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Bruce Lee's Son Gets Big Kicks From Acting, Not Fight Scenes LOS ANGELES If Bruce Lee will always be the king of kung fu movies, does that mean his son is fated to eternally remain crown prince? Not if Brandon Lee has anything to say about it. Sure, the 27-year-old actor's track record consists of small roles in films with titles like "Kung Fu: The Movie," "Legacy of Rage" and "Showdown in Little Tokyo." And he's a fighting fury in his top-billing debut, "Rapid Fire" (opening Friday at Chicago area theaters), whose copious martial arts sequences Lee also co-choreographed. But Lee is well aware that he's not the athlete his father was (as a small army of pretenders to Bruce Lee's throne have proven, no one is). Furthermore, he doesn't care to be. Brandon Lee's primary goal is to become a well-rounded actor, as proficient in Shakespeare as he is at chop-socky. "I do bridle a little bit at being described as an athlete-turned-actor," the darkly handsome, boyishly enthusiastic Lee s! aid during a warm Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, where he has lived since returning from Hong Kong after his father's untimely death in 1973. "I'm really not. I've always wanted to be an actor. I went to film school; that's what I've trained in. "The fact that I got to break into my first starring role doing a martial arts picture is just the way things worked out. It wasn't my plan or my goal from the get-go, but I can't say I'm too unhappy about doing it this way. Maybe I am digging a little ditch for myself to stand in at the beginning, though. It's real important to me to have a wide body of work in a couple of years." "Rapid Fire" mixes all kinds of volatile types - Asian drug lords, Chicago Mafio, crooked feds and hard-bitten cops - in a firecracker scenario marked by massive gun battles, collapsing buildings and a climactic, mano y mano confrontation on a rickety set of L tracks. Lee plays Jake Lo, a Chinese-American student who accidentally witnesses too much bloodshed, then has to fight for his life and freedom. Directed by Dwight H. Little (who deployed Steven Seagal in "Marked for Death"), "Rapid Fire" certainly doesn't contain the sheer, savage energy Bruce Lee displayed in his four genre-defining features: "The Chinese Connection," "Fists of Fury," "Enter the Dragon" and "Return of the Dragon." Yet it beats your average, American martial arts actioner in one key way: Brandon Lee made sure that, like in his father's films and succeeding waves of acrobatic Hong Kong productions, you really see the fighting. "That's something I felt very strongly about," Lee said, "because I can't stand those films that have a shot of one guy throwing a punch, then cut to a shot of the other guy's head snapping back. And it's all so murky; you don't get much sense of the geography of the room or the flow of the fight. And you certainly don't see the people execute the entire move." Lee carefully planned each fight scene in "Rapid Fire," working off of blueprints of unbuilt sets and even videotaping run-throughs with friends from the academy where he works out. In his own way, Lee applied the same kind of serious dedication that was so evident in his father's performances. "He would put together these extended sequences that didn't have a cut in them," Lee said of his father. "That's one of the reasons why they were so great, because they really gave you a feeling for the fluidity of the whole thing. If you look at more recent Hong Kong stuff, the Jackie Chan films for example, it's edited so well that it appears seamless. But if you break it down edit by edit, you realize how much specialized coverage they had to get to make some of the gags work. That takes a lot of planning." Hollywood migration Lee hopes that, by the time communist China takes over Hong Kong in 1997, some of the British crown colony's talented filmmakers will have resettled in Hollywood. That's when he thinks the real opportunity to do what his father, or any other Asian actor, has failed to do will arrive. "My dad was doing `The Green Hornet' and `Marlowe' and things like that over here in the mid-'60s," Lee recalled. "One of the reasons why he had to go to Hong Kong to work was that he encountered a lot of prejudice against an Asian man being in a leading role. That was almost 30 years ago, but to this day there hasn't really been an Asian leading man. There's (`The Last Emperor's') John Lone, a very fine actor, but not exactly a bankable star through no fault of his own. "Maybe when we get that crop of Chinese directors over here, we'll be able to do what African-American filmmakers and actors have done recently. Telling our own stories is something I really look forward to. At the very least, it's important for me not to denigrate that part of my heritage. That's kind of what the Chinese people are going through in cinema right now - put on a Fu Manchu moustache, deal drugs and you're the bad guy. I'd like to see that change, put in some positive role models. I guess I can be half of a positive role model." Though his mother, Linda, is an American of Swedish extraction, Lee spent his first eight years in Hong Kong, where, "Martial arts were pretty unavoidable for me. I don't remember having a choice about the matter, exactly; it just kind of came along with the package." But after her husband's death, when Linda brought Brandon and his little sister Shannon back to the United States, the boy had a difficult period of adjustment that involved rejecting things associated with his father and former life. "I'd been going to school with Chinese kids and speaking Cantonese. I'd been here and I spoke English pretty well, but I wasn't American. I certainly didn't think that way, so when we moved here it was a real big transition. For about five years, I didn't touch the martial arts at all. I gradually got back into it, but there were times in my teens when I didn't so much resent the martial arts, but being around those situations inevitably led to people wanting to talk to me about my father. I'm very proud to be my father's son, but I'm 27 years old now. When I was 16, 17, perhaps I was not as comfortable with the issue as I have grown to be." How proud is he of being Bruce Lee's son? "My dad was just a phenomenally talented martial artist," Lee said. "I've gotten the opportunity, purely through being his son, to meet and work out with a lot of the finest martial artists in the world, which is a tremendous privilege. And every single one of them who knew or worked out with my dad told me that he was the most dedicated, most innately talented martial artist they have ever met, before or since. "So it sounds kind of simplistic to say, but the man was simply something very special. He was not a marketing hype, he was what he was. As far as his films go, I think he would have liked to have been thought of as a martial artist first and an actor second. I think he looked at film as a wa! y of disseminating some ideas he had about martial arts." Ready for `The Crow' For Brandon Lee, however, the acting comes first. He's already jazzed about his next feature, "The Crow," in which, "I play guitar, quote Edgar Allan Poe freely and return from the dead!" Yet, like his father, Lee has very specific ideas about the future of kung fu movies. "I'd like to have a film with martial arts in it that was just dead serious," he said. "Something with the tone of `Mean Streets,' dead serious realism. The fights probably wouldn't be very long or particularly pretty to look at. It would be kind of sloppy, but wouldn't that be cool? "If we get to enter into Brandon's best of all possible worlds, I don't intend to never make another action film," he concluded. "I don't think that's very realistic. And frankly, it's not entirely against my wishes, either. I've still got some tricks up my sleeve that I'd really like to see make it onto the! screen."
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by Samantha/BLM |