Original subtitles

Action!

It is our cut.

What do you know about Ha?

We are investing in corruption.

We know everything.

We can prove nothing.

We want you to go in there as our agents.

Get us our evidence.

This is where you will be going.

An island fortress, really.

Sterling Silifam told me up one day.

Have you met Bruce Lee?

I said no.

I don't know.

He is the greatest area.

He is the greatest instructor.

He is brilliant.

You got a meeting.

I said, oh well.

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

I'll meet him.

We were just getting started and having been executive at Warner Brothers.

And Sterling Silifam and James Coburn came to us with a script called The Silent

Flute that Sterling had written for Bruce to star in.

And then Bruce and I became great friends.

We went out.

We went to dinner.

We talked about martial arts.

He showed me some of the films.

And I got very interested in the Chinese

fighting thing which never came over to America.

And we couldn't get anybody to be interested in doing it.

Nobody was interested really in a Chinese lead.

And he was really anxious to become an American television star.

He wanted to be a star.

He was just driven to be to that star.

I said, there was no way, Bruce, that you're going to ever get to really be

seen here in America unless you have a piece of film.

And it's not just the Green Hornet.

That's television.

Bruce was too much for television.

I mean, he was... he was bigger than television.

So when Raymond Chow offered him the... I think it was the big boss.

It was called the first one.

He said, well, I'm getting a little more.

I said, take it.

And he went back to Hong Kong because he didn't get the role in Kung Fu.

After Bruce went back to Hong Kong, he became miraculously successful.

I mean, he became like the Beatles, the Togunite hit and the Burries.

He'd never achieved that before at any time.

It was on television where I guess they had a group of martial artists.

And they were all breaking ice and bricks with

their heads and with their elbows and everything.

And they asked Bruce, who was sitting there looking at scans and all of that.

I said, well, what do you think about all this?

Well, I think that he can break ice with his elbow.

Or that he can break bricks.

Well, what does that have to do with anything?

Well, okay, Mr. Smartass, let's see what you can do.

And he says, no, I don't do any demonstrations.

And everybody in the audience went, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

And so he says, okay, okay, just wrap up three of those square boards.

Put some tape on him and so he yelled it out.

He dropped it and side kicked it and it shattered.

It just blew it.

It went up in the lights and the lights went pow, pow, pow.

And Bruce was so he said, I was so shocked.

Because he'd never done that thing before.

It was just something that came to his mind.

Pow, he acted way back to his chair.

Like nothing had happened.

I mean, after that, you know, of course, run, run, Shaw and Raymond Shaw.

And everybody started buying for his attention.

Bruce and I spent a lot of time and went out.

Bruce was interested in the project.

There was no question.

Raymond, on the other hand, was soft.

And why was Raymond's soft?

Because he didn't, he was making so much money on the pictures.

He still wanted to have complete control and everything.

So Raymond said, well, it's a shame, it's not going to work.

So we'll have dinner tonight.

And so we went out to a Japanese restaurant.

And we sat down for dinner, and as we're going through the meal, I said,

Bruce, I'm leaving tomorrow.

I said, why?

I said, well, it's obvious that Raymond doesn't want you to be an international star.

He understands that you're great as a local chop sake guy, but Raymond doesn't.

And he turned around to Raymond and said, make the deal.

At which point the next day, Raymond made the deal.

And we had found this young writer who had no real credits,

but it's somebody that I had an eye on for a while.

And then poured, you got this cockamamie writer who I'd never heard of,

who you love.

Michael Allen.

You called me in and you said, you got this wonderful, amazing guy named Bruce Lee.

He makes movies in Hong Kong.

You've never seen anything like it.

Guess what?

I want you to write a movie for him.

And he came up and he turned out a wonderful first draft.

It was wonderful because I didn't know anything about martial arts.

I didn't know anything about Hong Kong.

And I was learning along the way.

We really blocked it out.

It was so exciting and I'll tell you how the kind of energy we had of it.

We did the first draft of the screenplay in three weeks, which is unheard of.

It happened so quickly because I think that Bruce was getting so hot.

And he'd gone back to Hong Kong, I think in 1971, and virtually in less

than a year, he couldn't walk down the street.

He was a major Asian star in Hong Kong.

He knew that if he kept making Chinese chapsakis,

he'd stay in China the rest of his life.

And he was anxious to show Coburn and McQueen and

all the rest, that he was an international star.

