BRANDON LEE'S FIRST INTERVIEW

A Look Back at the Actor's Exclusive 1986 session with Black Belt Magazine

by Jim Coleman

Brandon Lee will never know how much his fans miss him. He will never know how much he was loved and revered by those who had never met him, yet felt they knew him. He will never know how popular he became and how successful his final film, The Crow, was at the box office. He never got the chance. Brandon had just begun to emerge from the overwhelming shadow cast by his legendary father, Bruce Lee, when he was cut down on March 31, 1993, at age 28 following a freak filming accident on the set of The Crow. At the time, he was putting the finishing touches on what promised to be his finest work. He was a bright, young star with a promising career. He was engaged to be married. Life was good. His film career started seven years prior to his tragic death when he appeared in the made-for-television production Kung Fu: The Movie. It was the launching pad from which Brandon ' s acting career skyrocketed. And Black Belt magazine was there from the beginning to document this and each ensuing film success. The following exclusive interview with Brandon appeared in Black Belt's April 1986 issue. It is, and always will be, the only interview he ever conducted with a martial arts magazine editor. The accompanying exclusive martial arts action photographs were taken at Black Belt as well, in what was the only photo session Brandon ever conducted with a martial arts publication.
It would be six years, in fact, before any other martial arts magazine would obtain an interview with Brandon-a short, unimpressive freelance, piece at that, and not nearly as comprehensive as what you will find here. What follows are Brandon's ever-so-candid comments about his relationship with his father, about their all-too-few training sessions together, -about the difficulties of being Bruce Lee's son and forging his own path, and about his budding film career, which, unbeknown to him at the time, would soon be taking him to Hong Kong, and later to the big screen in the United States. It remains the first and most intimate look inside the mind of Brandon Lee to appear in a martial arts magazine.

BLACK BELT: Have you had a difficult time stepping out of your father's shadow and making a name for yourself?
BRANDON LEE: It used to be a problem in my own head when I was younger. I would be talking with people and they would say "Hey, would you like to go out for a drink?" And I would be thinking "Does this person like me, or is this person just screwing with me because I'm Bruce Lee's son?" But that was a problem in my own head. When I went back East to college, I didn't tell people who I was. I certainly didn't advertise it, and I never have. I don't go up to people and say "Hi, I'm Bruce Lee's son." I would never do that. People out here [in Southern California] knew who I was because I went to the same school for five years, so if one person found out, everyone found out. But when I was back East, no one knew and everyone treated me exactly the same as everyone treated me out [West]. That really gave a big boost to my confidence. I said "Hey, it doesn't have anything to do with [people thinking I'm Bruce Lee's son]; it's just me." If a person does have that problem in his own head, it's solved after having known me for about
two minutes. Because I'm certainly not a caricature of somebody else.

BB: What similarities do you see between yourself and your father?
LEE: I don't know. My father died when I was 8 years old. People tell me that we look a little alike. They say we both have a drive to us, an intensity.

BB: Were you two close?
LEE: Yes, we were. But I was only 8. He hadn't gotten down to talking to me in any man-to-man way yet. It was all just "Take me to the ice cream store" and stuff like that. We used to goof around a lot together. We worked out and he would show me things. He was always training, and he would have people over at the house. And whenever they were over, I would come out and goof around with them. [Former professional basketball star] Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would be there, and he would pick me up and put me on the roof and stuff. What I'm doing now is formal training. Back then, it wasn't like that. Dad would show me things once in awhile, and I'd go "Yeah, this is neat."

BB: What kind of things did he show you?
LEE: He would show me kicks and punches.

BB: Did you show all your friends your martial arts moves?
LEE: Sometimes. But most of my friends were afraid to come over to my house. They'd come over and dad would be going "Ki-yah!" in the backyard all the time, and they'd say "Oh my God, I'm leaving." Seriously. My dad and I used to talk about martial arts sometimes, and I remember thinking "I'll get a little older and dad will stop working quite so much, and he'll have more time. And then we'll get serious about training." I always assumed there would be a time when we would begin training more formally. Unfortunately, we never got to do that.

BB: Do you remember any funny stories from when you and your dad used to work out together?
LEE: Yeah. Once we were at a tournament and we were both up on stage. I was standing next to him, holding his hand. He was talking to the crowd and saying something about the principle that it doesn't matter how big or strong you are, at which point I got him in a wrist lock and threw him onto the ground. It was all play-acting, but it was pretty funny.

