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On-screen, he communicates mostly with savage kicks to the head, slashing blows with his hands and, in extreme situations, he lets firearms do his talking. On-screen, his glares speak louder than his words - words which are few and not so much spoken as spit out in terse bursts. Off-screen, Brandon Lee is cool and articulate. He speaks with a precision and degree of thoughtfulness that seem jarringly at odds with the image of a deeds-not-words modern martial-arts hero, which is what he plays in ``Rapid Fire,'' a new action movie that opens today. In person, Lee, a formally trained actor, comes across as being too intelligent and too refined to be comfortable performing in a genre dominated by the monosyllabic likes of Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme. In fact though, the 27-year-old Lee says he feels very much at home in the genre. Movie critics tend to dismiss martial-arts movies as disreputable or laughable at best and mindlessly brutal at worst, but Lee says simply, ``I like these kinds of movies.'' What's more, he seems to mean it. That isn't to say he's blind to their flaws. During a recent visit to Seattle he said, ``If an action picture works, it's because you eventually care about the characters. If you don't, then the film just becomes about who can make a bigger explosion, and pictures like that appall me.'' But if they're done right, they can be a lot of fun to make, he said. ``When you have a chance to do the action choreography, like I do, you have a tremendous amount of free rein. You can be very creative with those sequences. You're really bound by nothing more than your imagination and your athleticism.'' Lee's affection for the genre runs deep, and no wonder. In an almost literal sense, you could say he has martial-arts movies in his blood. That's because Brandon Lee's father was Bruce Lee, and Bruce Lee is the founding father of martial-arts movies. As his son says, ``he created the genre in the West.'' Which may sound like a boast. But it happens to be the truth. Before Norris, before Van Damme, before Steven Seagal and a host of lesser genre stars, before the Karate Kid threw his first kick, before the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles became the focus of a kiddie cult, long before them all, there was Bruce Lee. Without him, it's doubtful whether any of those other stars and wannabes would have had a career. And every one of them is measured against a single benchmark. ``My father is the standard,'' Brandon Lee said. ``For better or worse, until Ektachrome fades, we are all going to be judged against him and compared to him.'' Bruce Lee, born in San Francisco, raised in Hong Kong, educated at the University of Washington (he studied philosophy), was catapulted to international superstar status in the early '70s by the Hong Kong-made ``Fists of Fury'' and ``The Chinese Connection,'' and especially by the Hollywood-produced blockbuster ``Enter the Dragon.'' In them he dispatched swarms of screaming attackers with dazzling combinations of kicks and blows, single-handedly igniting the worldwide martial-arts craze in the process. And then he died, suddenly, on July 30, 1973, in Hong Kong, reportedly of a severe allergic reaction to a prescription painkiller. He was buried in Seattle, where he had attended school, met his wife and worked for a time as a martial-arts instructor. Lee was 32 when he died and at the peak of his fame. ``Enter the Dragon'' was a worldwide hit that year (it would ultimately earn more than $100 million at the box office), and his sudden death created a vacuum at the top of the fledgling genre. In the past two decades, scores of men have tried to fill it, starting with Norris, who got his start in films in the Lee-directed ``Return of the Dragon'' and was a Lee family friend. What set Bruce Lee apart from all those who have come after? ``Aside from the fact that he was a phenomenally talented martial artist, I also think he was a very fine actor,'' his son said. ``In `Enter the Dragon,' when he's fighting he has that incredible energy which just pours off him. He's so fluid and so unselfconscious.'' But it was in his quiet scenes where his true talent could really be seen, his son said. Describing a scene in which Lee visits the graves of his mother and sister, he said, ``The work is so simple. He gets very still. He doesn't overplay it. And because you know he has all of that contained energy, that stillness is really magnetic. It just sucks you right in.'' ``It's just never been matched by any of the other people'' who have dreamed of becoming the next Bruce Lee. Does Brandon Lee think he can become the next Bruce Lee? He does not. Even though he's making the same sorts of movies and even though there is a distinct family resemblance (in the cheekbones and eyes, mostly), Lee said his father was one of a kind, an original no one can copy. The son knows he will have to create a screen