The Lost Interview

Pierre: So you just make the words...doesn't that sound strange when you go to the movies, especially in Hong Kong, your home town, and you see yourself with somebody else's voice?

Bruce Lee: Well not really, you see, because most of the mandarin pictures here are dubbed anyway.

Pierre: They're dubbed anyway?

Bruce Lee: Anyway. I mean in this regard, they shoot without sound. So it doesn't make any difference.

Pierre: Your lips never quite make the right words, do they?

Bruce Lee: Yeah, well that's where the difficulty lies, you see. I mean in order to....the Cantonese have a different way of saying things....I mean different from the mandarin. So I have to find, like, something similar to that in order to keep a kind of a feeling going behind that (in my films). Something, you know, matching the mandarin deal. Does it sound complicated?

Pierre: Just like in the silent picture days (the old silent days). I gather that in the movies made here the dialogue is pretty stilted anyway.

Bruce Lee: Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, see, to me, a motion picture is motion. I mean, you've got to keep the dialogue down to the minimum.

Pierre: Did you look at mainly Mandarin movies before you started playing in your first one?

Bruce Lee: Yes.

Pierre: What did you think of them?

Bruce Lee: Quality wise, I mean, I would have to admit that it's not quite up to the standard. However, it is growing and it is getting higher and higher and going toward that standard that I would term quality.

Pierre: They say the secret of your success in that movie, the "Big Boss", that was such a success here, and rocketed you to stardom in Asia, was that you did your own fighting.

Bruce Lee: Uh-huh.

Pierre: As an expert in the various martial arts in China, what did you think of the fighting that you saw in the movies that you studied before you became a star?

Bruce Lee: Well, I mean, definitely in the beginning, I had no intention whatsoever, that what I was practicing, and what I'm still practicing now would lead to this, to begin with. But martial art has had a very, very deep meaning as far as my life is concerned because, as an actor, as a martial artist, as a human being, all these I have learned from martial art.

Pierre: Maybe for our audience who doesn't know what it means, you might be able to explain what exactly you mean by martial art?

Bruce Lee: Right. martial art includes all the combative arts like Karate...

Pierre: Judo.

Bruce Lee: ...or Karate, Judo (agrees), Chinese Gung-fu, or Chinese boxing, whatever you call it. All those, you see, like, Aikido, Korean Karate, and on and on and on. But it's a combative form of fighting. I mean some of them became sport, but some of them art still not. I mean some of them use, for intense, kicking to the groin, jabbing fingers to the eyes, things like that.

Pierre: No wonder you're successful in it! The Chinese movies are full of this kind of action anyway...they needed a guy like you! (they both laugh)

Bruce Lee: Violence, man!

Pierre: So you didn't have to use a double when you moved into the motion picture role here.