Special Thanks to Knowing Is Not Enough by CFW Enterprises
Interview Conducted by John Corcoran
(Taken from “Knowing Is Not Enough”, Fall 2000)
This edition of Knowing Is Not Enough features the last installment of John Corcoran’s remarkable interview with the late, great Hollywood screenwriter (and former Bruce Lee student) Stirling Silliphant, who penned big screen blockbusters like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure; Oscar-winning screenplays like In The Heat of the Night; and imaginative concepts like TV’s Longstreet series from the early 1970s. Silliphant wrote Bruce Lee into numerous stories including Longstreet, whose one-hour special many fans consider some of Lee’s unsurpassed work on film.
Silliphant, besides having been a three-year private student of Bruce’s, was one of his closest friends directly before and during the period when Lee traded obscurity for greatness. Despite the fact that he knew Lee so intimately, past interviews with Silliphant have been alternately shoddy and superficial, for his part of the story is, like his screenplays, a blockbuster. His reason is startling. “Nobody listened.” So I listened – for some four hours – as Silliphant, a master storyteller, recounted his entire martial arts history. The parts which involve Bruce Lee appear here.
Have you ever seen Bill Wallace fight?
Silliphant: No.
I interject his name here because he’s actualized this same technique. Bruce did it in the movies, Bill did it in the full-contact ring.
Silliphant: I’m pleased to hear that, Bruce maintained that if you could develop that technique, you shouldn’t necessarily count on the kick delivering the decisive blow. He said that would get you into close-quarters and help you bridge the gap. If you were fighting some dude with lesser ability you could easily take him out with a kick. But otherwise, he firmly believed that the kick was essentially a weapon to break up your opponent’s rhythm and a way to allow you to close the gap and deliver the killing punch. I mention these things so you will understand the diversity of style he brought to each movement. Then, if you inquired about any particular movement two weeks later, he might even say, “Forget about it; I’ve thrown that out. It’s not as good as this! Watch!” Bruce was never locked in. He changed constantly. No lesson was ever a repeat of any previous lesson. Every one was an event. I felt there were infinite lessons always still to be learned. After working on defense and kicking, we progressed to fist work. Earlier, I told you Bruce asked me to demonstrate my most powerful punch. I kept hitting the glove he was holding and nothing much happened. So he had me take an eight-pound shotput and hold it out in front of me – I just had to keep on doing that for hours – until I got the feeling of my whole body holding up the weight. Bruce built into me the feeling that I shouldn’t punch unless everything were behind it. “Don’t push the arm out,” he warned. “What you want to do is have your whole body push the shotput right through the son of a bitch’s face.” Once I had that down, he would work with me on the distance, or lack of distance, the punch had to travel. Bruce was able to punch from half an inch away and grind anybody through the wall because he had such complete torque, such a dynamic turning axis and such an explosive pin-pointing of energy. His whole body and half the bloody universe was behind every punch. He could even place his hand against you and achieve the same result. I mean, if he struck you in the face from a quarter-inch away, he could make it sound as if he’d hit you with a baseball bat. And he could punch with either hand with equal power.
He could?
You better believe it! He could really do it. I saw him do one-finger pushups with his left hand. So you can hardly consider that a weak arm. Bruce worked both sides – and everything in between. Bruce liked the elbow as a weapon. And he didn’t mind the straight finger thrust. Matter of fact, he practiced it for hours – in sand, in beans, in steel pellets. His thrusting power with his hand was awesome. He even had a steel mask designed, a gruesome-looking mask with tiny holes where the eyes should be, so he could jam his fingers into the target areas. He laughed at the “movie chop” – with the side of the hand – considering it an obviously weaker weapon since the force of the blow was spread [out]. But, again, as I say, for close-in street fighting, he favored the elbow, the heel of the foot and the knee. In teaching, Bruce broke down all the options and taught them one at a time – yet all the while he was putting it together for you – so that by the end of the instruction I had with him, I had an overwhelming sense of grasp about fighting in general. I finally asked him, “I now feel confident that I can defend myself reasonably well with my hands and feet, but what happens if I fight a guy armed with a knife? What happens with a gun, and so on?” We got into the whole arena of meeting armed assailants. Bruce answered all of my questions, showing me what he believed to be the proper responses in each case and making it all highly enjoyable besides. If I happened to excel during a lesson he’d say, “Okay, tomorrow we’ll work out with a knife.” The next day Bruce would hand me a knife and say, “Try to stab me … because that’s the only way you’re going to learn what I’m about to teach you.” Well, I figured because I’d been a damn good fencer I was going to stick this guy, right? So I took the knife and started doing some real fancy stuff, brandishing the blade and two-hand switching like I was raised in the barrio. Forget it! Bruce would either kick me in the head, the hand, the leg, or else kick the damn knife – anywhere he wanted – at will! I mean, I got nowhere with him.
