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Actor Brandon Lee has been honing his craft since age five - and has the home movies to prove it. " I can't tell you what it's about," he says of one early Felliniesque effort. " I hand my sister a rose. She says something, and I run screaming out of the garden." Now twenty-seven, Lee has graduated from Super 8 to 35mm with Showdown In Little Tokyo and the just-released Rapid Fire. Both movies showcase the talent he inherited from his late father, martial-arts king Bruce Lee. The junior Lee insists he doesn't mind walking in the shadow of a legend; he became inured to the glare of the media while growing up in Hong Kong as the only son of a national treasure. " My dad was a big star at the time," he explains. " I always had a built-in-comma after my name." When his father died, nine-year-old Lee's American mom, Linda, moved the family to a quiet L.A suburb. During high school , the budding thespian appeared in local plays. When he dropped out of college to pursue his passion full-time, his tenacity was rewarded with multi-picture deals at both Carolco and Twentieth Century Fox. Although Lee aspires to work with heavy-hitters Scorsese and Stone, he won't turn his back on the genre that is his legacy. " I'm not gonnna step away from martial-arts films entirely," he promises. " I still have something to offer in them." In the world his father once mastered, the son also rises. Lauren David Peden |