"If someone says, "I can't watch a Bruce Lee film," I can't talk to 'em." "Bruce Lee is a worldwide fighting icon." "He was a 130-something-pound lethal weapon." "Bruce and his fighting style changed the game." "In the beginning I had no intention that what I was practising, and what I am still practising now, would lead to this." "(man) Bruce Lee, Bob Dylan, Ali, Jay-Z, Tiger, Kobe, Jordan, they all have the same spirit." "No stunt coordinator coordinated his shit." "He did it himself." "The guy you see in Bruce's films is the way Bruce was in person." "He could lose his temper." "Bruce Lee is my idol." "Wha-aa!" "He was directing, writing, acting." "(man) I don't even look at him as being Asian." "He's my idol." "When you think of Bruce Lee, you don't think about the Asian karate guy." "You think about a legacy." "The moves that he could do, you were wondering if they were speeding up the camera." "(man) Bruce Lee was like the superhero of the Asian community." "You had Muhammad Ali." "You had Malcolm X." "Bruce Lee represented that same kind of radicalism." "Technically brilliant choreography." "You get mysticism, hyper-masculinity." "This guy is like, bang!" "He's put balls on Chinese men." "There's some cool stuff." "You're like, "Wow." "That supercool guy is my dad."" " There'll never be another Bruce Lee." " Baby, here I am, man." "How does a small Chinese guy become the greatest martial artist of all time?" "(man) Production 263-05-224-10." "Test X1, take 1." "(interviewer) Bruce, just look right into the camera and tell us your name, your age and where you were born." "My last name is Lee, Bruce Lee." "I was born in San Francisco in 1940." "I'm 24 right now." "There was controversy about me taking him back to the United States." "But he loved his time that he lived in Seattle before all of this." "It was important for my children to know where their father was." "I just intimately just started crying." "I think I literally cried after the funeral all the way from Seattle, all the way to the California border, all the way up to Sacramento." "That was a very difficult time to leave Hong Kong and... take their favourite son away." "Bruce's childhood is interesting to look at from the standpoint of where he ended up." "First of all, Hong Kong in the early '40s was occupied by Japan during World War ll, and this had an influence on Bruce." "It was very important to him as a child from the get-go to be self-sufficient, and in doing that, you have to shoulder a lot of personal responsibility." "There's bad blood historically between China and Hong Kong and Japan." "His mother used to tell me how Bruce would hang over the side of the balcony and shake his fist at the Japanese planes coming to land in Hong Kong." "If anyone said a word against the Chinese, he would rebel." "(interviewer) And you work in motion pictures in Hong Kong?" "Yes, since I was around six years old." "Bruce became a child actor under his father's influence, his father being an actor in the Chinese opera and then in Cantonese films as well." "(interviewer) Tell the crew what time they shoot the pictures in Hong Kong." "Well, it's mostly in the morning because it's kind of noisy in Hong Kong, you know, around three million people there, so every time when you have a picture, it's mostly, say, around 12am to 5am in the morning." "(man) A lot of people don't touch on this, but he was the biggest childhood star in Hong Kong." "He made 20, 20-something movies as a child star." "(David) He was like the Macaulay Culkin of that era." "And then you have the fact that Hong Kong was governed by the British." "(Dan) They targeted the British." "You are crazy." "But there's a lot of competition between the British people living there and the Chinese living there." "(Shannon) He's also part Caucasian." "I think he saw a lot of adversity racially, not only around him but within himself." "(Linda) And he had run-ins with English schoolboys and that kind of thing, so there was always that feeling of resentment of others dictating his future." "Then, of course, when he was 13, he went to study with Yip Man." "As human beings, fighting's in our DNA." "We get it and we like it." "Yip Man trained Bruce in wing chun, and Yip Man was a fabulous kung fu master." "(David) Bruce had many run-ins with the law and other teenagers in Hong Kong, and he had fights." "He loved the street fights." "He loved other people who can street-fight." "Bruce's style is made for street survival." "He grew up fighting fights in Hong Kong on the rooftop." "Bruce had some of the films, 8mm, that he used to show us, where they get into the old traditional stance and one guy would come in and throw a couple of punches and the other guy would back up and fall down over the plant pot." "There were two clans usually, the choy li fut clan and the wing chun clan by Yip Man and his students, and they would have battles." "Although this stuff about the choy li fut and wing chun rooftop fights is the stuff of legend, it is true." "I was in Hong Kong." "The sentiment, the animosity between wing chun and choy li fut still exists." "(Linda) So Yip Man was a great influence on Bruce and leaned him in the direction of philosophy." "Yip Man would not be a legend without Bruce Lee." "Wing chun was a very, very minor martial art style, and now it's global, and that's all because of Bruce Lee." "Ultimately, martial art means honestly expressing yourself." "Now, it is very difficult to do." "A lot of that warrior spirit, to me, it's really honourable." "It's really pure." "It breaks through to every culture, every language, every colour." "It's all about getting respect back, you know." "If you're gonna hurt me, you're gonna have to earn it, motherfucker." "(Stephan) I was the youngest of three boys." "I got obsessed with Bruce Lee and martial arts." "I wanted to kick my brothers' asses and prove my worthiness." "When a good fight breaks out, you can't help but be excited." "You can't help but show emotion." "It took a while, but as many times as each of my brothers beat me up, each one of them got one ass-kicking from me and that was it." "I didn't do so well talking shit back, so I don't see the point in talking about it." "Let's just go there." "But then you feel bad and embarrassed afterwards, "That was childish."" ""I could have handled that better." But you also feel good." "If you couldn't get laid, you got in a fight." "Let me punch this ugly motherfucker." "In Youngstown." "It was a nice place to live." "(man) Fighting has taken over my mind and my being." "It's not what I do." "It's who I am." "My father told me fighters are born, not made." "Bruce Lee was a born fighter." "When you do punch, now I'm leaning forward a little bit, hoping not to hurt any camera angle." "I mean, you gotta put the whole hip into it and snap it and get all your energy in there, and make this into a weapon." "When Bruce Lee was a young boy, maybe 13 or 14, training in wing chun, they found out that Bruce Lee had Caucasian blood." " I believe it's one fourth German." " Well?" "The other students said he shouldn't be allowed to learn wing chun because he wasn't purely Chinese." "When you're by yourself and no one wants to be there because they didn't wanna get beat up, it's the loneliest feeling in the world." "(Bruce) One thing I have definitely learned in my life is that I do have a bad temper." "A violent temper, in fact." "(Shannon) His whole life is sort of this play between East and West." "He hated the oppression of little people which he saw everywhere, in the Japanese occupation, the Boxer Rebellion, the foreign powers going into China." "He just thought all of that was wrong." "(Shannon) To live the life he wanted to live, he had to fight for it." "He really had to put it out there and really walk the walk." "I mean, it is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky and be flooded with a cocky feeling and then feel like pretty cool and all that." "Or I can make all kinds of phoney things, you see what I mean?" "Blinded by it." "Or I can show you some really fancy movement." "But to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself, and to express myself honestly, that, my friend, is..." "In some ways it's the total opposite of anger." "It's beauty, it's passion, it's art." "It's..." "It's painting a picture without tools." "(man) It was a surprise, but an understandable one, when I found out that Bruce Lee was a cha-cha champion, because you could see that reflected in his fighting style." "(man) He was the 1957 Hong Kong cha-cha champion." "People don't know that." "His footwork was impeccable." "Incredible samba dancer." "He didn't move like anybody else." "He moved like himself." "In a fight you have footwork and you have form and you have stance and power that you interject, and that's the way that dancing and martial arts go hand in hand." "For him to be steeped into that rhythm reinforced why black people have always identified with Bruce and his fighting style." "So what I got from Bruce as a performer is..." "You know, most performers perform like this, right?" "Straight up." "Me, perform from the side, sort of like how Bruce used to always, you know, be ready for combat like this." "Honestly expressing yourself, like me being a dancer, that's what it's all about." "That's another big, big philosophy from him that I