We wanted to present him as this incredible force of nature.

He was designed and executed for a particular star in his genre.

And it had a real purity in that sense.

But he needed to be one of three.

He needed to be the coolest of three years.

And we were very hard, consciously creating an international

kind of movie that would present Bruce properly.

Well, when we got started, and there was very little time to do all these things,

and the script had been sort of roughed in

and we knew a little bit about what we needed.

We really needed to get some sets built if we were going to ever make the schedule.

And when I was a kid, I grew up with this comic strip.

Well, Terry and the Pirates.

And Terry and the Pirates was about China and

the Orient and the Mystery and Dragon Ladies.

It was high chroma, reds, blues, golds, and it

just lent itself to this project so, so closely.

Well, I brought in a sketch artist named Dale Hennessy.

Dale and I sat down and worked out the basic sets for the piece.

The biggest one of all the full studio size set was the cave.

Some of the prison areas that were Bruce got

caught in the cell, the doors clanging down.

And then the other studio, the banquet hall,

these are large sets that needed a lot of thought.

We put together enough material for me to bring over

to Hong Kong and turn over to the Chinese designers.

And they in turn took it and interpreted it.

And I think did an outstanding job.

I think what Bob, Klaus, the director, and I tried to do was to take the magical

element of Hong Kong and bring a photographic style to that.

Sometimes you'd look down a hallway and not

see anybody until they came into the light.

And I remember Bob was very insistent that he wanted

it to be absolute black and then come into the light.

And lighting was kind of a challenge.

Rather than light, the whole cave used pools

of lighting to try to make it very dramatic.

Where you smoke to sort of haze it out.

Bob did this very neat shot from up above.

And looking at it, it was kind of blah.

There was just a bunch of people walking around in there.

So someone had the idea to get like a hundred bird cages.

So we'd shoot through the bird cages.

So you couldn't really see what was going on.

Didn't really know who these people were.

What was going to happen.

So what we tried to do, lighting was, is to add to that.

To make it dramatic.

To make it exotic.

Freddie and I talked about this at length.

And the big problem is how do you have a film loaded with

action in a contemporary situation where the hero has no guns.

Now why doesn't somebody pull off 45 and bang, settle it.

No, no guns.

Han would never allow guns on the island anyway.

He had a bad experience with them once and he's fearful of assassination.

Can't really blame him.

Any bloody fool can pull a trigger.

I guess I won't need anything.

And the villain creates the hero.

You need a really sensational, I wanted Han to be the devil.

Gentlemen, welcome.

You honor our island.

But the devil who believed in something and was

dedicated to it, which is the worst kind of villain.

We create ourselves two long years of rigorous training, sacrifice, denial, pain.

We put into work an idea, which we clear with Dick Mard first, of Hans Island.

Hans Island never really existed.

I mean, we needed to establish an island in the film.

One of the actors was a pilot.

He took off his little single engine plane, took the door off, I got my camera out.

And we started taking pictures of islands, pictures of mansions, and put them all

together into one composite photograph that became the Hans Island of the film.

The pilot of the plane was Roy Chow, who played

the monk in the monastery at the opening.

By the way, we shot that on a tennis court.

Well, we found this series of step tennis courts that were just marvellous.

But nobody noticed it.

You look closely in the film.

You'll notice the lines on the green.

We had to paint them all over with the green.

I mean, they don't look like tennis courts.

They look like fields where a man like Han would

be working with its army of martial artists.

I was used to crews from Hollywood that were very experienced.

And so the crew was like the equipment taking a step back in time.

The lab we used for developing the film was the filthiest place I've ever seen.

Cobwebs hanging, dust, inches thick.

How we got a film that looks like the film we got out of there, I will never know.

The tools for lighting were very simple.

In Hollywood you had a lot of tools to control life.

And over there, I think we had window screen, black paper, rope, and clothes pen.

I think the most difficult part of it was that

we had come up with a very ambitious film.

And we worked very hard to pull it off.

A whole electrical crew didn't speak any English.

And so I tried to get a communication going there.

When we started, all we had was Chinese crews.

So I got about ten words of Chinese and wrote them on a

little card, like turn the light on, turn the light off.

The whole process was slower than we had hoped for.

I mean, the biggest problem was communication.

Obviously my Chinese wasn't very accurate, because most of the time when I would say

something, they just thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

As we went along, we learned about the crew, they learned about us, and we came

up with a very positive way of making things work.