BB: Was there a side to your father the general public doesn't really know?
LEE: I'll tell you something about my dad. He made his contribution on this world, without a doubt. And so much has been said and written-positively, negatively, knowledgeably, and by people who don't know their heads from their asses in the intervening years, which is almost 13 years now since his death. About all I would say about him is that he died when he was 32 years old. And not many people realize this. It's like James Dean. When you see a James Dean film, you say "Oh, he must have been acting for years and years." But he only made four films. Enter the Dragon is the only film my dad did that had any United States production values, was in English, or had any United States actors. And people see that film and say "Oh, look at that. That's the crowning peak of his career. That's incredible, etc." That was just the beginning. If he were alive, I think he would have gone on to many other things as well. He was not planning on making martial arts films like that his entire life.

BB: Are you planning on following in your father's footsteps, both as a martial artist and an actor?
LEE: My father said that if you are imitating, you are not bringing anything new into the world, and you're not helping anybody in any way, because they already had this. Why do they need you to do it again? And so, I know that he wouldn't want me following in his footsteps. And I don't want to follow in his footsteps. And one of the reasons I'm not following in his footsteps is because we already had him. Even if we could have him again, we don't need him again. Even if I could follow in his footsteps, it would be stupid. It would be a bad thing to do.

BB: Although you were unable to train extensively with your father, you did eventually train formally with his protege, Dan Inosanto, didn't you?
LEE: Yeah. I trained with Dan about three-to-four years. He was teaching me Filipino kali and escrima.

BB: What style do you currently practice?
LEE: A system called yee chuan tao. It's based on relaxation. It's not a hard, physical art. We don't do any kata (prearranged fighting sequences). We don't do any kiai (spirit yells).

BB: Is it a kung fu style?
LEE: Yes. I see in it something like jeet kune do. Jeet kune-do was my father's art, and a lot of people misunderstand this and say "Gee, where can I go to learn this?" You can't. All you can learn is someone else's interpretation of jeet kune do or your own interpretation of jeet kune do. Because jeet kune do is taking what is useful and disregarding what isn'tuseful.

BB: So jeet kune do isn't a system of specific techniques, it's whatever works for each individual?
LEE: Right. It's not like I can teach you move "A" through move "Z," and now you know the system. Jeet kune do is more a set of values. If you understand the principles, then you'll be able to create. That's what I'm doing in yee chuan tao. It is a creative martial art, totally and completely. I am taught by teaching myself.

BB: Who is your instructor?
LEE: Mike Vendrell.

BB: How often do you train?
LEE: I train every other day for two hours or so.

BB: What type of training do you do?
LEE: I'll work on the bags, perfecting my delivery and my relaxation. I have a hard time relaxing. I have a tendency to tense up and really whack the thing. Then Mike and I will do slow sparring together. He'll show me a move, and thenwe'll work it out, man on man. Then we'll do more metaphysical exercises like chi sao, "sticky hands," something like that, to work on each other's chi (internal energy), each other's aura. He also has a mook jong (wooden dummy) there. We'll do some pretty physical exercises. I'll be running in place and he'll swing a staff at me, and I have to either jump over it or duck under it
.
BB: What kind of weapons training have you had?
LEE: I've used the three-sectional staff, the sword and the knife, escrima sticks, and also guns.

BB: How did you happen to come by your role in Kung Fu, The Movie?
LEE: It was very coincidental. I was working for Ruddy/Morgan Productions as a "gofer." I was on lunch break one day, and a friend of mine introduced me to casting agent Lynn Stalmaster. He looked at me and said "Hey, just three days ago we got this script for Kung Fu, and the age of one of the characters has been changed to your age, and we need somebody. Would you like to read for it?" I said "Fine," and I went and read for it, then ended up reading for it twice and screen-testing twice over about a three-and-a- half -week period. I got the part three days before they started filming.

BB: Some people probably think you got the part because of the fact you are Bruce Lee's son. Does that bother you?
LEE: To tell you the truth, I expected it. What do you expect?

BB: What was the plot of the movie?
LEE: It's 20 years after what happened in the Kung Fu TV series. (Kwai Chang) Caine (played by David Carradine) is still wandering around the old West, doing whatever it was he was doing last time. He is the only Shaolin monk left on the face of the Earth. He is no longer the confused young "Grasshopper." Then off the boat from China comes the Manchu, the evil character-played by Mako-and his apprentice, Chung Wang, which is me. I am also Carradine's son. I don't know it, and David doesn't know it. Mako knows it, and he has been cultivating and training me in the martial arts over the years, and he's going to use me as a tool in his vengeance against Caine. Mako has me under his hypnotic control, and when he puts me under his spell, I become his complete slave and he can order me to go kill people, and I'll do it. He uses me to try and kill Caine, but of course Caine manages to escape. Mako eventually tells Caine who I am, because Caine, knowing this, is at a severe disadvantage because he cannot hurt me. But I still don't know I'm his son.

BB: What happened in the end?
LEE: Caine manages to break the spell I'm under. We're in a fight and he uses his metaphysical powers to break the spell, and then he defeats the Manchu. I learn Caine is my father, and we reunite in the end and walk off into the sunset together.