take with me to this day." "So I'll be performing like, "Bah, bah!" "Bah, bah, bah, bah!"" "(Jose) I keep trying to dig deeper and deeper within myself and find that fluidity that no one can replicate." "That's the vibe that Bruce Lee taught me." "It's to always bring it." "That's what I get from Bruce." " And when did you leave Hong Kong?" " 1959, when I was 18." "(Shannon) It had gotten a little difficult with the police on one side and with gangs on the other side." "He beat this kid up, but he didn't know that the kid was the son of a high-ranking police officer in Hong Kong." "He got into so many street fights that by 18, his father gave him $100 and sent him off to America." "(Shannon) If he wanted his immigration status to be US citizen, then he had to return by the time he was 18." "(David) To go when you're still a star is very strange, because he could have kept doing films, but they wanted him to go, to make the right decision of where he's going next." "(Shannon) In Seattle, my father started teaching martial arts." "He didn't ever look at people because of their race or their stature in life." "If you had a sincere interest in martial arts, he would teach you." "Taky Kimura was really his best friend." "Taky became his first assistant instructor in his first school, the Jun Fan Gung Fu Institute, in Seattle, Washington." "(Linda) Bruce used to come to my high school and he used to teach in the Chinese philosophy class." "He was five years older than we were and I do remember my heart going," ""Pah, pah, pah", you know, "He is sure cute."" "It wasn't long after that that I started taking gung fu lessons from him, and my relationship with him changed more from just a student to actually feeling that maybe, maybe there could be a connection between us." "We both attended the University of Washington." "We would get together on campus and attend our classes, occasionally, when we weren't doing gung fu or something else." "And then when we were both done with our classes, we would rush back to his studio, which was just right there in the university district, and we'd turn on the TV and watch General Hospital every day." "And it was like, "We have to get there." "It's almost three o'clock!"" "(woman) In the '60s, marriages were happening in California." "In the rest of the country there were no interracial marriages." "It was difficult." "(Linda) My mother was not thrilled when we decided to get married and didn't want her daughter to have to suffer any negativity from others." "(Diana) The ban on interracial marriage was lifted in 1968." "That didn't mean the ban lifted in people's hearts." "(Linda) Bruce was very strong in saying," ""I want to marry Linda." "I know that we are a good match."" "And so we did get married." "It was really hard on my mother." "But it wasn't long before she came to love Bruce very much." "It's so important to know that it was his wife Linda that grounded him." "She was his rock." "(Linda) As a couple, we really did not suffer any prejudice from outsiders, and I think this had a great deal to do with Bruce's overwhelming personality." "I absolutely recognise that my uncle was a gorgeous man." "He's got swagger." "We love his style." "He had style the way Muhammad Ali had style in the ring." "He was like the Elvis of martial arts." "He looked like a movie star." "(Linda) He was always such a snappy dresser and so handsome." "I've heard the term that he's put balls on Chinese men." "He's shown that the Chinese man can be, you know, sexy and hot and enticing." "I'm trying to copy his hair." "That's why my hair is long." "After Bruce Lee, my God, Chinese men, they're a force to be reckoned with." "They're invincible." "So that's an amazing transformation." "He's one of a kind and extremely attractive." "That would be for both straight women and a lot of gay men that I know too." "Let's just put it this way." "I think the one thing that's missing in my life right now is Bruce Lee." "A man like Bruce Lee." "(Dan) The first internationals were in Long Beach." "I was instructed to take out Bruce Lee." "He was the guest." "So I was sort of like the tour guide for him." "He demonstrated his art before he even demonstrated in front of the black-belt audience." "In the hotel room he says, "You can use everything, you can side-kick, you can round-kick, and I'll just use my jab."" "When he knocked me out, it was more like a hook." "It sort of came off the side like that." "The ease in which he did it, and explaining while he was doing it to me, that was mind-boggling for me." "It was like a bad dream, like the dreams where you can't run." "When Bruce Lee came up and did his performance of his gung fu, it was something I had never seen before." "He said, "The individual is more important in any style or system."" "I said, "I need to train with a man like this."" "He was just so ahead of the times." "He'd go to Ed Parker's events in Long Beach and they treated him like a god." "When he did his one-thumb push-ups, you could hear a pin drop." "(Dan) He showed his speed, showed his power, showed his one-inch punch." "People say, "Bruce Lee is the fastest person on earth."" "(Gene) He did these things so realistically that people didn't know if it was show business or the real McCoy." "(Linda) When Bruce did the demonstration in 1964, before he had even come back to Oakland where we lived at the time," "I had received a phone call from William Dozier's office." "(Shannon) Jay Sebring, the famous hair stylist, happened to see my father at the Long Beach internationals, and he cut the hair of William Dozier." "He said, "You have to see this guy." "He's amazing."" "When Bruce came home, I said to him," ""You need to call this guy back, William Dozier."" ""He's a producer in Hollywood and he wants to see you."" "That was the first inkling that," ""Wow, I might be able to do something in Hollywood."" "(interviewer) Look directly into the camera." "Very dapper." "He's got the suit and the tie, you know, white shirt." "He's so elegant." "But he feels like a coiled cobra." " You've just had a baby boy?" " Yeah." "And you've lost a little sleep over it, have you?" "Three nights." "He was 24, and he went in there, it's almost like," ""You're lucky that I'm here auditioning for you."" "There is the finger jab There is the punch." "Just the poise he had said it all." "There is the back fist and elbow." "Even in conversation, you could feel his explosive nature." "Of course, then they use legs, straight to the groin or come up." "That's a special kind of star power." "Or, if I can back up a little bit, we stop at the..." "and then come back." " Alright." " This kind of works." "(Linda) He never had any intention of going into show business." "His passion was his martial arts, so he had a school in Seattle and a second school in Oakland." "His plan was to open many, many schools all over the county." "Obviously he started with the classical Chinese arts, which is wing chun." "And then everyone knows about the fight in 1964 in Oakland." "(Shannon) There's the famous story about how he was challenged by the Chinese community in Oakland, and he had to defend the right to teach his art to non-Chinese people." "You and this entire society are useless in this country." "You are archaic." "And you're a fool to think that you can break away from us merely because you choose to." "To prove Bruce Lee was wrong, he was a fake and a fraud, the Chinese traditionalists sent somebody over to fight him." "(Teri) The Chinese sent someone to shut down the school." "Shut down or thrown down, and Bruce chose throw down." "The fight was to be held at Bruce's school." "If Bruce lost the fight, he would have to stop teaching non-Chinese people." "Anything that forces you to review your dogmas, most people don't respond too well to it." "(Linda) I was there, eight months pregnant with Brandon, and these elders arrived from San Francisco, led by Wong Jack Man, who was going to be the opponent in this challenge." "They came and they had this big match." "I didn't have a shred of a doubt about how this would come out." "Wong Jack Man started to run around the room trying to get away from Bruce, and it took three minutes for Bruce to get him down on the ground and say, "Do you give UP?"" "So Wong Jack Man and those people all left." "And I remember so clearly in my mind's eye" "Bruce sitting on the steps in the back of the studio with his head in his hands." "And she said, "What's the matter?"" "That was the fight that he realised the classical arts were not working for him." "He should have put that guy down sooner." "Bruce Lee doesn't beat him fast enough, so he goes off to rethink it all, and these tales all had the structure of myth and fantasy." "Little parables about the master." "(Shannon) He said, "My training in wing chun, my classical art, didn't prepare me for this kind of a battle."" "That was the beginning of the evolution of his own way of martial arts." "If you read the notes that he left behind, 1965 he starts to write," ""My style is Western fencing," "Western boxing and wing chun."" "He said he owe our knowledge to the wing chun, but we're gonna go beyond the wing chun." "Bruce Lee took a lot from boxing." "He felt boxing was more realistic in that you were trading blows." "He likes the boxing footwork." "It's alive, it's moving and it changes." "(Linda) He