After slamming Quentin Tarantino for her father’s portrayal in "Once Upon a Time In Hollywood" which Shannon Lee says, depicts Bruce Lee as an "arrogant a**hole who was full of hot air", Lee’s daughter has lashed back at the filmmaker again. In an exclusive interview with Variety, Shannon, when asked about how Tarantino could have rectified the controversy surrounding the depiction of the late martial arts king, Lee’s daughter replied,
“He could shut up about it. That would be really nice. Or he could apologize or he could say, ‘I don’t really know what Bruce Lee was like. I just wrote it for my movie. But that shouldn’t be taken as how he really was’’ Lee’s daughter said.
The remark came after Tarantino replied to Shannon’s criticism of his father “Bruce Lee was kind of an arrogant guy,” he said in a press conference in Russia.
“The way he was talking, I didn’t just make a lot of that up. I heard him say things like that to that effect. If people are saying, ‘Well he never said he could beat up Mohammad Ali?’ Well, yeah he did. Alright?’’ Tarantino responded.
The controversial scene in Quentin Tarantino's revisionist drama Once Upon a Time in Hollywood features Brad Pitt's character Cliff Booth taking on martial arts legend Bruce Lee. In the scene, Lee (played by Mike Moh) is portrayed as fast-talking and arrogant—saying he’d make Mohammed Ali “a cripple.”
Since then, many people have been critical of the scene, including Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s stunt coordinator, Robert Alonzo, Lee’s biographer and even Brad Pitt intervening.
‘’Everyone involved was like, ‘How is this going to go over?' Brad was very much against it. He was like,? It's Bruce Lee, man!' Alonzo had then said.