We had a very good time, and they were very hard working.

And once we actually started doing things, where we would turn the light on,

and I would go over and show them what we wanted, they were very accommodating.

The skill of the Chinese craftsman working at things

that they knew how to do was just outstanding.

Bob had an idea for the island when we came there

to sort of fill up the frame with a lot of flax.

So we had some flax made, and then we needed some flag poles.

Well, there weren't any.

So we had them made.

I never ceased to be amazed.

When this old man came in with a bag of plaster, some bus sticks and wire,

and at the end of the day there'd be a four-foot temple

dragon or a six-foot statue about Chinese warrior.

They just did a wonderful job.

I mean, the casting of the film was really kind of amazing.

We selected John Saxon because we heard that he was very interested in martial arts.

The interest in karate was spreading all over the place.

That was the reason why I decided to do it.

I was surprised at how good he was.

Yeah.

Talking over how to do the scene in the golf course with Bob Paus and Fred

Weinfeld, I felt I had to demonstrate to them what I meant.

So I began doing all kinds of leaping kicks that I could do at that time,

you know, scissor kicks and so on.

I know he worked really hard during the shooting.

But I felt that I had sufficient preparation.

I thought to do a movie, you know.

I was a little overestimation.

I think when he got to Hong Kong, he really saw

these guys working and he was working every day.

It was, I think, about eight days of continuous fight scene stuff.

I got to tell you, after those eight days I had had enough of doing the karate movie.

I didn't want to do any more of these fights yet.

I was like, oh my, give me back to something that is a drama that is an

internal thing, an emotional sort of situation.

I was glad he was over in those eight days, yeah.

Bruce had a lot to say.

He had a lot of recommendations in terms of the martial artists.

And we kind of deferred to him in the final choice because he would be the one

to work with them in their martial arts areas.

He had worked with most of these guys in America.

Bob knew Bruce, I guess, from competition.

Bruce's and my relationship was slow in developing.

In a way, we kind of had a tease each other, almost to say smart, Alec things to

each other kind of relationship for quite a while.

There's no question there was some, there was a competitiveness there.

In the shooting of the film, when that accident with the broken grass happened,

it got way of growing out of proportion.

We shot that scene several times, eight times to be

exact, a particular scene with the broken bottles.

The problem was, believe it or not, a very

simple thing, they didn't have a breakaway glass.

How can't I get that time?

And then, you know, rumors feed themselves,

they don't have to have a lot of substance.

They use regular glass and all that movement.

And so, each time we'd shoot the scene, I'd have to break the real bottles.

And Bruce instructed me to take the jagged edge of my right hand, which I had one in

each hand, but lunge with the right hand at his right pet.

And Bruce's words were, come at me as fast as you can.

And Bruce insisted that the action be so realistic.

And he wanted to get it perfect.

Everything had to be perfectly loose.

It was a fraction of an inch and Bruce got cut.

And it was lightning fast.

And I just lunged as fast as I could.

It was over.

And Bruce had his right hand up, and he started to spin.

And as he spanned, he jammed his fist into the glass.

No, it truly was an accident.

Truly an accident, we were both there on the set, I saw it.

You know, I told him, sorry I was able to bother.

He said, it's not your fault.

Just one of the things that happened.

One of the most interesting things about the selection

of the actors was how we finally got Jim Kelly.

It was really a last minute thing, because when it

happened, we had another actor signed on to do it.

Two days before we were ready to leave with martial artists, actor.

Society wasn't going to go.

And so we had to find somebody else.

We went to the studio.

So a studio?

Yeah, a friendship, I think it was.

Yeah.

And at night we went down there, and we saw Jim Kelly working.

He looked great.

And two days later, he was on the plane.

He was on the plane.

You know what was going on.

And it was fast.

One of my most favorite players was Angela Mao, who played Bruce's sister.

She was so petite, so darling.

And what a martial artist.

We saw her in a film that she had played the lead in when we were in our car.

And when she was presented to us, we flipped over.

And she was so cooperative.

And such a good actress.

Boa and I, we just saw this guy.

He just looked so wonderful.

And then he took his shirt off.

And then we had to be in the movie.

Well, Peter Archer was in Hong Kong, I believe, at the time that we made the film.

And that's where I came in.

I was a local martial artist and a foreigner on the spot.

