RISING SON

Brandon Lee, hero of Fox's action thriller, Rapid Fire, is a complex star in the making. And family is at the heart of this complexity - he's had to come to terms with his father Bruce's legacy. With a marketing campaign that relentlessly invokes his dad while touting him as the "Action Hero of the '90's," Rapid Fire is the first of Fox's three-picture commitment to Lee, a megadeal that could establish him as Hollywood's first Asian American male sex symbol since - well, since Bruce Lee. In this interview with Lee talks about his father, his career, action films and Asian American identity.

A. Magazine: About Rapid Fire: it seems like there's a lot going on in there that invites people to reflect on you and your history. For example, the theme about coming to terms with an absent father.

Brandon Lee: I think it's a little too pat to make a direct reference like that, and say that because a certain circumstance is true in an actor's life, then doing a film with a similar theme is an attempt on that actor's part to express something about it. It wasn't my idea for that to be the plot of the film, it was the writer and director's. Admittedly, it was one I didn't shy away from. It is interesting when you get offered a script and something that's going on in it clearly echoes something going on in you as well.

A.: But that question about following in your father's footsteps is a recurrent one.

BL: That's a question I can't really answer legitimately. You can't put a burden like that on yourself: it's a burden that only exists in other people's expectations of you. And you can't make choices in your career or your life based on other people's expectations. You have to make choices based on what your heart tells you to do. The character in this movie - Jake - is trying to come to some kind of peace with his father. That's something every young man needs to do in the process of growing from boy into man, and if you don't have your father around to give you that affirmation, then you just have to find that affirmation inside yourself, whether it's through visiting his grave or talking to his friends, or whatever.

A.: And you've done things like that?

BL: Well, it's an ongoing process, but when I think about following in my father's footsteps, I feel I've come to a certain amount of peace with trying to live up to something, and now all I try to do is my own work. Because that's all you can ask anybody to do. You can't ask somebody to try and copy somebody else.

A.: So are you happy with the martial arts direction? I remember years ago you saying that this is a vocabulary that you are used to, good at, and so on, but it's just a side of you.

BL: Well, I struggled for a while with: Do I want to do this, or do I want to stay away from it entirely, and just stick with straight acting roles, even if it means less work? And what I eventually decided was, after Showdown in Little Tokyo, in which I had very little input - I didn't choreograph the action sequences, I didn't have anything to do with the character except that I played it - I decided that I was just going to go into it, fully, and say "all right, if I'm going to do this, then I'm going to be able to walk away from this film and say, `you may not like it, but that's my vision.'" And there it is. I jumped in and did the choreography with the stunt coordinator, Jeff Amada. It was a good experience.

A.: Seems to me your character in Rapid Fire is pretty complex. Comparing it to Showdown, for example, in which you play a kind of assimilated "regular American guy" - in this film you're more of a mix.

BL: You know, the part in Showdown was so two-dimensional, and I'm sure some of that was my fault, but it just didn't compare to this. This was a much more involved work for me, and I found it a lot more rewarding. In Showdown I was the comic relief, basically. I had a good time with it, some of the scenes were really fun. I still really enjoy that scene where all the yakuza guys pull their guns on us, and my character gets to take his badge out and do that little monologue - I liked that, but I mean the guy's whole backstory in the film is summed up in one sentence: "Hey, you know, I'm from the Valley and my dad's a dentist." That's it. That's all you ever know about him. There was a lot more meat on Jake's bones.

A.: With Showdown, there was talk about it being a Japan-bashing film. That may be a bit ... nutty, but the Asian American community's reaction to it is interesting anyway. How do you relate to that?

BL: Well, to put it in a nutshell - see, I grew up in Hong Kong, so my very deeply ingrained memories and values - certainly filtered through having grown up in America for the majority of my life - the ones that got set in real deep, came from Chinese culture.

A.: You were there as a child.

BL: Yeah, I was there till I was nine, and I spoke Cantonese fluently, all my friends were Chinese. I went to Lasalle Academy, which is a Catholic school on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong. But most of my experience with what it's like to be Asian in America comes through some strong feelings I have about my dad, strangely enough. The thing is, I don't look particularly Asian, and so I haven't been privy to being treated as particularly Asian, except on some very rare occasions. I'm sure you've had different experiences. Because if I walk into a room, unless someone knows who I am, it's very rare that someone will come up and say, "Do you have some Chinese blood in you?"