BB: How is David Carradine as a martial artist?
LEE: He's got his own definite style, which is good. It is a very relaxed style. He's a good martial artist.

BB: You and David performed your own fight scenes, didn't you?
LEE: Yes. They were choreographed by Mike Vendrell.

BB: Some of the fight scenes were in slow motion, weren't they?
LEE: Parts of them. But you know one thing I liked about that? If you watch, everything I do [in the fight scenes], I do myself. There weren't any trampolines to bounce off or anything like that. Everything I did was a real move. I didn't really do them, of course; the stuntmen reacted. But the moves were real, and had they connected, they would have done what they presented themselves as doing. We didn't have any guys flying through the air because I touched them on the finger.

BB: How many fight scenes did you have?
LEE: I had about four fight scenes. In the first fight, there were two thugs in an alley, and I dispatched one of them immediately with a throwing star. The other thug had a gun, so I had to disarm him and then defeat him. I disarmed him with a crescent kick and defeated him by hitting him three times in the stomach. I did a front snap kick, and then a spinning crescent kick and a sweep. I also fought the foreman of a warehouse I was working at because he was a cruel tyrant who was really bad to the Chinese. He came at me with a baling hook, and I disarmed him using a couple of arm locks, then put him on the ground with a couple of kicks. I had another fight scene where I had to try to kill David with a sword. I had never used this type of sword before, but I had trained with escrima sticks for about four-and-a-half years, so it was a pretty easy transition. It was a very short fight; I actually just slashed at him three or four times, and he picked up a huge globe and knocked me down, and that was the end of that. There was one other fight scene between David and I in a graveyard. I was still under the hypnotic trance, and I attacked him with a three-sectional staff. I came at him with it a couple of times and didn't manage to get him, and he disarmed me. Then I pulled out some shuriken (throwing stars).

BB: David didn't have any weapons, did he?
LEE: Of course not; he's Caine. He doesn't need any weapons. But I was an evil guy, so I got weapons.

BB: What did you do with the shuriken?
LEE: I threw a couple of them and he managed to evade them. But then I stuck one in his hand, and he was wounded. He was already wounded before this; he'd been shot in the shoulder in another scene. So poor Caine was in pain. Then it came down to hand-to-hand [combat], and I managed to hurt him a couple more times. So things were looking bad for Caine. He was on the defensive. Then Caine managed to throw me into a lake and, through the use of water and his metaphysical powers, he managed to break the spell I was under.

BB: For your father, nothing, not even acting, was more important than his martial arts training. What about you?
LEE: My father was a martial artist first and an actor second. The martial arts was his consuming love. And he did the martial arts day in and day out. I'm sure you have read and heard of his fanaticism for the martial arts. That's how I am with acting. At the same time, I train in the martial arts. For me, the martial arts is a search for something inside. It's not just a physical discipline. Because if it was just a physical discipline, you may as well take up weightlifting, or playing soccer, or baseball, or anything else. Why is it the martial arts has generated this tremendous interest and excitement that these other things haven't? Because these other things are just surface. When you see someone who is the greatest at what they do, it goes beyond a physical perfection. They don't just go out there and pump their muscles and win. There's got to be an inner, spiritual-whatever it is for them-aspect to what they're doing. That's what the martial arts is to me. I'm trying to develop that. The physical stuff comes along with it, and is an expression of it. And each move should be an expression of the serenity that's inside. Because if the move is just a move, then it's just waving your arms and shouting. And anybody can do that. Whether I ever do martial arts films again, I'm going to keep training.

From Black Belt Magazine, 1997 (interview in 1986)

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FATE'S CHILDREN: BRUCE AND BRANDON

By Betty Sharkey

Brandon Lee was not yet 6 when he played his first film role. In the grainy, flickering images of a home movie, the young boy could be seen jumping and kicking his way across the screen, mimicking his father, Bruce Lee, the famous martial arts master and film star. When the actor died suddenly in 1973 at the age of 32 while making his fifth film, "Game of Death," Brandon, then 8, made a prophecy: He told his mother that when he grew up he was going to be an actor like his father.

Unexpected and unresolved, Bruce Lee's death in Hong Kong, caused by what experts now believe was a brain edema, spawned tales of battles with mythical Chinese demons as well as rumors of murder, mistresses, drugs and intrigue. On Friday,"Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story," a film that largely celebrates the Chinese-American actor's life, will be released in the shadow of yet another unexpected and unresolved death -- Brandon's. The 28-year-old actor was shot and killed in an apparentaccident on March 31 while filming "The Crow," in which he was starring.

As someone close to the family observed, both father and son died "as they were just becoming."

