Brandon Lee: the scene from The Crow where he died

The death of Brandon Lee was one of the most heartfelt and tragic events of modern cinema. It was the one that created the myth of The Crow, as a film that expresses the real soul of Brandon, a film that really belongs only to him and should never be remade. There are also several legends spinning around that death, coming in part from the curse of the Lee family which throws a shadow even on the death of his father, Bruce Lee, dead as well during the shooting of his last film Enter The Dragon. What people often ask themselves is: in which scene of The Crow did Brandon Lee die? Is it possible to see it on video or in the movie itself.

The real scene in which Brandon Lee died is the one where his character, Eric Draven, was killed in his apartment, by the thugs who raped his girlfriend.

In the original scene Funboy, the thug played by Michael Massee, used a gun wrapped in a grocery bag. The gun still had an old dummy bullet from a previous scene, and in order to make the scene more realistic a small explosive charge was triggered during the shot, inside the grocery bag. A fragment of the dummy bullet hit Brandon Lee, in a wound that will later be fatal.

The original scene is obviously not in the film (there is no image of a shot with the grocery bag). Someone says that the film with that scene was destroyed, some others that it was confiscated by the police for the investigations on his death. In the original scene of Eric Draven’s death (the one above), Brandon Lee is first hit by a knife and then killed by two gunshots. That scene was completed without Brandon Lee, and the images where we can see Lee’s face were remade through digital processing, adding Lee’s face to his double.

Brandon Lee’s death was filed as accidental. Both the mother and the true girlfriend of Brandon Lee, Eliza Hutton, although devastated by his death, were collaborative in completing the filming of The Crow. After the death of Brandon Lee, many studios refused to produce the film, considered now too difficult to propose to the public. Miramax was the only one believing in the movie and released it, without even playing too much around the death of its main actor: their only initiative was to add a dedication in the ending credits: “For Brandon and Eliza”. And that was enough to touch the spectators for generations.