The thing about my dad was, so it's the early to mid '60s, and he's doing The Green Hornet, and he ended up having to go to Hong Kong to get the bulk of his work, because at that point a major American studio or TV station wasn't about to put an Asian man in the leading role in a Hollywood production. That was almost 30 years ago. The thing is, right now in 1992 there is not a single bankable Asian star in Hollywood. Not one.

So that's where I get most of my feelings about the matter, to tell you the truth.

A.: Also, I think that when he came back as a star, it was really as a foreign star, curiously enough.

BL: And the other fucked thing about it, you'll excuse my saying so, is that it was also almost entirely posthumous for the American public. By the time they figured it out, he was gone.

A.: I was also thinking as I watched the film that your character plays out the complexity of his mixed identity by passing in different communities. By speaking Chinese, by going into the laundry, it's possible for you to pass as this immigrant worker, while at other times you fly through non-Asian society and aren't marked - except for moments, for instance, in the hotel when these mock FBI guys say something like, "Oh, we could order out Chinese." That's a really interesting moment.

BL: Well, it's funny. Growing up, because a lot of people wouldn't consider me Chinese, there have been several times - the majority of what I've experienced as any kind of Asian prejudice - when people have felt comfortable making rude remarks in my presence, like I wouldn't mind because I don't look Asian or something, you know what I mean? And there have been many times when I've had to look at somebody and go, "Excuse me?" Then they get kind of abashed, like "oh, I'm sorry, I didn't really mean that."

They probably wouldn't do that in front of you.

A.: Well, you'd be surprised.

BL: Yeah, I probably would.

A.: What do you think about the marketing - the sex symbol, action hero of the '90s thing?

BL: I think it's really artificial. For one thing, it's very presumptuous, and for another, like all marketing, it just makes me recoil, the whole concept of it, and it's a side of this profession that I'm learning more about the more involved I get with my films. It's distasteful - you reduce something to its lowest common denominator - but I put myself in this position in order to be able to do something I dearly love doing. It's kind of Machiavellian: do the means justify the ends, you know?

A.: And yet it has a life of it's own. There's this whole other life that these images take on. I think that happened in the marketing of Rapid Fire.

BL: I just want people to come see the film. I'm not concerned about what people will think afterwards. I think that the marketing of this film - and I've told anybody who was involved in it that would listen - trivializes it to an extent, and they have told me, "well, the reason we're doing this is because it's supposed to appeal to this one particular crowd." I just hate all that shit. It just seems so manipulative to me. But then a movie that I enjoyed very much, Prelude to a Kiss, comes out and just does zip at the box office, and you hear people say it's because it was not readily understandable by the shopping mall audience. If I were to see the marketing and know nothing about Rapid Fire I would dismiss it: I'd say oh please!

The thing is, these films, the ones that work - like Die Hard, Lethal Weapon - you care about the characters, and there were stakes because of that. You care whether they lived or died. If you don't have that, then it becomes just about who can make a bigger explosion in the next reel, who can break more glass in the next scene.

A.: Speaking of blood and guts, I know that you worked in Hong Kong. I was wondering what you think of the whole new wave of Hong Kong action films, like John Woo's films.

BL: I admire them a great deal. There's so much inventiveness - the films that have been coming out in Hong Kong for the last decade are the cutting edge of action stuff.

A.: I'm really impressed by how much emotion they squeeze into those things. I mean, Jackie Chan, for instance, goes through a whole range of different rhythms: totally comedic action, serious action, sad action.

BL: They keep the same beats through an action scene that a dramatic scene would have, and they express character through a sequence instead of having it just become about blowing stuff up. And they do it inventively, and sometimes breathtakingly. Doing the choreography for Rapid Fire, I really wanted to bring the flavor of that to American film, to an American audience.

A.: What about your Hong Kong film - Legacy of Rage? How did you find that experience?

BL: At the time, it just about drove me insane, because things are so chaotic over there. I was working with a relatively new film company, DMB Films, and not only was there not a shooting schedule most days, there wasn't even a script. You know, you'd show up on the set, and it was just improvised from take to take. In some ways it was a really good experience, because it was like getting thrown in the deep end and having somebody say swim, but I was there for six months. When I got off the plane I literally kissed the ground all the way to the car.

A.: Do you have an audience out there? Did it do well?

BL: Yeah, it did. I think it was the second highest grossing movie of that year for Asia.

A.: Would you go back to work there?

BL: With a Chinese production? I don't know. It would depend who it was. There are people over there I would like to work with, I was thinking it would be nice for them to come over here. But if they invited me to come over I'd seriously think about it.

A.: Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens there, in '97 and all.