The parallels extend to the expectations surrounding their final films. "Enter the Dragon," the 1973 movie intended to introduceBruce Lee to American audiences and establish him as an action star, was not released until three weeks after his death. In the two decades since, it has made $100 million. "The Crow" was the film Brandon Lee hoped would propel him out of the action genre. It remains to be decided whether it will be completed.

"Had Bruce Lee lived beyond 'Enter the Dragon,' " said Alex Ben Block, author of the biography "The Legend of Bruce Lee" and editor of The Hollywood Reporter, "I think he would have gone on to be quite a force in show business, but that's just aguess. He never had that luxury. He made a few lousy films in Hong Kong. He made one American film, and he died."

While Bruce Lee was a charismatic presence, no one considered him an Olivier. Indeed, showings of his films, with the audience cheering each punch and kick, had more the feel of a sporting match than high art. And when Brandon died, he was still striving to free himself from the action genre that had so defined his father. Both father and son struggled to realize the American dream, only to have death leave them on the verge of success. Like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, whose celebrity seduced the public and whose premature deaths came as a shock, Bruce and Brandon Lee's immortality seemsassured. Their films record the bittersweetness of promise unfulfilled.

Brandon Lee spent a lifetime dealing with his father's death and struggling to be more than Bruce Lee's son. But just as Brandon's life was framed by his father's fame, so will his death. "If Brandon had lived and made 50 great films," said Mr.Block, "then no one would much remember the Bruce Lee connection except as some minor footnote. But I'm afraid he isinextricably linked with his father forever."

The Father Struggling In Two Worlds

As portrayed by the film "Dragon," Bruce Lee was a man caught between two cultures -- Hong Kong, where he was raised, and the United States, where he was born and where he returned at 18 to seek his destiny. He earned a degree in philosophy from the University of Washington in Seattle, paying his way by teaching kung fu to other students and marrying one, Linda Emery. Soon Lee began blending philosophy with martial arts, creating a new technique called jeet kune do, literally translated"way of intercepting the fist," which he laid out in the book "The Tao of Jeet Kune Do." Jeet kune do was a fast and to-the-point approach to martial arts that stripped away everything but the essentials. His innovations were met with outrage, skepticism and ultimately a following that would pack martial arts competitions around the country.

In the process, Hollywood discovered Lee, first as a martial arts master whose pupils included Steve McQueen, KareemAbdul Jabar and James Coburn, then as an actor. A child star in Hong Kong -- he had appeared in 20 films by the time he left at age 18 -- Lee returned to acting in the United States with small television roles. His major break came with the 1966 television action series "The Green Hornet," in which he co-starred as the hero's sidekick, Kato.

But Hollywood was to disappoint him. Lee helped develop the idea for the television series "Kung Fu," about a martial arts superman who wanders the West battling villains with his wits and the tenets of kung fu. When the starring role went to the American actor David Carradine, Lee became convinced his Asian features would forever limit his future in Hollywood, and he returned to Hong Kong. Nearly two decades later, his son would get his first real acting job co-starring with Mr. Carradine in the 1985 television film "Kung Fu: The Movie."

Once back in Hong Kong, Bruce Lee and his martial arts films -- "Fists of Fury" (1971), "The Chinese Connection" (1972) and "Return of the Dragon" (1973) -- became huge successes. In Asia, he was a film star of major proportions, and there was a growing audience for his movies in Europe as well. Raffaella De Laurentiis, the Italian- born producer of the new film "Dragon," has childhood memories of being taken to Bruce Lee films by her mother, the actress Silvana Mangano. By "Return of the Dragon," Lee was not only choreographing the scenes but also writing and directing. But his films did less to establish him as an actor -- he rarely spoke -- than to his remarkable physical prowess.

Lee had just completed filming a death scene in "Game of Death" when he died in the apartment of Betty Ting-Pei, an actress rumored to be his mistress. The coroner labeled the cause of death as "misadventure," a conclusion that is still disputed. More than 25,000 people attended Lee's funeral, and for months the press pursued rumors about the real cause of his death.

His mystique also captured the fancy of the press in the United States, and in the months and years after his death, it was explored in detail in magazines, books and at least one Hong Kong exploitation film, "Bruce Lee: His Last Days, His Last Nights."

The Son A Search For Identity

A few weeks after Brandon's death, Linda Lee Cadwell, Brandon's mother and Bruce's widow, admitted that it was both a blessing and a burden to be a child of Bruce Lee. "It was a blessing because Bruce was a wonderful father, " said Mrs.Cadwell, who lives with her third husband, Bruce Cadwell, in Boise, Idaho. "But for Brandon it was also a burden to live up to what other people expect of you because of who your father is."

