| By Fred Topel
In Stores August 30
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Remember Jason Scott Lee from Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story or The Jungle Book? Did you keep up with him through Soldier and Timecop 2? If not, you may not still recognize him today, but your kids might. As a voice in the Lilo and Stitch franchise, Lee finds himself approached by kids who see him as David, boyfriend of Lilo’s sister.
“I think maybe because they drew the character fairly closely to what I look like, the kids relate even more to it, I think, when their parents say ‘That’s David,’” Lee shared. “Then they get the idea and they kind of put two and two together. But it’s kind of fun being a cartoon.”
Lilo and Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch debuts on video and DVD August 30. While Lilo and Stitch have to stop Stitch from turning evil again, David tries to get the attention of Nani, who is quite overwhelmed with three aliens living in her house. Still set on the islands of Hawaii, the Hawaiian Lee enjoyed the opportunity to bring his culture to the film.
“I like what they let me do. I like the quality of voice that they let me bring to the character, sort of a naive softness, kind of a gentle quality to him. And the whole rhythm of the speech is kind of akin to how people speak pidgin English here. Sort of a sing-song kind of [tone of voice].”
David still surfs in Lilo and Stitch 2, another quality to which Lee could relate. “I grew up on the western side [of Oahu] in an area called Pearl City, so we’d catch the bus from there to this part of the coast and surf all day and grab our lunches at the lunch wagon and go back into the water and spend eight, ten hours in the ocean. So that was my upbringing and I know a lot of my friends are still surfing and doing all that. If I’m ever in the water now, though, it’s a little different. I don’t surf that much, but if I’m in the water I’m fishing or something so I’m not doing anything else.”
Though Lee made the live-action Jungle Book with Disney in 1994 and the first Lilo in the years leading up to 2002, Lee hardly finds himself in the Disney stable. “I can’t deny that I had an ongoing sort of relationship, but it’s not something that we maintain. It’s either they call you or they don’t. It’s not like, ‘Oh, we’re buddy-buddy,’ with people over there, with every project. In fact, I got Lilo & Stitch, the first one because of Tia [Carrere]. She had told them to call me.”
These days, you won’t see Jason Scott Lee at any Hollywood parties or even on the soundstages in Burbank. He chooses to live a modest life on the big island of Hawaii, off the grid, farming and cooking his own food with wood burning fires. “Everyone told me me, ‘Oh, you’re going to ruin your career.’ I said, ‘How do you know? Have you ever done it?’ and no one had ever really done it, so I thought well, five hours to LA, same thing from New York to LA, so I thought, why not be in a better place and a place that I can really have a lifestyle? I guess there’s a certain time in your career when you say, ‘I want to have my lifestyle. I want to have the lifestyle that I am going to be fulfilled with.’”
Lee has to connect to the modern world via phone, but even that is to fund his artistic endeavors. “I’ve had to get a cell phone because I’ve done this thing on the property that I have where it’s arts and agriculture, so it’s doing sustainable agriculture and also I have sort of a ‘black box theater,’ so I’m actually putting on a show right now. I’m in between. We go from Wednesday to Saturday, so I do theater at home in my back yard, and we sell tickets to the people from the big island, and it’s a pretty cool operation.”
Having learned martial arts for films like Dragon, Lee discovered the spiritual side of such study. “The martial arts I had learned changed my way of thinking and changed my concept of success and power, and that started leading me into wanting to grow my own food and sustain myself through my own work. Then I read about this old man in Japan named Masanobu Fukuoka, who they called the sensei of natural farming, and natural farming is a very different concept from organic farming. So when I went to Japan to study with him, I made a very big turn in my outlook on life and how I saw my own island paradise so I started looking at land as being wealth, not material gain as being wealth. So in that instance when I put my mind to it and my hands to it, it was like, you take care of the land and it will take care of you. That meant the oceans and everything, so that really started me on that kind of lifestyle where to be a true artist you have to combine everything.”
It takes a very special project to get Jason Scott Lee’s attention these days. “There were a number of movies and things and musicals in Singapore and stage things [that I turned down], because I always find myself caught. Like, ‘What am I going to do with myself for the next four months? What do I do in between the time that I don’t work?’ And then you have crops in the field and then there’s a drought, maybe a one-month drought, and you can’t do anything, and so it’s taken priority over the other things.”
Hear Jason Scott Lee in Lilo and Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch on DVD. |