was totally invested in watching boxing films, going way back to Jack Johnson, Gene Tunney, Dempsey." "(Teri) What he took from Dempsey was the kinetic chain, how to generate power, the importance of a good jab." "There's a lot about the alignment of the body." "Bruce had a huge collection of boxing films and he thought the world of Muhammad Ali." "What he would do was very unique." "I once came in, lights were all out." "And he's watching this 8mm film and he's watching it backwards." "(Linda) Ali had a left-foot forward stance and Bruce a right foot forward." "So he would run the films backward in the film editor and study them meticulously." "He would stretch and read and review on 8mm film of a boxer at the same time." "According to John Saxon, his co-star on Enter the Dragon," "John asked him, "Why do you have all these boxing films on Ali?"" "And Bruce said, "Because one day I'm gonna fight him."" "If I was to fight Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee was so quick, so smooth, but the one thing that negates speed on a fighter is pressure, and I was a pressure fighter." "(Mickey) With Bruce Lee, you gotta go inside, smother him and outmuscle him." "But you can't fight a dude like that outside." "I see Bruce leading off with some long-ass kicks and Boom Boom gets pissed off and tries to give him some body punches." "And when you get close, then Bruce, I'm sure, would be trying to bring knees and high head kicks, and I'd throw an upper cut, bring the elbow across." "And he's gonna be trying to counter me, so I have to bob and weave inside." "Bruce gets it to the ground and arm-bars him or guillotines him." "It would have been a good time." "People are watching this going, "He took more shots than we thought."" ""He absolutely has lost his mind thinking he can do that against Bruce Lee."" "Ray was good to the body." "Then he'd eventually get that hook on you." "Bruce wouldn't know how to stop it." "Why?" "Because he never did it." "(Bruce Lee)" "People bring up the question:" "Was Bruce Lee a real fighter?" "Bruce was a brilliant fighter." "I saw him beat up a guy on Enter the Dragon." "It was a gang banger, a tong member, who started giving him a bad time." "Pound for pound, I think he's probably one of the best fighters." "He had tons of street fights and with that speed and footwork, he'd be a hell of a 135-pounder." "He was a 130-something-pound lethal weapon." "(man) He has all the attributes that make a good fighter:" "The agility, the balance, the coordination, the dexterity." "(Gene) People say was he the toughest man that ever lived?" "He was 130, 135 pounds." "You'd grab him and, you know, out the window." "And that isn't to put him down." "He was an entertainer, and the best." "If he wanted to become an MMA fighter today, he would easily have been that fighter that everyone fears." "His technique was beautiful, perfect technique." "I don't care how good you are, 135lb wrestler, you fight Brock Lesnar, you're gonna lose." "The bigger guy equally trained is always gonna beat the littler guy." "But the fact is, it wasn't about mass." "He would just put it down no matter how big you were." "But, then again, everybody's chin is different, you know?" "Whether Bruce Lee was a great fighter or wasn't a great fighter doesn't make any difference to his cultural and historical importance, because his films changed the world." "You got the job on The Green Hornet, where you played Kato, the chauffeur, mainly because you're the only Chinese-looking guy who could pronounce the name of the leading character, Britt Reid." "I made that as a joke, of course." "And it's a heck of a name, man." "Every time I said it at that time, I was superconscious." "Mr Reid's residence." "As a kid, we watched Green Hornet for him." "We could care less about Green Hornet." "He had a fly car, I'll give him props for the car, but Kato was incredible." "Everybody in the neighbourhood was fighting to be Bruce Lee, not the Green Hornet." "A lot of stunt guys didn't know how to react." "You do the old John Wayne, you throw a punch and the guy goes down." "With him, it's boom, boom, boom, boom, lightning fast." "There's a shot of Bruce and he's doing a kick, and his thigh, his inner thigh, is flat against his chest." "And we would just look at that kick like, "Are you kidding me?"" ""Look how incredible this guy can kick."" "(Shannon) I think about what my dad said about his first foray into Hollywood." "There were all these seasoned actors doing their thing, and he felt like the only robot in the room." "That's something I can really relate to in my life, back when I was acting, and I was trying so hard to impress the right people." "(Bruce) When I did The Green Hornet, I was not being myself and I'm trying to accumulate external security, external technique, but never to ask what Bruce Lee would have done." "The beauty was that he immediately said, "I'm not gonna do that any more."" "Sort of an awakening moment for him." "By the way, I did a really terrible job in that, I have to say." "Really?" "You didn't like yourself?" "I didn't see it." "He was always trying to be a holistic person, the fight, the philosophy, the better human being." "Martial art has a very, very deep meaning as far as my life is concerned." "And he was a very literate guy." "He really did read and really did study and really did think." "All type of knowledge ultimately means self-knowledge." "He had a huge library of books in his den from the ceiling to the floor." "Any book I'd pick up, there were notations about what was good, what was functional, what was no good." "As an actor, as a martial artist, as a human being, all these I have learned from martial art." "(Teri) Most of the writings in the Tao of Jeet Kune Do are Western influenced and they come directly from fencing and boxing books." "And you can take most of the passages in that book and trace them to their roots, verbatim." "He might have changed "fighter" from "fencer", but pretty much it's intact." "People will say, "Hey, that's not Bruce's philosophy."" ""That was this author or that author."" "That doesn't matter." "These people are missing the point." "Bruce Lee's writings are very fun to read, but they were notes." "You get these quotes where he may change one word and substitute jeet kune do for tao." "So therefore it's not pure naturalness or unnaturalness." "The ideal is unnatural naturalness or natural unnaturalness." " Yin yang." " You're right, man, that's it." "Because of Bruce Lee, now I read up on Alan Watts." "JD Krishnamurti, of course Lao Tsu," "Tao Te Ching." "Bruce Lee dissected those philosophies, making them straight and direct and to the point." "That's what real philosophy's about, something that you can apply to day-to-day living." "That's what Bruce Lee did." "This is where he was a genius." "It might sound too philosophical, but it's unacting acting or acting unacting if you..." " You've lost me." " I have, huh?" "So Bruce Lee as a philosopher introduces nothing new but introduces a radicalism into martial art." "He's speaking the ideology of the counterculture." "He speaks the zeitgeist." "So you get an interest in Buddhism, in yoga, in all things Eastern." "Bruce Lee shows you meditation in movement." "You set up a school in Hollywood for people like James Garner, Steve McQueen and the others." "Why would they want to learn Chinese martial art?" "Because of a movie role?" "Not really." "Most of them, you see, they are coming in to ask me to teach them not so much how to defend themselves, they want to learn to express themselves through some movement, be it anger, be it determination or whatsoever." "He is paying me to show him in combative form the art of expressing the human body." "(Linda) Our back yard was always a back yard school, so for Jim Coburn to come over or Steve McQueen to come over was like not that big a deal." "Of all your students, famous, James Garner, Steve McQueen," "James Coburn, Roman Polanski, which was the best?" "Depending, OK?" "Now, as a fighter, Steve McQueen, that son of a gun, got the toughness in him." "Now, James Coburn is a peace-loving man." " (interviewer) I've met him." " You've met him." "He's really, really nice." "Super mellow and all that, you know what I mean?" "Now, he appreciates the philosophical part of it, therefore his understanding of it is deeper than Steve's." "He often told me, "I would like to see Steve McQueen be a little bit more like Coburn and Coburn to be a little bit more like Steve McQueen."" "Actually, you see, it's a combination of both." "I mean, here is the natural instinct and here is control." "You are to combine the two in harmony." "Not if you have one to the extreme, you will be very unscientific." "If you have another to the extreme, you become all of a sudden a mechanical man." "All the big, big names in tournament fighting came to Bruce because they wanted to refine their skills." "Joe Lewis, Bob Wall, Chuck Norris." "(Robert) Chuck Norris was probably the greatest kicker I've ever seen." " Chuck Norris is unbelievable." " Bruce didn't want to teach beginners." "He did have some in his own schools." "But he took the top martial artists and he felt he could make them better." ""One more time." "You don't get it, we move to something else."" ""You gonna get it?" That's how he would teach." "He knew a lot." "He taught