For years, Brandon had said he was little more than a comma: Bruce Lee's son, Brandon. At the same time, his walls were covered with huge photographs of his father. In one of his favorites, taken on the lawn of their Los Angeles home, Bruce can be seen holding up a board for Brandon, then just 6 years old, to break with a precisely aimed blow of his hand. Both faces were turned to the board in intense concentration, one a miniature of the other. "In the end," said his mother, "Brandon was a youngman who had found his own identity."

At a memorial service in Los Angeles on April 4, a day after Brandon was buried beside his father in Seattle, Mrs. Cadwell tried to explain Brandon's sense of reconciliation to friends and relatives by telling of a conversation she had had with her sonthe day before the accident.

She had been in a shopping mall when a poster promoting "Dragon" caught her eye. Some teen-agers had gathered in front of it, and as she walked up, she heard one of them ask, "Who's Bruce Lee?" To which another answered, "He's Brandon Lee's dad." Damon Caro, a friend who studied martial arts with Brandon, related the anecdote: "When Brandon heard the story, he said, 'Mom, when I was 17, that would have meant a lot to me. Now it doesn't make any difference.' In the last few years, he had really come to terms with the pressure of living in his father's shadow." Another friend added that Brandon was just starting to cast his own shadow.

"Dragon," with its portrayal of a larger-than-life character, is likely to sharpen the focus on the father. As designed, the film is not a typical martial arts movie but an intimate exploration of Bruce Lee's life, drawn heavily from conversations with Mrs. Cadwell and her memoir, "Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew."

Jan McCormack, Brandon's personal manager, said Brandon cried when he read the script, which the director, Rob Cohen, wrote with Edward Khmara and John Raffo. But Brandon vowed he would never see the film. He told his mother that "it would be too painful and too difficult to see our lives portrayed in that sort of intimate way," she recalled. "He felt such a strong connection with his father, he couldn't take watching those memories. " She would not, however, approve the project without Brandon's blessing. He gave it.

In the early stages of the development of "Dragon," several executives at Universal Pictures suggested that Brandon Lee be considered for the role of Bruce. From the outset, Ms. De Laurentiis and Mr. Cohen were troubled by the idea.

"The process for a really great actor is to burrow into the psychology of a character so deeply they become the character," said Mr. Cohen. "To ask an actor to burrow into the psychology of his own father, knowing it's going to be a love story and he would have to start thinking about being in love with his mother -- we did not want to send this kid into psychoanalysis."

Brandon dismissed the idea immediately, too, and the part of Bruce Lee went to a 26-year-old Hawaiian actor, Jason Scott Lee, who is not related. Brandon had gone up against Jason Scott Lee for a leading role in the recently released "Map of the Human Heart," a role that Jason Scott won. Brandon's younger sister, Shannon, 24, an aspiring singer, does make an appearance in "Dragon."

The aura of tragedy that surrounded Bruce Lee seemed to haunt the production of both "Dragon" and "The Crow." From the beginning, Mr. Cohen believes, "Dragon" was touched by what the Chinese call yuan fan, "fate of the deepest sort."

Jason Scott Lee also tells of the personal losses and afflictions that darkened the atmosphere around the film. Within a two-month period, while "Dragon" was in preproduction, his grandmother died; the actress Lauren Holly, who portrays Linda Lee, lost her 14-year-old brother in a fire; Ms. De Laurentiis lost an uncle she was close to, and Mr. Cohen had a heart attack
that nearly forced him off the project. "The whole impact of Rob's heart attack and those people in our lives leaving us just shifted our whole energy," said Mr. Lee.

When Jason Scott Lee learned of Brandon's death, his mind went to a scene in "Dragon" that takes place in a Hong Kong cemetery. Bruce Lee is almost lost in swirling mists as, for the final time, he fights the phantom that chases him throughout his life. But in this scene, he is fighting not for himself but to save his 8-year-old son, who stands at the edge of the graveyard calling for his father.

From the outset, "The Crow," too, was plagued with problems, which were widely reported. The production was bedevilled by freak accidents, ranging from an electrocution that severely burned a technician to the destruction of a workroom by adisgruntled employee. Even the weather in Wilmington, N.C., where the film was being made, was unseasonable, with storms destroying some of the sets. "It was cold and wet," said the producer, Edward R. Pressman, "and Brandon was doing these scenes, which were often without much clothing." Brandon was said to be exhausted. When he died, "The Crow" was nearly complete.

Father and Son Coming to Terms With a Ghost

Brandon Lee did not tread easily in his father's footsteps. Danny Inosanto, who studied for years under the father and later began teaching the son, said Bruce Lee always told him to "live life as if it is your last day." That tenet lent an urgency and intensity to Bruce's life, said those close to him, and became a guiding principle in Brandon's as well.