But he was really quite good.

And I loved the scene in the boat.

There was a boat scene on a junk heading out of Aberdeen Harbour.

And one of the things that this particular scene called for was for me to jump off

the deck of the junk and into this little dinghy.

They think I was out there on the boat.

Yeah, I was out there.

And Bruce was ready to do it.

Something had happened between the two of them.

But I was being towed behind the junk at the end of a long run.

And he wasn't supposed to stay out there, not on the boat.

And Bruce made the kids not bring them in so fast.

And this jet on the bullhorn on the back of the junk was saying, pull on the rope,

pull on the rope, get mad.

So I'm shaking my fist and pulling on the rope.

At the same time as the bow of the dinghy was disappearing under the waves.

Whatever happens to the boy, the boy who plays the little boy from the monastery,

whatever happens to him.

He's a director now.

He's an important director in Hong Kong.

Uh, he's a great guy.

He's an easy guy.

He's an easy guy.

He has a different head and can be done.

He's a great guy.

He is a great guy.

We were all back, and then going home.

This is that woman Bruce that was so well and he didn't want to quit.

And he invented that little scene...

Because I think after he saw some of the rushes of the film... he got very excited...

and went back and shot that.

For that one he called Samo-Hung.

Samo was one of his old good friends.

I want you to be my movie.

Five with me.

That way we heard so we don't do anything.

We just talk.

Give me punch.

And I punch you.

Yeah, I block you.

I'm ready to take action.

We just want to take one day.

Okay, one day.

Okay.

We're fresh.

We should only one and a half day.

One day whole day, the other day is for lunch.

You know, they're finished.

They're very funny.

They're very happy.

We were nervous.

Okay, okay, go, go.

We saved the dragon lady for last, Anna Capri.

And we're very fortunate because Anna took

some home movies while she was making the film.

Back in those days, I loved going on location and I had told my agent that at

that particular time I wanted to go anywhere on location because my mom had

just passed away and I was I would welcome the opportunity to work out of town.

My agent called me up and he said you said you wanted to go on location.

He said it's Hong Kong far enough.

What are you talking about?

And he said there's a film called Enter the Dragon

and it's starring a martial artist called Bruce Lee.

He says have you ever heard of him?

And I said I have never heard of Bruce Lee, nor martial arts.

He said to me would you like to go to Hong Kong?

And I said absolutely.

So I said well good, when should I go?

And he said tonight.

I said no way.

And I said well what's the part?

He says I don't have a freaking idea.

But you know they'll send you the script, packer, and the luggage.

Just get on that plane.

I somehow miraculously was on that plane going to Hong Kong that night at midnight.

China Airlines.

My dad had given me a little super eight camera from my birthday which was like a

couple months before I went and I guess threw

it in the bag just to keep past the time.

Just walking around and you know taking some shots

of Bruce and John and Jim Kelly and Bob Wall.

Of course I'm sorry that I didn't have more.

We just placed five three-minute increments together

so it would be easier to view to show my friends.

And like I said it was just for fun.

And it wasn't really from the beginning, middle and end.

It was mostly just where they were filming the tournament scenes.

And when they first arrived that was just down the

steps from where we shot the tournament scenes.

As a matter of fact it's very interesting because I had

been invited to a formal lunch at this rich palatial estate.

It was on a Sunday afternoon and I went and the lunch was

basically held on a boat which was down the steps from this palace.

I noticed that these yellow flags were flapping in the wind.

I asked our host I said what are all those yellow flags doing there?

And he said to me tomorrow some movie company is going to start shooting here

for the next two to three weeks and as a film starring Bruce Lee.

And I said I can't believe that.

I said I'm the leading lady in that role.

I mean in that movie.

And he said you're kidding.

I said no.

I said and we're going to start shooting here tomorrow.

But it was mysteriously wonderful and beautiful at the same time.

I mean I was fascinated with it.

I loved Hong Kong.

But the interesting thing is when we started

the film Bruce was so nervous he didn't want it.

He didn't want to start.

We started shooting the picture and Bruce did not show up.

And what we had heard is that he was nervous and he was nervous.

Meanwhile we started shooting the movie because

I wanted to get going and we had won his money.

And the guy from Warner Brothers kept coming and I

said oh I'm telling you it's really turning out great.

I didn't have a bit of footage on Bruce.