me gung fu." "(Dan) Joe Lewis was highly influenced by Bruce Lee." "Joe Lewis was a world champion when he met Bruce, but it was a lot more of Bruce being the instructor to Joe." "(Dan) I don't think he had boxing hands until he met Bruce Lee, but his side kick was phenomenal." "Joe would throw 1,000 side kicks a day." "Listen, Joe Lewis, in today's world, he would have learned all that shit and been just as bad as he was back in the day." "Bruce didn't think point karate, point martial arts competition, was valuable at all, and I totally disagreed with him." "Bruce watched it but didn't believe in it." "He always advocated full-contact sparring." "Bruce Lee looked at all of that and said, "This is not martial arts."" ""This is nonsense." "Let's get rid of these rules."" "I respect that he didn't feel like he wanted to compete because it wasn't real combat." "He says you're not fighting for yourself or expressing yourself." "You're fighting for the judges, the referee, the rules." "What's the reality of combat?" "There's someone who wants to beat you down." "He said to learn to swim, you cannot swim on land." "You gotta get in the water." "To learn to fight, you gotta fight." "Can you break five or six pieces of wood with your hand or your foot?" "Boards don't hit back." "I'll probably break my hand and foot." "He had high regard for those martial artists of the day that were winning tournaments." "He just had a different philosophy about martial arts and actual fighting." "I do not believe in styles any more." "I mean, I do not believe that there is such thing as like a Chinese way of fighting or the Japanese way of fighting or whatever way of fighting." "Because if you don't have styles, if you just say, "Well, here I am, you know, as a human being, how can I express myself totally and completely?"" "Now, that way, you won't create a style, because style is a crystallisation." "I mean, that way it's a process of continuing growth." "He called his institute Jun Fan Gung Fu." "We were riding in a car and he mentioned what he enjoyed in fencing was the stop hit." "Bruce didn't have any passive blocks." "His blocks were a strike." "Bruce took the stances from the stances that you see in Western fencing." "Instead of just block and then hit, it's done simultaneously." "He says we wanna intercept his physical motion and his thought." "It's almost like fencing." "You see this capture?" "That's the capture." "And that's why he said, "I'm gonna call my new method the intercepting way or the intercepting fist."" "Come on, touch me." "Any way you can." "To reach me, you must move to me." "Your attack offers me an opportunity to intercept you." "And they said, "What do you call that?"" "He says, "We call thatjeet kune do."" "In Cantonese, jeet kune do." "Then it was Dan who says, "Acronym would be JKD."" "And Bruce Lee said, "I like that."" " The way of the intercepting fist." " Intercepting fist?" "It sounds Chinese, but it's very much an American martial art." "Jeet kune do was how can I most efficiently directly end a moment of combat?" "(Ed) The philosophy Bruce Lee had was:" "The simpler the better, the most effective, the direct line." " The other stuff was Hollywood." " It can be taught." " Do you understand?" " But it cannot really be standardised." "And that's not to say that it can't be passed on." "But it was very personal to him." "All the wannabes, all the imposters who put up jeet kune do signs on their school building, and they have no idea whatjeet kune do is." "They think it's a style." "I don't know if he'd be dojo-busting in his days, but that would upset Bruce." "(Bruce Lee)" "Bruce Lee has the big middle finger raised toward any form of authority." "All kinds of dogmas, all kinds of traditions." "He's saying a big "screw you" to all of them." "This guy was preaching back in the '60s you shouldn't stay to one style." "No one style is the best." "Have a piece of everything." "In 1968 he says, "JKD in '69 will be different."" "I said, "This is really good stuff we're doing now."" "He says, "JKD in '69 will be different." "JKD in 1970 will be different."" "Martial arts has evolved more in the last ten years than it has in the last 10,000 years, because all the stuff that Bruce Lee talked about and his philosophies and things that he believed were finally proven and now this new martial art was able to start to grow and evolve." "(announcer) Our main event, for the light heavyweight title, here we go!" "You talk about Chinese boxing." "How does it differ from, say, our kind of boxing?" "Well, first we use the feet." "(commentator) Second to none." "And then we use the elbow." "(commentator) Oh!" "Beautiful elbow!" " Do you use the thumb too?" " You name it, man, we use it." " You use it all." " You have to." "Because that is the expression of the human body." "I mean, the... everything, I mean, not just the hand." "The crazy thing about martial arts is people debate and fight over this stuff." "There's no debate." "Bruce Lee is definitely the father of mixed martial arts." "I do think there's a correlation there, but it's not that jeet kune do is the same thing as MMA." "If Dana White says Bruce Lee is the father of mixed martial arts," "I would say he's one of the earliest ones, but Gene LeBell is the father of mixed martial arts." "In 1963 you'll see Gene defeating Milo Savage, a professional boxer." "Well, Bruce wasn't into mixed martial arts in 1963." "(Gene) As I was choking him, he grabbed my hand and started to bite, and I said, "Milo, you bite my hand, I'm gonna take your eye out."" "He opened his mouth, I pulled my hand out and I choked him." "And he was out, like, for 22 minutes." "Gene LeBell taught Bruce Lee grappling moves." "I'd throw him and flip him and he'd land on his feet." "Then he'd spin, do a crescent kick on me or do a judo throw." "And he was a magnificent athlete." "If you're gonna say father of mixed martial... it's gotta be Bruce." "He's before anyone else." "He's the first one who decided to put it all together." "He had the little shorts on, too." "That's as close as he could get to what the UFC and the MMA was 25 years later." "(Richard) In 1947, kajukenbo was the first to put all these different martial arts in one title:" "Karate, judo, kenpo, boxing." "Like Bruce Lee, they put all these practical things together but kajukenbo had it first." "I agree with Dana White." "He is one of the pioneers of mixed martial art." "The reality is, everybody has been a part of this evolution, from Benny "the Jet" Urquidez to Joe Lewis to all these guys, to Joe Lewis the boxer, too, and the list goes on and on and on." "When the UFC came in, they weren't talking about Bruce Lee." " They were talking about Royce Gracie." " (Commentator) Royce Gracie!" "The Gracies were a piece of that too, a piece of the history of not only the UFC but of the martial arts evolving." "For a while they owned those competitions." "(commentator) There's the tag." "What the Gracies did was they took the ground game, the submission game, and really refined it to a whole other level." "Bruce would have loved Brazilian jiujitsu." "I think if he saw the Gracies, he would have studied." "He really embraced wrestling and he really embraced judo." "The difference between the Gracies and Bruce Lee is Bruce Lee was never stuck and married to one thing." "I think once everybody started to learn jiujitsu and then people started to do more stand-up in there..." "(commentator) My goodness!" "Then I think they started talking about Bruce Lee." "(commentator) Oh, man." "That is the Karate Kid." "And when you're talking about combat..." "Well, I mean, if it is a sport, now you're talking about something else." "You have regulations." "You have rules." "But when you're talking about fighting as it is..." " No rules?" " With no rules." "Real fighting." "Well, then, baby, you'd better train every part of your body." "Mixed martial art in the cage is for a contest." "It's a sport." "I don't know that I would call him exactly the father of mixed martial arts because, again, it is still sport, there are still rules." "Bruce Lee was strictly for the street, taking guys out, not for competition." "When they had these Vale Tudo fights in Brazil, there were barely any rules." "You could head-butt, you could kick in the groin, all kinds of things." "Bruce's favourite weapon in the street fight was the fingerjab." "This hand would block the vision, so when he came up, like that." "If you do that, it could be very serious damage to his vision for life." "Mixed martial art is the purest form of combat that you can possibly have in civilisation." "(commentator) Oh!" "With a kick." "I just always felt like it was such a real raw sport and that it was gonna overtake boxing one day." "It seems like that day's here." "Let's fight!" "It's the most hardcore real form of competition and honesty I could find, and that's the kind of thing I crave." "(commentator) Carano, a big-time puncher." "There is fear." "Sometimes you don't wanna go in there." "It just teaches you to face the music, that fear's something that needs to be devoured." "My biggest fear is not that I'm gonna get hurt." "(commentator) Carano getting pounded!" "My biggest fear is that I'm not going to be able to make it authentic and honestly express myself." "You're not trying to express yourself in real fighting." "You're