"Bruce seemed to have a real sense of his own mortality that went beyond something normal," said Mr. Block, the author. Brandon, who owned a vintage Cadillac hearse, spoke of mortality, he said, "but seemed more playful about it." To Ms. McCormack, who never knew Bruce Lee, "Dragon" revealed what Brandon had inherited from his parents -- agility and intensity from his father, strength and humor from his mother.

Although his father was his first teacher, as Brandon grew older he would go to Mr. Inosanto's school in the ocean town of Marina del Rey. There he would spend hours training with Mr. Inosanto and talking to him about his father. "Most people don't know how accomplished Brandon had become in martial arts," said Mr. Inosanto's wife, Paula, who was also close to Brandon. In 1991, Brandon was one of just 14 people worldwide certified by the Thai Boxing Association to teach the sport.

Only in recent years did Brandon become consumed with wanting to learn everything he could about martial arts -- and his father. "I had tried taking him down to Danny's when he was 9 or 10," said Mrs. Cadwell. "I hoped it would be a good thing for him to be around his father's students. But he rebelled against it totally. When he was about 18, he went back on his own." Despite the memories and the legacy of Bruce Lee that still saturate Mr. Inosanto's studio, it became one of the few places that Brandon felt he could be himself as he grew older. He would sometimes take as many as four classes a night. To friends, Brandon was just one of the guys.

While martial arts were Bruce Lee's first love, said his widow, acting came first for Brandon. In both disciplines, though, he learned from his father. More than 20 years ago, Bruce Lee would film fight sequences he had rehearsed with Mr. Inosanto to better choreograph scenes for his movies. Brandon adopted the same technique and would hang a video camera from the rafters of Mr. Inosanto's studio so he could analyze how different moves would play on film. He began to study his father's philosophy and writing as well. Mrs. Cadwell found Brandon's library stacked with his father's books and papers, most filled with lengthy notes.

The son's role in the 1992 action film "Rapid Fire" pulled him back to his father. "There is a scene where the character's father dies," said Jeff Imada, a stunt coordinator who also trained with Mr. Inosanto and later worked closely with Brandon on his films. "He was reading a lot of his father's writings before they filmed that."

Like his father before him, Brandon had returned to Asia to make his first feature film, the 1987 "Legacy of Rage," which was made entirely in Cantonese, which he spoke fluently. His 1991 film "Showdown in Little Tokyo, " in which he co-starred with Dolph Lundgren, was his first Hollywood movie. It was followed by the lead in "Rapid Fire." Although none of the films did much to establish Brandon Lee's acting talents, the industry saw something in the young actor. He had a multi-picture deal with Carolco, and Paramount Pictures was planning to distribute "The Crow." In "The Crow" Brandon believed he had found a vehicle that offered him more drama and less action than previous films. Based on the 1989 comic book series by James O'Barr that became a cult hit, "The Crow" is a dark story of a murdered rock star who takes on the persona of a night bird to avenge his girlfriend's death and his own. When Brandon was halfway through reading the script, he called Ms. McCormack and said, "You have to get me this part." She finds the memory particularly difficult.

The Survivors Days of Love, Nights of Loss

Brandon's life paralleled his father's in very personal ways as well. Like his father, he had one great love in his life. In his case, it was Eliza Hutton, now 29, who was a story editor when they met three years ago. They were to be married on April 17, just after "The Crow" was scheduled to finish filming. It took a long time for Brandon to get to that point, said his mother. "Brandon was afraid of getting married," said Mrs. Cadwell. "A lot of it stemmed from the fact that he knew what it was like to make a commitment with your heart and then lose that person. He had experienced it with his father, and he did not want to repeat that pain."

Soon after Brandon met Ms. Hutton, he called Ms. McCormack and said: "Jan, have you ever met anyone in your lifetime where you just say hello and you hope they'll be in your life for the rest of your life? I met a girl like that today." Once he drove for hours into the desert outside Los Angeles to Joshua Tree, a starkly beautiful, isolated camping area where he set up a tent and iced down a bottle of champagne to surprise Ms. Hutton. He chose Venice to propose and did it on one knee, with champagne and flowers in hand . Just hours before the accident, he called Ms. McCormack to tell her that Ms. Hutton's wedding ring had just been delivered. He and Ms. Hutton had planned to bring a busload of friends down to Ensenada, Mexico, a beach town they loved, for the wedding.

Mr. Cohen, who has a young son, now fights nightmares of losing him. "I believe in some forms of higher power," he said, "like fate and, sometimes I'm embarrassed to say it, God. There is a certain sort of chaotic nature to life, and the mind rebels against chaos and wants to supplant order and reason because reason makes us safe. If I could tell you why Bruce and Brandon Lee died young, then maybe you could know how you could protect your children. But I can't.

Said Mrs. Cadwell, who spent the weekend Brandon was to be married with Ms. Hutton: "It is beyond my realm of cosmic thinking to think that it was meant to be. It just happened. I'm not beginning to make sense of it. I just think we were fortunate that he had as many years as he did. They say that time cures anything. It doesn't. You just learn to live with it and go on."