Are you serious?
Absolutely. So I then began to see the wisdom of his combat psychology. “The guy who’s got the knife is at a disadvantage. He will clearly lose the fight,” Bruce said confidently. “The reason is very simple. Psychologically, he only has one weapon. His thinking is therefore limited to the use of that single weapon. You, on the other hand, are thinking about all your weapons: your hands, elbows, knees, feet, head. You’re thinking 360-degrees around him. Maybe you’re considering some form of escape, like running. He’s only got a lousy knife. Now he might throw it at you – let him. You still have a chance to avoid it, block it, or he misses you. You’ve got all the advantages, when you think about it.” Now the same thing applies to some other weapons. I wouldn’t want to fight a good cat with some of that stuff, you know? Forget it; I’m going out the back door. But take a guy with the average stick, plank or club, Bruce would laugh at him. Bruce once told me, “He’s holding something with two hands, I mean, what’s he going to do: swing, thrust, jab? He’s got a problem. What’s he going to do with his feet? He’ll be off-balance if he holds the staff and tried to attack you. That’s his disadvantage.” When I was down in Los Angeles recently I asked Tak Kubota to show me how he would defend against his Kubotan weapon, the short stick he invented. He gave it to two cops he was training and told them to attack him. He defended against it very simply. He went into a low-line attack from the ground, knocked both cops off their feet, then theoretically dispatched both of them. But everyone isn’t Tak Kubota and everyone isn’t Bruce Lee. That’s a pretty tough little weapon to fight against. Unless you’re really good, you may have to take some punishment first. But Bruce took me through all those things. Then we got to guns, and he showed me how – if anyone is foolish enough to stick a gun in your back – you can almost always take it away. Bruce used a cap pistol and we practiced this exercise, I don’t know, maybe 500 times. And not once was I able to “shoot” Bruce, nor was Bruce able to shoot me. Once he had taught me how to disarm a gunman in this position, it became easy. But the minute you make a wrong move, just a centimeter, or hesitate at any point, you’ll get your ass blown off. There’s no margin for error with this one. Sometimes I’d come away from a movie I’d seen – not a martial arts movie, please understand – and question Bruce on the techniques I’d observed in the filmed fight scenes. In most of these encounters, here again nobody was kicking the other guy. They’d get down on the ground and still attempt to punch each other, no matter how many openings they had for a kick. Even I could have torn someone’s balls off or any number of things given those openings. Well, I’d go back to Bruce and ask why is this? He’d say, “Because they don’t know any better. They’re stupid. They’ve been taught to punch guys in the face or in the gut. Those are movie guys, stuntmen. But the street fighters know better.” I said, “I saw a movie the other night where a guy put a wire noose around a victim’s neck and strangled him. What do you do in that case?” Bruce simply said, “You die. The only way out is to not get yourself in that position in the first place. If a good cat gets a noose around your neck, you’ll be dead in a matter of seconds because he’ll pull you back off balance and you won’t be able to get to him.” These little delicacies on the finer arts of mayhem only transpired after two or three years, when Bruce and I felt more secure with each other. I used to pose theoretical combat problems to him. “I’m walking down a dark alley at night,” I’d say, “and four guys appear. They want to do me bodily harm. I can’t run, I can’t call the cops, and for the sake of argument, let’s assume I’m unarmed. Now what do I do?” Bruce said, “What you do there is attack. That is, if you’re sure they’re after your ass.” “How do you attack?” I asked. “Four guys!” Bruce explained, “Always remember, outflank them! You don’t do what they do in the Japanese samurai movies, where the hero runs into the middle of the throng and gets surrounded by a group of swordsmen. That ‘s one good way to get yourself chopped up. Always stay on the flank and try to take out one guy at a time. For example, if four guys are there, don’t run into the middle. Run to one side. Now they may try to close in, in which case, shift but keep trying to get the guy on the outside nearest to you. Always try to stay outside when you attack.” The more I thought of that strategy, coupled with Bruce’s techniques, the more logical it seemed. Bruce’s whole technique was to move fast, move aggressively, stay on the outside – on the flank – either left or right. I tell you all these things to try to give you some perception into the diversity of Bruce’s instruction, the fun it was, and how dissimilar it was to the other martial disciplines, which will not be named and which I later studied out of desperation. I found later I was unable to maintain any interest in other methods of teaching.
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