Bruce Lee’s Only Surviving TV Interview, 1971: Lost and Now Found

Bruce Lee’s TV act­ing career began in 1966, when he land­ed a part in The Green Hor­net. (Watch his thrilling audi­tion here). But it took anoth­er five years before he gave his first–and, it turns out, only tele­vi­sion inter­view in Eng­lish. For 25 min­utes in Decem­ber 1971, the mar­tial arts star sat down with Pierre Berton, a Cana­di­an jour­nal­ist, in Hong Kong. And their con­ver­sa­tion cov­ered a fair amount of ground – Lee’s suc­cess star­ring in Man­darin films .… despite only speak­ing Can­tonese; his dif­fi­cul­ty devel­op­ing a career in a coun­try still hos­tile toward Chi­na; and his work train­ing oth­er Hol­ly­wood stars in the mar­tial arts.

Taped in 1971, the inter­view aired only once, then went miss­ing, and was­n’t found until 1994, when it final­ly aired again as a TV spe­cial called ”Bruce Lee: The Lost Inter­view’.’ First fea­tured on Open Cul­ture in 2011, the record­ing is now con­sid­ered his only sur­viv­ing on-cam­era inter­view and/or his only mean­ing­ful inter­view con­duct­ed in Eng­lish. A some­what restored ver­sion can be viewed on Vimeo here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bruce Lee Audi­tions for The Green Hor­net (1964)

The Poet­ry of Bruce Lee: Dis­cov­er the Artis­tic Life of the Mar­tial Arts Icon

Watch 10-Year-Old Bruce Lee in His First Star­ring Role (1950)