trying to survive." "(Bruce) And you ask yourself how can you honestly express yourself at that moment?" "If I want to punch, I'm gonna do it, man, and I'm gonna do it." "Not you want to punch because you're trying to avoid getting hit but to really be in with it and express yourself." "So that is the type of thing you have to train yourself into it, to become one with the..." "This might sound different." "I feel as if I'm helping people as I'm punching them in the face." " (commentator) Shogun's badly hurt." " Jon Jones!" "I'm beating weakness out of them, making them a better person." "In my opinion it's the highest art of expression and that's what honestly expressing yourself is." "(commentator) To the body." "And it is all over!" "(Ed) Jon Jones, look, guys like this, it's important for them to have this kind of confidence." "I don't look at it as if I'm hurting my opponent, my enemy." "It's like we're brothers painting this picture together." "It helps them, until, of course, it doesn't, which, as we know historically, always happens, where they run into that guy where, "Oh, this isn't fun."" ""This is reality." "You can get hurt in there."" "What happens is after several years of that, it takes its effect, you know?" "Like when I had to go take my neurological and my hands were going, and I couldn't remember where I parked my car in the morning." "It should be regulated." "There should be judges and medical staff there." "You don't wanna see people get injured." "I think my father, from a pure martial arts interest and combat interest standpoint, would have loved to watch the UFC." "I believe that Bruce Lee was a huge fight fan." "He'd have been jumping out of his seat, getting as excited as any of us." "I think he'd have been proud to be called the father of mixed martial arts." "OK, there's people out there, they got it." "They say that Bruce Lee was the father of mixed martial arts." "That bothers me." "If he's the father of mixed martial arts," "I'm the grandfather of mixed martial arts," "And if you don't believe me, I'll choke you, cos you got a nice neck for choking." "When you get into this whole martial arts thing and you start talking about Bruce Lee, a lot of people get offended." "People get pissed off and bombed out and everything else." "But Bruce Lee is 100 percent the father of mixed martial arts." "He was so directed and so concrete about his thoughts and his beliefs that he actually went out and had his friend George make a little miniature tombstone." "It's really heavy and it says, "In memory of a once fluid man crammed and distorted by the classical mess."" "The classical mess meant that all these traditions were a classical mess." ""Right punch comes." "I'll move out to a 30-degree angle."" ""Then I'll bend my..." It's too complicated." "It's not gonna work in real life." "(Shannon) So here was this tombstone he created to essentially remind himself to go back to fluidity." "(Linda) Bruce had a vast library of motivational books and wrote motivational thoughts every day and had a little diary that he kept every day." "Always they would say you've got to have the plan and work the plan and write down your goals, which he did." "You know, his famous paper he wrote, My Definite Chief Aim." "1969 was a very difficult time for him." "A lot of things were going through his life." "As I recall, money was short." "Bruce was very traditionalist and very ashamed that I had to go to work." "This was not in his way of thinking." "He contemplated maybe going back to Hong Kong at that time period." "And then in the summer of '69 these horrific murders happened." "We have a weird homicide." "When the Manson murders happened, it was horrible, it was horrifying." "(reporter) The scene described by one investigator as reminiscent of a weird religious rite." "Bruce was a very good friend of Jay Sebring and of Sharon Tate." "(reporter) Five persons, including actress Sharon Tate, were found dead at the home of Miss Tate and her husband, screen director Roman Polanski." "My father worked with Sharon Tate the summer before the murders on the film The Wrecking Crew." "(reporter) Miss Tate was eight months pregnant." "Among the other victims were Hollywood hair stylist Jay Sebring..." "Jay Sebring introduced my father to William Dozier, who was the producer of Batman and also produced The Green Hornet." "The murders were then followed up the very next night by more murders." "It was just a nightmare and very scary for Bruce, too, because Bruce's whole mentality was protection, to take care of us." "(reporter) One officer summed up the murders:" ""In all my years I have never seen anything like this before."" "(Shannon) Those were tough times, going out of the '60s and into the '70s." "And every day, I practise martial arts." "We were really struggling financially to make it, and we had bought our first house which we ended up not being able to afford." "And right in the middle of that he hurt his back." "He was doing a good morning stretch exercise which can be very dangerous." "Chiropractors like that exercise." " You see?" " Watch out." "For whatever reason, he did not warm up and just... that was it." "He was in excruciating pain." "I said, "Where's Bruce?" They never wanted to say he hurt his back, because I knew he was working on the screen scripts." "They told him that he was never going to walk properly, and forget doing any gung fu." "On the back of his business card he wrote the words "Walk on"." "He used to put the card on his bathroom mirror and his doors and walls, so everywhere he went in his room, he'd see "Walk on"." "So he'd get down and start doing his stretching." "Bruce brought himself back through rigorous rehabilitation." "I had a similar expression when I would drive down to Torrance to do my jiujitsu class every week." "His expression was "Walk on" and mine was "Walk in the front door"." "I had every excuse on the way down to go back." "My stomach hurts." "My arm hurts." "My knee's aching." "And I used to say, "Walk in the front door." "Walk in the front door."" "The end result of walking in that front door 16 years was I got my black belt, which I consider the greatest achievement of my life, apart from my children." "The back problem was a constant problem in his filming from day one after the injury." "Something he had to be careful about and nurse each day when he finished working." "And you push it out, but all the time you are keeping the continuity going." "Bending, stretching." "He worked extremely hard." "Most of us, I think, don't know what it is to work that hard." "(Shannon) My father went to India with James Coburn and the writer Stirling Silliphant." "They were scouting locations for a film, The Silent Flute, that my father had written the treatment for that he was really hoping would come together, because he was struggling at that point in time to get a project going." "The Silent Flute could have blasted Bruce into Hollywood big time." "This was going to be the big breakthrough project." "This was going to put money in the bank to pay the mortgage and all that." "But they couldn't find the locations that they wanted." "(Linda) Stirling and Jim came back to Warner Bros and said, "This is just not what we're looking for in location."" "And then it all came crashing down." "That was such a disappointment to Bruce because we were banking on it, literally." "(Bruce Lee)" "(Linda) Bruce took a trip back to Hong Kong to help his mom with immigration into the United States." "He took Brandon took with him." "Brandon was five years old." "(Richard) He wasn't working, had no money." "He dropped everything." "Closed his schools." ""I'm going to Hong Kong."" "The Green Hornet was at that time showing on TV in Hong Kong, only the people were calling it The Kato Show." "They didn't care about Van Williams." "He was the biggest thing there." "He was greeted there as a returning star." "That was the first time he thought, "Wow." "People recognise me here."" ""They remember me."" "He did a couple of interviews on television shows." "Oh, yeah, that kid." "Now he's a big star in Hollywood." "So that was the first inkling that maybe there would be a future there in Hong Kong." "But he wasn't quite ready to follow up on that." "Bruce Lee had a bit part, or a supporting role, in the Longstreet series." "And this had an enormous effect on the audience." "What was it?" "I think the successful ingredient in it was because I was being Bruce Lee." " Yourself?" " Myself, right." "And did that part, just expressed myself, like I say, honestly expressed myself at that time." "He was very proud of Longstreet, and it was very much from him and his art and his thoughts." "Can you remember the lines by Stirling Silliphant to..." " He's one of my students." " Was he, too?" " Yes." " You've had everybody as your student." "But some lines there expressed your philosophy." " I don't know if you remember them." " I remember." "I said..." "This is what it is, OK?" "If you try to remember, you will lose." "I said empty your mind." "Be formless, shapeless." "Like water." "Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup." "Put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle." "You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot." "Now, water can flow or creep or drip or crash." "Be water, my friend." " Like that." "You