The Ashcan

Favourite Interviews: Pierre Berton, Bruce Lee

Posted on 20. Jul, 2010 by Jef in Favourite Interviews

I’ve watched this interview dozens of times over the years, always to bask in the aura of Bruce Lee. It’s one of his only in-depth on camera interviews (the other popular one being a screen test), and in that sense, it is very Lee: quick, get in get out, knockout. I’m not sure there was ever much need for another. As I’ve gotten older though, widening my scope beyond kung-fu and movies, and later even getting into journalism, I’ve learned about the other side of what makes this interview work so well: Pierre Berton.

I’d known of Berton when I was younger but only peripherally. I knew he was the interviewer of Bruce Lee. I knew he wrote some stuff. I knew he was Canadian, and very much so. I knew he was a “marijuana connoisseur.” But it was only until much later that I put it all together and realized he was someone kind of important, and only much more recently that I went back and re-watched this interview and saw him sitting there, across from Lee, making what I thought was a solo act a two-person dance.

As a journalist, Berton was known for being a hard-ass, the type who infamously told one of his writers he had to re-write his story just so he could throw it in the trash. I see it now, the way he cuts off Lee and summarizes his points, how he looks nonplussed by Lee’s philosophical musings, and especially in the way he curtly ends the program, like whatever. But he’s not a narcissist who likes hearing his own voice. More than interrupting Lee, he controls him. It’s his show, and he knows it, and he has no need to overcompensate and talk over his guest. Berton knows he can’t beat Lee up, but he’s also confident he’s smarter than him.

Lee being controlled? Of course not. Despite Berton, he’s there, laid back, gesticulating, drawing thoughtful pauses, enunciating all of his words as exactly as he punches. Their respective charisma-chismo doesn’t cancel each other out, it just magnifies the other’s. Neither one backs down. Neither Lee nor Berton seems to even notice that the other person is just as cocksure. It makes them all the more impressive, especially nowadays when cockiness is so put-on and almost always just a pose. These two have the right to be so sure of themselves — it’s all walk, not talk, or as Lee would say, it’s an honest expression of their true selves.

According to a comment on IMDB, Berton said Lee was “the most intense person he’d ever met.” I like that, because it’s not exactly a fawning compliment — as Lee remembrances so often are — but neither is it a dismissal. It’s just a fact, black and white, caught on video.

Tags: "yeah man", Bruce Lee, interview, marijuana connoisseur, Pierre Berton