and other Hong Kong cavaliers. “There’s no hiding it, that’s where I got my influences,” Lee said. “I thought there was a place for that kind of action, as long as you don’t cross the line too far into unreality.
“So I tried to stay within the rules of a Western movie, but bring in some of the good stuff from the Chinese movies.”
Lee likely will maintain that delicate balance in his next effort, The Crow, a supernatural-themed thriller set to start production next month. After that? Lee couldn’t say for certain, but he didn’t sound like a man who’s worried about where his next job is coming from. At least, not too worried.
“The funny thing about it all is, I can’t say as I’ve really experienced that much racial prejudice due to the fact that I’m an Asian-American. But I’m well aware that, to this day, there are problems. Like, you can’t name me a bankable Chinese actor — there aren’t any.”
But Brandon Lee intends to change all that. Like father, like son.