Taken from The New York Times, May 2, 1993

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SHADOW OF THE CROW

by Jeff Yang

A. Magazine's Jeff Yang, one of the last journalists. to interview Brandon Lee on the set of his final movie, looks at his life and his tragic end.

It is March and coffin-cold in the bowels of the Ideal Cement plant, an abandoned legacy of America's industrial past. The residue of honest work - pieces of junked heavy machinery, cracked and creaking formica, rusting metalwork - is strewn throughout the gutted rooms. The emptiness and space turn all sounds into ghostly effects: voices are distant, footsteps echo, the faint, chill breeze whistles and whispers. If ever there was a location to film a movie about the uncontent dead, this is it.

I'm here on assignment to cover the shooting of a new film by the hero everybody wants to happen, Brandon Lee. The film, The Crow, is a break from Brandon's past: he plays a rock guitarist, Eric Draven, who meets an untimely end, weeks before his wedding. Brought back by an othernatural force as the Crow, Draven is given the opportunity - and abilities - to avenge himself and his dead love. It is a challenging role, horror spiced with action, gothic drama married to romantic reverie. For Brandon, it is the chance of a lifetime.

It is two weeks later. Brandon is gone. Or going. Suspended in a loop of coincidence and recursion, Brandon's story goes on after his death, a puppet dancing on tabloid covers. He died. He was killed. Like his father. How strange. Was it the gangs? some ask. The Chinese Hong Kong gangs, I mean. Was he killed?

Does it matter? He died.

Died tragically. Died young. Much too young, at 28, never exacting that pound of recognition which he spent his life pursuing. Never casting off the long shadow of his too-famous father.

So he went.

Rubbing his hands from the factory's frightful chill, Brandon stalks toward his trailer, long and macabre in his matte-black Crow gear. I'm motioned to follow: You'll have 10 minutes, 15 tops, the handler says. Brandon needs his rest.

"Come in, it's cold," Brandon says, his face pan-caked pale and rouged to fright. "Sit down." He's smoking. He offers the pack around. His handler shakes his head: No, man, those things'll kill you.

"That's been the hardest thing I've had to deal with so far - the cold. There have been a couple of nights here where I've been colder than I really ever remember being." Brandon is a California boy, brought back after the death of the Bruce from Hong Kong to L.A. by his grieving mother. He was just eight at the time.

"It's kind of funny, because, you know, in this film, I play a dead man, and it wasn't like I could research - go interview people who've come back from the dead. But I read a book once, one of Stephen King's better ones, Pet Sematary, which had a scene in it with a cat that came back from the dead. And he described how it walked across the room in a very uncatlike manner. For some reason that really horrified me; the image of that cat, which is a very natural animal, not capable of artifice like a person, really stuck in my memory.

"In the scene where my character, Eric, first comes back, I wanted to play with that - the fact that his body temperature would be very low and there would almost be a rigor mortis involved."

Brandon lights another cigarette, exhales a corona of smoke.

"So when I was preparing for this scene, I went to the store and bought about 20 big bags of ice. I packed myself in them, got very cold, and came out of them and moved, to get those movements right. And now I come out here, and it's five fuckin' degrees out there. The ice would have kept me warm."

Brandon smiles. In his makeup, he looks manic, frightening; the grin is a joker's grimace. Out of makeup, he is dark and handsome and warm, touched by the southern California sun and charismatic in the carefree way of a surfer boy, a slightly smart-alecky beach rat. He's a prankster: he appears on set in an outlandish wig, looking like Cher and Edward Scissorhand's bastard son, and the crew collapses in laughter. A wit: asked about his next project, Brandon gives a wink and says, "it starts production April 17, it's all been cast, and it's going to go on for about 50 years: I'm getting married." Brandon is a true lover and loyal friend, as his family, his fiancee Lisa Hutton, and, among others, Jeff Imada - stunt coordinator for The Crow and as close as a brother for 18 years - would attest.

He is cared for. But carefree? Freedom is something that Brandon has always reached for, and not found. He has been watched since he was born; until age eight, he trained under the tough, loving eye of his father. After eight, when the eye became icon, he wore the mantle of responsibility and expectation: the footsteps of his father ahead, the memories of his father behind, he could not be anything less than a master in his father's image. At high school in Los Angeles, he was tested again and again: "I definitely got the 'hired gun' syndrome, the 'fastest gun in the West' syndrome. I was on the soccer team. Often when we played another school, there was some guy who had heard who I was, and we would have a fight after the game."

