Shekhar Kapur’s Bruce Lee biopic is “still very much a work in progress”, he told Screen Daily at the Macao International Film Festival and Awards. The director of Mr India and Elizabeth was supposed to have started shooting the authorised biopic, titled Little Dragon, in 2017 for producers Bruce Lee Entertainment and Convergence Entertainment. Kapur is writing the script with the martial art icon’s daughter, Shannon Lee.
At the time of his death in 1973 at the age of 32, Bruce Lee had already transformed the fortunes of the martial arts genre and become a pop culture icon in his native Hong Kong and around the world. His films Fist of Fury (1972) and Enter the Dragon (1973) endure as martial arts classics.
Lee was also a student of philosophy, an aspect that interested Kapur. “I took it on because I was fascinated with Bruce Lee, the idea that a man was the greatest expert in martial arts of all time is suddenly now being accepted as a major philosopher,” the director told Screen Daily.
Kapur’s other projects include a possible project set in China. His ambitious Indian production Paani, meanwhile, hasn’t yet taken off. “Asian storytelling is different from Western storytelling,” he told the publication. “In Asia we accept the unreasonable much quicker. The mythical is part of our genetic makeup…Most of the Western philosophy is about the dominance of the individual. If you talk to Chinese, Indian, Japanese people and say, ‘I am stronger than my destiny,’ people will say, ‘you will learn.’ There is a fundamental philosophical difference.”