Fred too was going around the hills of Hong Kong shooting, cenics and car rides

and everything to get before we could get Bruce into the studio.

When the first scene that he did in the studio he was so nervous and so physically

shaking.

We shot the scene where he's sitting down in a chair and they

just sort of turned his head as the only action we gave him.

And then finally he got it and I said Bob you gotta keep going now.

And then from then on Bruce, now that he was with it, like everything Bruce did,

he became terrific in what he did.

Great film coordinator, stunt coordinator.

And ultimately what we did in the screenplay was when we came up on an

action sequence which was going to be a Bruce Lee kind of show piece.

He was just writing the script choreography

to be designed by the director of the store.

A lot of Bruce's talent was with working with other actors and choreographing a

scene and leading the whole operation both in what he

did and what happened with other people in the fight.

And a lot of it again with the director, the

director had a wonderful sense of action.

And he had a wonderful visual eye to what would make a good action scene.

When I saw the fight downstairs when he goes into the caves, I thought when we saw

that the kind of things that Bruce was doing was unusual and different.

And he also had great charisma.

And you know, you watch the other stunt guys watch Bruce.

You begin to understand what happened.

I mean, you know, I remember Jackie Chan was a stuntman on Enter the Dragon.

Everybody began to understand that this was something unusual.

And we were starting to get the feeling of being in Hong Kong and seeing the way the

people, you know, considered him a hero, you were caught up in it.

And when Bruce liked something, when Bruce saw something, he was very inventive.

You know, we'd walk through the sets and we built these kind of marvelous sets.

And as we'd find something, as he'd see something, he was very, very actually

genius at finding a way to incorporate everything within it into his fight sequences.

See, what was a great thing was also a work in progress.

As we saw things, we added that to give color to Michael Allen's grip.

I sort of ran across the phenomena in a little hotel in Hong Kong on Repulse Bay.

On the way to the men's room and having lunch there, there was this sort of

multiple paneled mirror, and I just looked in it and I said, wow, this is amazing.

And I took Bruce and showed it to him, and he thought

it was too fragmented that he couldn't get any action.

It could mean anything out of it.

And the bomb clouds, and I really fought hard for it.

And we created this mirror in room.

The mirror in room was a great idea.

It was very visual.

We built it, and then we walked some people through it and

showed Bruce how it looked, and then he got absolutely.

So we wanted to see ourselves.

We just built like a closet in the middle of the

room that was movable with mirrors on the outside.

It just blended into the other mirrors.

I remember that I would always have to touch, because

if I'm looking at something, they might not be there.

They might be over there.

Each angle was so carefully laid out in terms of

where people appeared and mirror images appeared.

And we'd be doing a shot of Shaqin, and all

of a sudden Bruce would appear in the back.

And of course that image was maybe six reflections.

There was no place you could go that any reflection might not be seen.

So I found that I can only be in there for a couple hours, and I'd have to go out and

sit down and look at a wall in real dimension, because it's like there was a

fourth dimension in which was unbelievable to work in.

All of a sudden I get a call from Fred Wightro.

One of the producers says, Bruce Lee is in town.

He wants to have lunch with you.

I wanted to meet him, but I didn't know what to talk to him.

Ollalo had done that marvelous score for mission impossible.

And then he said, the reason I wanted to meet you is that I practiced in my dojo in

Hong Kong with the rhythm of your music of mission impossible.

He had the most unusual instruments when he found things that we used and entered

the dragon that hadn't really been used much in orchestration.

So I had to invent sounds based on instruments that are accessible to the

studio musicians that would sound like from the audience.

He wanted it to be modern, but a lot of little Chinese, but not have a Chinese score.

And I accomplished that.

That was a great way to try.

And Neary Crown was an exciting and sad at the same moment.

Of course, Bruce had passed away by that.

Before the opening, we had had a Chinese dragon race down.

Hollywood Boulevard.

One dragon from San Francisco and one dragon from LA.

But it was all due to Bruce.

I mean, you have to understand everything

emanated from the fact that we caught a star.

And I don't mean star movie star.

I mean, a comet, a comet.

And we're just saying that he wasn't there at the opening to see it.

The regret that I think we have at this moment is that

Bob Klaus isn't here with us anymore to be part of this.

Without Bob, I don't think Enter the Dragon would have been the film it is.

And certainly would have been nothing without Bruce.

Bob had a gentleness and an ability to see what Bruce could do.