BL: I'm going to be there. I have a hotel suite booked. I'm serious - it's four years in advance, and they usually don't do it, but I have a good friend over there, so we have two different hotel suites booked: one at the Peninsula Hotel, and one at this new hotel that they haven't even finished building yet. But when it's finished, we've got hotel suites for that week in June or July when the regime switches over. It's gonna be amazing. You have to be there, you know, you have to be there! It's going to be a quarter revolution, a quarter riot, a quarter eulogy, and a quarter party. There'll be expatriates drinking and wailing in the streets.

A.: What do you plan to do? What are your next projects like?

BL: The next project's called The Crow. It's actually based on a graphic novella, you know, like The Dark Knight Returns, but this one's a little bit more underground than that Frank Miller Batman piece. It's by a guy named James O'Barr, and I'm playing a rock musician who is murdered and returns from the dead.

A.: Will it have action?

BL: It does. I'm doing the choreography again. I haven't really decided how I'm going to approach it yet, because to me you have to fit the action very much to the tone of the piece. Rapid Fire is a theatrical action movie. The fight scenes in it are not what I would say, "Hey, this is what a real fight looks like." You know, the techniques are still valid, but you're walking a line between reality and theatricality. That's why I think Hong Kong action movies don't play in this country - one of the reasons - because they go too far in the direction of theatricality. And they undercrank all the action, which makes it come off looking a bit frenetic and cartoonish.

A.: Yeah, but the audience has a real vocabulary for that ...

BL: But it's that audience. Doing it for an American film, I was very conscious of exactly that. There were things we wanted to do, but we just shook our heads and grinned and said "Ah, we can't do that."

Actually, Jeff and I talk about it a lot. It'll be great: we'll do this one, and then we'll do one more, and then on the third one we'll really be able to let go because we'll have built a...vocabulary, like you said. The Crow is a very dark piece, it's got supernatural overtones, obviously, the guy comes back from the dead. And he's a little bit more, and a little bit less than human - he's something different than human. And so the action's going to be a little bit wilder than in Rapid Fire. I mean, it won't be a straight action film.

A.: Well, there are a lot of elements in Rapid Fire that play against the straight action film, like the way the character's introduced with a flashback to Tiananmen.

BL: I'm telling you, for that scene, they rebuilt the Goddess of Democracy, they had six Soviet tanks, and three or four hundred screaming, running, bleeding Chinese student extras with automatic weapon fire going off. And so much thought had gone into it on my part, but when we actually shot it I found that I didn't have to do a goddamn thing except stand there and look at it.

I enjoyed that whole part.

A.: And there's that little Cantonese insult scene, where you're making fun of Ryan, your white boss, and he doesn't understand what's going on.

BL: It's funny, because for that sequence the director just said, say something insulting to him, it doesn't matter what. So I said something pretty insulting, and they didn't subtitle it, and they never asked me what it meant. Anybody who speaks Cantonese in the audience ... I don't know, it might be pushing the MPAA rating, you know? (Laughter)

A.: I'm not sure any of the ratings people will know what's going on. But there again it seems to me that your presence in this film generates other interesting effects. It's as if you had an action film and the lead was black - you're going to see other blacks in the film, you've got to have some reflection on that theme ...

BL: Well, okay, just as an example: in the last decade, the African American film scene has really jumped. You have African American directors, writer, actors, and that's something you really can't say about the Asian American film scene. And the thing is, a lot of black actors now are saying, you know, that even though I'm black, I can still play an Everyman character that's not specifically related to me as a black man. When those films were first coming up, a lot of them were about people telling stories of their neighborhoods, their people, how and where they grew up. There's a wealth of stories like that from the Asian American community that hasn't been tapped into yet.

A.: And that's a preliminary stage, it seems to me, too. Having that presence out there, to the point where you don't feel ghettoized by having to tell just those stories.

BL: Exactly. You reach the point once more where you get to where you should have been in the first place, and you can play the Everyman character, and not have it stand out glaringly: this man is Asian American, this man is African American.

A.: So do you see that as part of your project? Is that something you're conscious of in your career?

BL: If anything, the only thing that I have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder is about just that: wanting to advance. Maybe in 10 years there'll be more Asians in film. That's something my father started to bring about and didn't have time to finish, and something that I think I'll have a chance to work on a little bit more.

A.: It's a pretty heavy burden to place on your shoulders. Not only do you have to act, but you represent people in a way.

BL: Oh, but the thing is: you only have the burdens on you that you choose to put there.

A. Magazine; 10-31-1992, Ethnic NewsWatch © SoftLine Information, Inc., Stamford, CT




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