see?" " I see." "I get the idea." " A-ha." " I get the power behind it." "The thing that I got off him the most is the trust, being able to trust your abilities in each situation." "A lot of times the game becomes too scripted." "When it's too scripted and you start planning for certain things to take place, that's when I believe you're weak." "What he's saying is that you have to adapt to your surroundings, your environment." "James Coburn said, "Look, man, the best thing you can do, go back to Hong Kong, do what you do best, come back, rock the world."" "James Coburn did tell Bruce that he shouldn't keep doing TV, that it would eat up his genius." "He had much more to offer the world and he should hold out for starring roles." "Jimi Hendrix had to break away and go to England to be recognised as the rock star that he was." "Clint Eastwood, he had a career out of Rawhide, but it was the Italian Westerns that really made his career." "Bruce ultimately had to go back to Hong Kong to be recognised as the movie star he was." "Here's a plane ticket." "Just go back to Hong Kong for a few years." "You wouldn't want any trouble, huh?" "That's one of the things I admire most about him." "He said, "OK, the institution's not gonna work for me."" ""I'll figure something else out."" "He just went to through back door." "Bruce made the first two pictures with independent producer Raymond Chow for $15,000 each." "That was..." "It was made in Thailand in a small village in Thailand." "Bruce Lee plays a working-class hero." "He's from the land." "He's one of the folk." "But at the same time as that, he's never one of the guys." "And this is why it was so successful, as well as the brilliant choreography." "Bruce Lee completely changed the way action scenes look today in cinema." "It's about making violence look beautiful, which may sound like a paradox, it probably is, but a director like John Woo, he shoots a gunfight like martial arts." "It's a ballet." "In terms of the craft of filmmaking, that's a huge change." "But the Western movies really piss me off." "They chop 'em up so much." "Most of the scenes overzoom, so you can't see what's going on." "Those guys have to go back and watch Bruce Lee movies." "You can see these awesome moves he's doing in their entirety." "You can have a shot that doesn't have to last only a half-second long." "I never even thought about it until I did this movie Haywire." "Now every time I see a movie, I'm like, "Stop cutting away."" ""Oh, that's a stunt double."" "(Ray) They were wonderful to watch." "No wires, no gimmicks, no quick cuts." "You get an actor to portray that, you're gonna have to do quick cuts." "(Paul) Bruce Lee set a new baseline." "Every piece of film fight choreography has been influenced by Bruce Lee, whether the people involved know it or not." " A motion picture is motion." " Yeah." "I mean, you gotta keep the dialogue down." "(Linda) We came over to Hong Kong and that was when they showed the premiere of The Big Boss." "The theatre was packed." "Bruce and I sat there towards the back." "(Richard) When Bruce Lee's first movie showed in Hollywood," "I was so elated, I was so emotional, seeing my friend, my teacher, on the screen." "When the movie finishes, it is so quiet... you could hear a pin drop." "And Bruce is like, "Oh, no." "They hate it." You know." "And all of a sudden... a huge roar goes up." "And they're cheering and laughing and clapping." "It was wonderful." "(Richard) Every time he came on and did his fight scene, everybody applauded." "That's when we knew he was a movie star now." "And then they started to spot Bruce in the audience." "They carried him out on their shoulders." "Oh, it was thrilling." "It was thrilling to him." ""Finally I have been appreciated in my work."" "It was wonderful, a very high moment in his life." "(announcer) It's The Pierre Berton Show, the programme that comes to you from the major capitals of the world." "This edition comes to you from Hong Kong." "And Pierre's guest, the newest Mandarin superstar." "His name is Bruce Lee and he doesn't even speak Mandarin." "Here's Pierre." "There's a pretty good chance that you'll get a TV series in the States called The Warrior in which you use, what, the martial arts in a Western setting?" "That was the original idea." "Bruce Lee had an idea for a TV show called The Warrior, which later became the series Kung Fu, which we all know and love." "David Carradine did a good job, but Kung Fu, the TV series, was Bruce Lee's role." "The better guy doesn't always get the job in the movie business." "There's a lot of politics involved." "Have people come up in the industry and said," ""We don't know how the audience are going to take a non-American?"" "Well, such question has been raised." "In fact, it is being discussed, and that is why The Warrior probably is not gonna be on." " I see." " You see?" "Because unfortunately such thing does exist in this world." "Bruce Lee was a bigger star, both in Asia and America." "He was a world-class martial artist." "He had already done The Green Hornet." "And then he did not get the role for being too Asian." "He had such disdain for Hollywood and all those old movies having Caucasian people play the parts of Chinese characters." "I have already made up my mind that in the United States I think something about the Oriental," "I mean, the true Oriental, should be shown." " Hollywood sure as heck hasn't." " You better believe it, man." "It's always the pigtail and bouncing around, chop-chop, with the eyes slanted and all of that." "(Reginald) There's nothing worse in a movie than when all of a sudden some horrific stereotype shows up." "You're like, "Why?" "Just leave us out." "Just leave us out."" ""We'd rather not exist in your world than exist in your world in some buffoonery coonery."" "He had a lot of celebrity students and he was teaching them philosophy and martial arts, so he sold them." "But when it came down to it for Bruce and Hollywood, they didn't get it." "They didn't take the time to know who Bruce was." "This was his struggle." "You want to get ahead?" "Here you have a bright future, if you apply yourself." "I will, sir." "Hollywood was a terrible disappointment to him, especially because then you throw in the racial factor as well, that studios did not want to back a major Chinese star." "Asian stereotypes for women are pretty bad." "For men it's much worse." "And I think he was railing against that his whole life." "When that little thing of disrespect crept into my life again, which was the movie business, I got really angry." "It is kind of shocking, isn't it, that that much time, 40 years, has passed and there hasn't been one Asian-American romantic lead, or even just a movie star on that scale, an Asian-American movie star?" "Not one." "I don't think" "I could name an Asian romantic lead male." "There hasn't really been anyone since my uncle here, particularly in Hollywood." "Obviously out of China you have Jet Li, you have Donnie Yen." "There have been no great Asian male leads in Hollywood who are sexy." "Er, a lead male, Asian-American?" "Erm..." "I don't even look at him as being Asian." "He's like Bruce Lee." "He's like my idol." "And that's something I guess I don't think of so much, but I guess, yeah." "(Paul) A Chinese nationalist watching Bruce Lee films will see Chinese nationalism." "A white Westerner may not even notice the ethnicity." "Maybe Dean Cain, right?" "Isn't he part Asian?" "(Richard) At certain times there were prejudices against my skin, but I never let it bother me, because in the back of my mind I used to think," ""I'll take care out in the parking lot and I'll beat your head in."" "(Reginald) Bruce Lee became a complete star making films in his own country." "40 years later, things haven't changed." "So if you wanna see another star like that, it has to happen in films made outside of the system." "My first memory of Bruce Lee is in the movie Chinese Connection." "The last scene in the movie there's a firing squad." "When he came out and ran up and jumped and they froze it." "I was like, "Mom, what happened?"" "And she said, "He wanted to go that way."" "And that just..." "that just stuck with me." "If you look at Chinese Connection, it's a movie about cultural nationalism, as expressed through action sequences, but that's no different than Swan Lake." "There's no difference between a ballet and a kung fu movie, expressing the ideas and the emotion through movement." "When the Japanese bring the sick man of Asia framed picture, this is speaking to a long period of Chinese suppression and subordination that was within living memory of those 1970s Hong Kong Bruce Lee films." "If you play the film with the dubbed English and then in the original Cantonese, you see that they're essentially different films." "So, for example, one of the characters goes up to Mr Wu, the translator, and in the English dubbed version he says:" "Look, here, now what's the point of this?" "The translator goes:" "In the Cantonese version he says:" "So in the English version he's not Chinese, but in the subtitled Cantonese version, he says, "Yes, I'm Chinese, but I've chosen to go with the Japanese, the powerful."" "So there's a world of difference." "We're consuming different films depending on the nature of the decisions they make in translating." "Westerners have thought