identity all his own. When asked whether he thought working in the very genre that his father originated might make it difficult, if not impossible, for him to create a distinctive identity for himself, Lee had this reply: ``If I had done a film that didn't involve any martial arts, we would be sitting here having a conversation about `why did you choose to take a path that did not involve the martial arts?' ``There is no avoiding these questions and these comparisons,'' he said. ``You become accustomed after a certain amount of time to having a comma after your name in most situations'': Brandon Lee, son of the late martial-arts star Bruce Lee. It's inevitable. It's inescapable. And Lee thinks it would have been foolish for him to have tried to run away from his father's legacy of fame, to have changed his name or gone into another line of work for no other reason than to avoid that dreaded comma. ``If you make a decision to do things in a completely different way than your father has done, you are still having your life be completely influenced by your father by having closed off all those options in order to be different,'' he said. And besides, he really wanted to be a movie star. ``From as early as I can remember,'' Lee said, he wanted a career like his father's. His training in the martial arts started early, ``as soon as I could walk.'' His teacher was one of the best in the business: Bruce Lee. Brandon, born in Oakland, Calif., to Bruce Lee and his Swedish-American wife, Linda, moved to Hong Kong with his family when he was 3 months old and lived there off and on for most of the next eight years. (He also lived for a time in Seattle and Los Angeles.) Raised with his younger sister, Shannon, in a multilingual household where Cantonese as well as English were spoken, Lee said the family was very close. ``In my father's life his family was the most important thing,'' Lee said, and whenever he had to travel for film or TV work, he took his wife and children with him. The elder Lee's first big show-business break came in the late '60s when he was cast in the short-lived ``Green Hornet'' TV series as the crime-fighting hero's sidekick Kato. He also began working in Hong Kong-made action pictures around the same time and was an instant hit. Brandon Lee was 81/2 when his father died. The family moved to the Los Angeles area, and Brandon continued his training in the martial arts and continued to dream of being a movie star like his father. That dream got him expelled from high school in his senior year. ``I just didn't understand the concept of a group of educators who didn't know me - didn't know the books I'd read, what my background was, what my hopes and aspirations were - picking this series of classes and making them compulsory (for the purpose of) making me a more well-rounded person. ``I knew what I wanted to do from the time I was very young, and I was well on my way to doing it.'' School was just getting in the way, and Lee didn't make a secret of his feelings, to the point where he was using his authority as student body president to call assemblies to discuss his educational philosophy. He was kicked out. ``The little piece of paper they gave me said I had a bad attitude toward the educational process and was a poisonous influence on the minds of my fellow students.'' He got into college, a small Massachusetts school, took some acting courses, dropped out after a year - ``I never had any intention of graduating'' - and moved to New York to study acting full time. Like his father, his first big professional break came from TV, where he was cast opposite David Carradine in the 1986 TV movie, ``Kung Fu: The Movie.'' He played an assassin. In a further parallel to his father's career, his broke into the movies in Hong Kong, in ``Legacy of Rage,'' playing a sympathetic guy who has a falling-out with a friend over a woman. It was never dubbed into English and was shown in the United States only in theaters in Chinatowns across the country. Next, he landed a co-starring role in the U.S.-made ``Showdown in Little Tokyo,'' and with ``Rapid Fire'' he's graduated to leading-man status in a picture produced by a big studio, Twentieth Century Fox. His father has been a continuing presence in his life each step of the way. Lee feels that presence most strongly whenever he reruns Bruce Lee's old movies. ``At different times in my life they have meant different things to me. I've appreciated them in different ways.'' Lately, he's watched them almost as a way of comparing notes. ``Seeing some of his films after having done `Rapid Fire,' I can much better appreciate what exactly was the process he went through to do what he did.'' At such times, he feels not so much like the son of the man on screen but rather a co-worker. At other times, though, a much different mood prevails. ``There have also been times,'' Brandon Lee said, ``when I have sat down to watch his films just to see my dad.'' Transcribed by Samantha/BLM |