Upon attaining adulthood, that image became his prison. He attended college and studied acting, at Massachusetts's Emerson College, and took courses at the Lee Strasberg Academy. Producers assailed him with scripts. "The stories were lowbrow and beneath doing ... The only reason they wanted me was to exploit my father's name. I wanted to have nothing to do with them." He told reporters that he was tired of being typed: "I want to do many other parts. I don't want to be stuck doing martial arts parts ... I want to do all kinds of things. I don't want to be seen as Bruce Lee's son and nothing more."

There's a freedom to death, Brandon says. "I've just shot a scene where a guy's pointing a gun at me - go like this" - he takes my hand and forms it into a pistol, thumb up, pointer outstretched - "and I'm just like, `go ahead, take a shot.' And he does. Eric can do that. He's already dead." Brandon
leans against my finger and takes the shot. Bang.

Thursday, March 31, a friend calls me from Hollywood to tell me Brandon is dead. An accident on the set - a simple shooting effect gone terribly wrong. I think back to the thunder and crash of exploding squibs and blank bullets that rocked the set. Fire in the hole, the cry would go out, and fingers would go in ears, and pyrotechnics would fly. Gunplay, followed by playing dead.

Friday, April 1, coroners dig a .44 caliber bullet out of Brandon' s body. It had travelled the thickness of his torso, flattened itself against his spine. The scene was being shot. Brandon cried out, and people laughed, so close to April Fool's. Brandon the prankster in a Crow Harlequinade, a corpse, a clown with a painted face. It's a joke, right? Bang.

"I had the feeling something was going to happen," says one person associated with the production, who chooses to remain unnamed. "I was in the air at the time of Brandon's death, and I somehow knew, I knew it had happened ... I don't think you cane image that kind of violence - you can't do that without paying for it somewhere. It wasn't a question of carelessness, and it wasn't anything bad about the people, but when I found out, everything about the shoot, a very difficult shoot, seemed to come together."

The week of Brandon's death, people had already been talking about curses. Entertainment Weekly had run a detailed piece called "The Curse of The Crow." An electrician had been jolted with 13,000 volts of live power, hospitalized with burns on 90 per cent of his body, his eyes fused shut. A
carpenter had accidentally driven a screwdriver through his hand. A sculptor had run amok and driven a car through a studio wall. The storm, the great storm, had blown through the set and left chill and devastation in its wake.

"This movie has a haunted quality," David Patrick Kelly tells me. "A ghost-town soul." Kelly plays T-Bird, one of Eric's murderers, killed by Eric in his Crow incarnation. Kelly sees in The Crow a nest of classical references: Poe's Raven, of course, and, he thinks, Paradise Lost.

Paradise Lost is about rebellion and redemption and despair. Lucifer, brightest among the angels, leads an army against the Father - demanding self-determination, free will, an identity separate from the Supreme. His success is his failure, his fall. The first son, Adam, disobeys His Father out of love for Eve, and is denied paradise. Eric is Lucifer and Adam, dark killing angel and lover exiled from Eden.

And Brandon is Eric. A bright, shining son, with an absent, other- worldly father, who died and was reborn as symbol and icon. Brandon chafed under his father's legacy, demanded to be seen as himself and not just child of the Bruce. Not one of the clones, the Bruces Le, Lai, Li who emerged after the death of the master. This film was to be his break, his resolution, at once an homage and an Oedipal thrust. You cannot mourn until the story is done.

"He said he was going to relate the loss of Shelly" - Eric's fiancee in the movie - "to the loss of his father. He was going to try to use those kinds of emotions," says James O'Barr, author of the comic book on which the film was based. "We sat in his trailer one night and talked for about four hours ...
You know the first thing he said to me? A quote from Blade Runner: `It's not an easy thing to meet your maker.'"

Nor is it easy to escape him. And that is the great tragedy of Brandon' s passing, that in death, like in life, he is forever bound to the man who made him, whom he loved and was haunted by. People are talking about curses: Robert Lee, Brandon's uncle, spoke to reporters about the curse of the Lee
family - "Our grandfather was told that in our family, there would be death, there would be divorce." Conspiracy theories: Brandon was killed by his father's killers, martial arts mystics who envied the Bruce's fame and swore vengeance on him for revealing secret techniques.

Does it matter? He died.

Yes, it matters. Because for Brandon, and for a generation of Asian American men, Bruce was a figure to be claimed and shunned - his power was our power, but our identity was our own. Playground fights where we struck fear in others with the Bruce's poses; chopsocky Chinaman taunts, when older, about prowess that we did not have. Brandon was buried by his family in a grave at his father's side. And perhaps the cult will rest. Perhaps, like the Crow, it will revive with vengeance in its eye - the story of the Bruce's life, Dragon, has been brought to screen; there is talk of finishing The Crow and releasing it, in Brandon's honor.

But we who wait, we wait for the story to end.

So we can mourn.

from A. Magazine, 1993

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