that they're slapstick, but the Chinese audience are watching highly politically charged films with quite recent history, animosities and resentments coursing through them." "Now, you listen to me, and I'll only say it once." "We are not sick men." "(David) What he gave was so real and so raw because he lived it every day of his life." "Bruce did not get along well with the director of the first two films, Lo Wei." "Lo Wei thought that he could put his thumb on Bruce as one of his simple actors." "Well, he was old school and wouldn't listen to any ideas Bruce had." "(David) The bottom line is Bruce still didn't feel the freedom that he wanted." "He said to Raymond Chow," ""I want to make this film, The Way of the Dragon."" "I want to write it, I want to produce it, I want to direct it and I can do this and act in it." "(Bruce) It's really a simple plot of a country boy going to a place where he cannot speak the language but somehow he came out on top." "He goes to Italy and the mafia can't beat him, so they call America and America sends over Colt." "We must call America for Colt." " Is this Colt good?" " Is Colt good?" "(Paul) And Colt is Chuck Norris." "Bruce Lee is fighting a real American, you know." "He's strawberry blond." "He's got hair all over his body." "In fact, he uses that hair against him." "So when he fought Chuck Norris..." "He represented all people of colour fighting the Western oppressor." "(speaks Spanish)" "If you're a non-white viewer, this is a big deal." "The little guy is beating the best that America can provide." "I can tell you, at the Fox Theatre in St Louis, which was 100 percent all black, we cheered for him." "Some of us were more politically aware than others, but everyone got the joke." "He was very appealing to anybody who's ever been oppressed because of ethnic reasons or other reason." "That time when Bruce was on the rise, we were looking for countercultural heroes to fight the establishment." "(Teri) It's 40 years." "Wouldn't have people forgotten him by now?" "No, I think a lot of cultures have picked him up as sort of their hero." "You had Muhammad Ali." "You had Malcolm X. You had the Black Panthers." "You had a lot of radicalism going on." "Bruce Lee represented that same kind of radicalism." "Bruce Lee emerges when America is having a very bad time in Vietnam and cannot beat the Viet Cong, these little yellow guys in pyjamas, so Bruce Lee speaks to that." "Anywhere you go, everybody is about Bruce Lee and rallies behind him." "He's the underdog." "(Paul) You don't have to start shouting political declarations to be culturally and politically significant." "That Colosseum fight was very accurate." "Taking nothing away from Chuck Norris, but I think Bruce Lee would be victorious." "That fight scene gave Chuck Norris pretty much a career." "If they said Bruce could have beat Chuck Norris," "I'd say, "How much do you wanna bet?"" "I got a fistful of green backs in my pocket." "Chuck got chucked out right there in that movie." "That's one of my favourites." "Boom." "Guillotine choke in the '70s." "Hello." "That's being ahead of your time." "When Bruce started doing the film Way of the Dragon and he was this huge star on the rise, things were changing." "I think he started having a hard time trusting people around him." "You bastard!" "Fame is a killer, literally." "Put money on top of that." "Suddenly you distrust people's motives, for very good reason." "He had told me that he doesn't know who his friends were." "He says he doesn't know who to trust." "It was eye-opening to know what the price of fame was." "(Bruce Lee)" "You can't go to school for it." "You deal with it on a day-to-day basis." "(Bruce Lee)" "Fame took over my mind." "It almost destroyed my career, my family." "I was caught up in my own hype." "I thought the only way to save myself from myself was to do something where I could get hit and hit back." "And I thought I'd made a healthy choice because it was better than a whisky bottle or, you know, whatever the fuck." "It got to the point where he could hardly go out of the house without people following him." "He craved on sort of a soul level to be a little bit more peaceful." "(Bruce Lee)" "Well, you can't have a normal life or make normal mistakes because everybody's constantly, you know, looking in." "And it was just like a smorgasbord." "He could have had ten at a time if he even remotely wanted to." "The word superstar really turned me off and I'll tell you why." "Because the word star, man, it's an illusion." "It's something what the public calls you." "I really loved..." "I might get a lot of crap for this, but Game of Death, and to have like no way is the way." "He's fighting each opponent that brings a different problem to the table and he's gotta adapt." "Kareem Abdul-Jabbar came to Hong Kong to visit and Bruce had this great idea." ""Let's do a scene together." "It'll be great, a great fighting sequence."" "I'd speak to Kareem about his sessions with Bruce and he said," ""I sparred with him and like he was just so quick."" ""I'd turn this way and then he's not there."" ""He's kicking you in the back of the head."" ""Then I turn this way and he's over here."" "He said he couldn't catch him." "There was just no way he could lock in on him." "He was just like a rabbit." "I really love the idea of the levels and getting to the next level, and fighting different styles." "As a dancer who battled other dancers, that was like the whole mentality." "And on the third level, it's supposed to be a person who is trained in weaponry, and so he chose me to do the part." "Dan Inosanto, being one of the freshest Filipinos on the planet, was actually the person that brought the nunchucks to Bruce Lee." "1964, I introduced the nunchucks to Bruce Lee." "And at the time he thought this was a worthless piece of junk." "When he moved into the LA area, I taught him how to use it." "He said, "I'm gonna use this on The Green Hornet."" "Nunchucks was always some mother's broom getting sacrificed, which would then turn into someone's groin being sacrificed." "In three months he was swinging it like he had been doing it for a lifetime." "I was living in Miami when they came out." "Every gangster in town had nunchucks, and couldn't use 'em worth a shit." "I would spend hours whipping 'em around and trying to learn the moves, trying to copy how he'd have it under his shoulder right here and have the hand out." "In a short time I think almost every child is using this." "It became like a household product." "It's outlawed now in California." "After I watched this movie, I used to use that." "But I always hit my elbow." "Whaaa!" "Right out of the gate I swung real hard and I even made the Bruce Lee noise." "I went, "Whoo!" and I hit my head and there was this big nut that came out maybe an inch." "And after that I stopped making the noise and I stopped playing with the nunchucks." "I tried to make my parents buy me some real ones." "Thank God they didn't." "I'm nunchucking, I'm busting myself all in the head." "I had the rubber ones, so I'm good." "I got into it because I stopped carrying a gun." "I carried a gun for years." "I'm not ashamed to admit it." "I think I went into therapy and I thought, "Let me carry something else."" "This one particularly is sentimental for me." "These are the same nunchucks that we used in The Game of Death." "He gave me these to keep in the house." "It brings out really fond memories for me." "(David) Fred Weintraub, who was an executive at Warner Bros, comes to visit him in Hong Kong on the set of Game of Death, says, "Hey, man, we've seen what you can do."" ""We wanna do a film with you and we wanna do it with Warner Bros." Boom." "It was a time when Bruce had so much opportunity and he was so thrilled to co-produce Enter the Dragon." "He said, "This is my opening back into Hollywood."" "They were all there in Hong Kong, the producers, Fred Weintraub, Paul Heller." "They're ready to film, have all this crew, Western crew, Chinese crew, which was a very difficult situation in itself, and sets are built, and Bruce won't come to work." "He wants to put a little more Chinese philosophy that fits in with the story." "(Bob) Bruce knew what he wanted Dragon to be, but had problems with folks who didn't share his vision." "(Linda) And he was adamant he was not going to the set." "It was kind of hard around our house because was Bruce was so frustrated." "He could lose his temper." "If he didn't like anything you did, he would tell you." "Linda was that fabulous wife." "She knew how to talk to him and counsel him." "I was talking behind the scenes to Fred and Paul and the other people, saying, "You need to listen to what he has to say because he is right."" "He was fighting for his career." "It was a coming together, and, yes, Bruce did get things in that film." "Let me think." "Don't think." "Feel." "And they're all better off, the world is better off, for the stand that he took that time." "Action." "Enter the Dragon was Hollywood's first dipping its toe into the water of the martial art genre." "Bruce Lee is explosive in a way that no one had seen before." "The opening scene, Bruce Lee basically put the mixed martial arts in his film." "Fighting in the kenpo gloves." "The mixed martial arts gloves with the open fingers." "And he used arm bars." "(Ray) There's not a lot of charisma in a straight arm bar." "He was the man." "When he stomps out Bob Wall and kills him... you see a lot of complex emotions all going on at once." "I haven't seen any actor in an action film match all those levels and nuances in the middle of a fight scene." "The mirror scene was just, you know, when he's walking around and he's cut up and all of a sudden he hears his master in his head saying if you destroy the image... (master) Destroy the image and you will break the enemy." "You defeat the enemy, he was just..." "It had a tension that to me resonates because it's cutting through all illusions." "This is the moment that he was waiting for." "This was Bruce Lee's film in Hollywood." "Bruce was in a studio doing dubbing for Enter the Dragon and he went to the restroom and he collapsed." "I was called and came to the hospital." "And he was unconscious and I was talking to him, and he told me later that he was like in the bottom of a well and he could hear me calling him, "Come back, come back."" "And he did recover from that." "It was a cerebral oedema, a pressing of fluid on the brain, but they never found the cause of it." "Ted Wong used to always tell me, "Bruce Lee was never afraid of anything, except one thing, and that's getting older."" "(Linda) He came to the United States and had a complete physical and they pronounced him in perfect health with the body of an 18-year-old." "The doctors were very reassuring." "He had just had a collapse." "He didn't have frequent headaches." "Of course, they didn't have MRls then to see what his brain tissue was looking like." "I had seen him in June." "He told me that he'd had an OK from UCLA that his body was fit." "He was not worried about himself and he was taking good care of himself." "(Pierre) Bruce Lee faces a real dilemma." "He's on the verge of stardom in the United States, but he's just achieved superstardom as a film actor here in Hong Kong." "So what does he chose, the East or the West?" "It's the kind of problem most budding movie actors would welcome." "I was called and told by Raymond Chow, "You should get to the hospital."" ""They're taking Bruce to the hospital."" "And I was there way before Bruce got there." "So eventually the ambulance arrived." "It took a long time." "Everything took too long a time." "He got to the hospital and I saw him laying there and I saw them do a big injection of something right into his heart." "And I remember turning to a medical person standing there and saying..." "I couldn't say, "Is he dead?"" "I said, "Is he alive?" "And they shook their heads and said, "No."" "And that was just unbelievable." "It must be a mistake, you know, it's not real." "What can I say?" "It was." "(Diana) You can see how when he passed away, you know, how... how difficult that was and, you know, how difficult that was for my dad." "It's the first time I saw my dad ever cry." "Yeah, that's true." "It was really rough." "Well, yeah." "I said, "Dan, is it true?" "Ls Bruce Lee dead?"" ""I got a lot of calls." And he says, "Yeah, Rich."" "Linda called him from Hong Kong, and he was in a trance on his own and talking about Bruce Lee." "He was so in grief, so in mourning about Bruce's death." "He was just really uniquely different from everybody else." "(Shannon) My memories, they're more like glimpses." "But I remember primarily the funeral in Hong Kong, because it was so massive, and sort of being dragged through that, because it was chaotic." "And I remember my dad's mom taking us to get candy and feeling really happy about that." "(Mickey) I was in class, actually, when Bruce Lee died." "There were guys in there crying, sobbing, just..." "I mean, Bruce Lee, you know..." "He was just... he was it." "Will you tell me what Teacher died of?" "Forensic scientists from around the world came up with the conclusion that he had had a hypersensitive reaction to this medication that he had been given for a headache and that that had caused the fluid on his brain and that he had succumbed to that." "It's still something that people cannot believe." "He was well." "There was nothing wrong." "How could a healthy man die?" "And then there's all this stuff about, you know, how he died, the sinister way in which he died." "He had an aneurysm or the death hands got him or, you know..." "He was murdered." "They gave him the dim mak, they gave him a death touch." "There's absolutely positively something a little shady about the way that it all went down." "How he could pass away at that age, you know, but it does happen, so I've learned to cope with it and deal with it." "But it always puzzled me." "The fact that my family is cursed and the very sad and tragic circumstance that my brother died, those are sort of the themes that pop up." "They wrote so many stupid stories, the tong killing him and all that bullshit, and he died of drugs, that sold magazines." "He died in Betty Ting Pei's apartment, so there's no denying that." "The decision was made by the producers to say that he had died at home." "When that news got out that he had not died at home, the tabloid press went crazy." "But my mom knew he had been at a meeting and doing his films." "She was dealing with his death and taking care of her kids, and all of that gossip was just the tabloid press trying to make it bigger and crazier than it needed to be." "It is my wish that the newspapers and the people of Hong Kong will stop speculating on the circumstances surrounding my husband's death." "Please remember him for his genius, his art and the magic he brought to every one of us." "(Linda) Of course I was going to go and see his film and applaud him and be with people who admired him." "That was always my thought in my head, is, "I need to do this for Bruce."" "She really is this incredible woman with just great dignity and grace under fire." "(Linda) It was great to see Bruce again, but only a month later my memories were very fresh anyway, you know." "It was more pain than joy at the time." "Everybody said all these years, you know, he had an allergic reaction to marijuana, he had a brain aneurysm." "The most important thing is how he lived." "Every time you see him, it's still emotional." "We miss the friend." "I'm now 74, but there really has not ever been a day that I haven't thought about him at least once, maybe twice or three times or four times or five times through the day." "There's nobody who's gonna replace Bruce Lee, not while you or I are alive." "It just ain't gonna happen." "This genius passes away way before his time." "We have to be thankful we had him for 32 years." "(Paul) Bruce Lee was just a symbol of everything that every little boy wanted to be." "You have offended my family and you have..." "Disgraced the Shaolin temple." "Whoo!" "(David) The most important thing he's ever done and accomplished is bringing people together." "Bruce brought..." "he brought cultures together." "(Jones) People remember him for being powerful beyond measure, you know, for being limitless, for standing for things when people crucified him." "It didn't matter what colour you are, what country you came from, you were a Bruce Lee fan." "He's the man." "He's the truth." "And it was amazing how he connected so many people." "Not just martial arts, but people from all walks of life." "If Bruce was here today, he'd be on Dancing with the Stars and he'd win it, hands down." "(Bruce) Doggone it, such is the basic need of a human being," "I might as well enjoy it before I kick the bucket, like that type of an attitude." "We remember Bruce Lee today because he was so much fun to watch." "He was like a mythological hero." "My strength flowed through Bruce to me, so..." "He left me with that gift." "The idea is running water never grows stale, so you gotta just keep on flowing." "He didn't compromise." "People really felt that presence about him and felt that influence from him and they just wanna somehow connect with him." "When people try to relate to him, they do say," ""That's my Bruce Lee." "That's what I connect with."" "When I watch Bruce Lee, I am Bruce Lee." " Dragon whips his tail." " Dragon whips his tail." "I watch Bruce Lee, you watch Bruce Lee and we're both being Bruce Lee." "Bruce would want us to recognise that he honestly expressed himself, that he did not bow down to any sacred cows." "To express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself, and to express myself honestly, that, my friend, is very hard to do." "He would urge others to examine your life, you know, see how things fit you personally, find your strength, take a stab at life, don't just sit back and take it easy, you know?" "That's not what life is about." "It's even more fun to see him now when I look back, you know." "Oh!" "What an amazing young man he was." "(Pierre) Do you think of yourself as Chinese or North American?" "You know what I want to think of myself?" "As a human being." "Because, I mean, I don't wanna sound like "as Confucius say", but under the sky, under the heaven, man, there is but one family." "It just so happened, man, that people are different." "Empty your mind." "Be formless, shapeless." "Like water." "Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup." "Put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle." "You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot." "Now, water can flow or it can crash." "Be water, my friend."