Repression is a main element of my movies. It’s easier to work against something than go along with something.1
The Auteur
ANG LEE HAS been referred to as an auteur and it is not difficult to see why—he is an artist with his actors, and seems to draw amazing work out of his cast, from the smallest to the greatest, while continuing to reiterate common themes of family, culture, and identity in an astonishing variety of genres. Keeping in mind that he has made films in Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, British English from the time of Jane Austen, high-school drop-out cowboy English, American English from the Civil War era, and 1960s American hippie slang—with six languages (Mandarin, English, Japanese, Hindi, Shanghainese, and Cantonese) represented in Lust/Caution (Se jie, 2007) alone—this is no small feat. He has drawn performances of the highest quality out of actors as diverse as Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Chow Yun-fat, and Tony Leung, as well as defining and prodigious early work from a young Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Katie Holmes, and, at 19, Kate Winslet and Zhang Ziyi. As Jake Gyllenhaal reflected after the making of Brokeback Mountain (2005), Ang Lee is also “fluent in the language of silence.”2 This has been proven by his films from his earliest 15-minute dialogue-free scene between Deb Snyder and Sihung Lung (Lang Xiong) in Pushing Hands (Tuishou, 1991), to the paean to noncommunication and 1970s angst, The Ice Storm (1997), and finally, to the tortured secrets of repressed souls in Brokeback Mountain. Indeed, the use of silence is so effective for this director that the last fifteen minutes of The Ice Storm were virtually a silent movie; similarly, 16-year-old first-time actor Suraj Sharma had to carry much of Life of Pi (2012) with nothing but a blue screen to share his soliloquies. While Lee uses language and silence to tell his stories, he also narrates them through physical posture and facial expression. Thus, he brought out such memorable performances as Heath Ledger’s clenched-jaw repression, Sigourney Weaver’s languid and vampish physicality, Joan Allen’s erasing of her own identity, Michelle Yeoh’s fathomless loyalty, Hugh Grant’s internalized awkwardness, Tony Leung’s brutal indifference, and Tobey Maguire’s passage from boyhood to maturity. The nuanced performances in Brokeback Mountain were widely recognized as the three young actors in the film, all just in their twenties, were each nominated for Academy Awards, one of the youngest casts in history to receive such recognition.3
Ang Lee’s talent for drawing out the best from his actors is mixed with his flawless incorporation of the natural environment, utilizing breathtaking vistas and frames. In Sense and Sensibility (1995), animals, hedges, and the natural effects of wind create subtleties in mood; in Ride with the Devil (1999), sun-dappled woods filmed on location in Missouri coupled with peaceful scenes of farmstead domesticity contrast markedly with the bloody and violent battles that take place in that setting. In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong, 2000), he utilizes the startling green bamboo grove and the grid of old Beijing; in Brokeback Mountain, the hundreds of sheep stumbling up a mountainside, the headlights of a lone truck moving at a distance down a country road; in The Ice Storm, the cool metallic look of ice-encased branches and snow-slick streets. All are extremely evocative and unforgettable, almost haunting, images. It is the style of Ang Lee: emotionally resonant (in human relationships) and visually splendid (in the natural world).
After the critical and commercial failure of Hulk in 2003, Lee faced a grueling depression. During an introductory speech at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2005, where Brokeback Mountain was previewed, Ang Lee said that after Hulk he wasn’t sure if he wanted to continue to be a filmmaker. He considered quitting the profession, and giving up directing entirely. Ironically, it was his father, a conservative high school principal and teacher who had always longed for his son to follow in his footsteps and settle into a more stable career, who pushed Ang Lee back into the game. Ang Lee’s father, who had never encouraged him to be a filmmaker, stunned his son by telling him “You need to go and make a movie.”4
Lee elaborates in Michael Berry’s Speaking in Images, a 2005 volume of interviews with contemporary Chinese filmmakers:
[My father told me] he wished that I would continue making movies even though I told him I wanted to stop. That was in February 2004. He saw Hulk and loved it—I don’t know why. He was very old. I told him I wanted to retire, or at the least, take a long break from filmmaking. He asked me if I wanted to teach, but I told him I didn’t think so. He warned me that I would be very depressed if I stopped. So he told me to just put on my helmet and keep on going. That was the very first time he encouraged me to make a movie. In the past, he would always try to talk me out of making movies.5
Tragically, Lee’s father died two weeks after this crucial conversation, which was the first time he had been supportive of his son’s dream of being a director.
Ang Lee took his father’s advice. The film that he went to make was Brokeback Mountain. Regarding this film, Lee says, “In some ways, it was a movie I didn’t dare to make, for both economic and subject-matter reasons.”6 He had read the script several years earlier and found it extremely moving, especially the ending, but he felt it would be very difficult to bring the story to the screen. (Instead of pursuing it, he turned his attention to Hulk.) Finally, after his father’s nudge, in late spring 2004 Lee began filming Brokeback Mountain in a remote part of Canada. In contrast to the multimillion-dollar Hulk, it was a return to the simpler, small-budget, independent-style filmmaking he had enjoyed in the past. Little did he know that his simple film with a small cast of young and (at the time) lesser-known actors would put him on the road to the Academy Awards.
The Outsider
The whole of Asia was held in thrall on the morning of Monday, the 6th of March, 2006, during the live presentation of the Academy Awards (broadcast at 9:00 a.m. in Taiwan), while waiting to see if Ang Lee would be named Best Director, thereby becoming the first Asian in history to win the award. At the ceremony in 2001, when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had been nominated in the Best Film and Best Foreign Language Film categories, Lee’s disappointment was palpable when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won the latter award. The film had taken America by storm in 2001 and arguably was more deserving of the Academy Award that ultimately went to Gladiator (2000). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had dominated the headlines that year, and all who saw it were claiming it was something really special: not only was it the most popular subtitled Mandarin film ever to be received in the West, but it spawned imitators hoping to capitalize on the new popularity of the martial arts genre (Hero, 2002, and House of Flying Daggers, 2004, are just two examples).7 Within a year of its release, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became the highest-grossing foreign-language film ever released in the United States,8 and it triggered a cultural phenomenon, much the way Brokeback Mountain did following its release in 2005. There was hardly a moviegoer in America that year who did not see the film, or make a joke about “Crouching Something, Hidden Something-else.”9 While the film took home four Academy Awards, Lee’s disappointment was evident as his movie won for Best Foreign Language Film; he was clearly upset that the top award, Best Film, was going to elude him. Even while delivering his acceptance speech on the Academy stage, the bittersweet look on his face revealed his true feelings. The filmmaker who had unstintingly championed the cause of the outsider, the alienated, and the foreigner was still considered a foreigner/outsider himself, and it clearly irked him.
Ang Lee was 37 years old when he began his career as a professional filmmaker. He had lived in America since he was 23. Ironically, although Lee had to overcome numerous obstacles due to his “outsider” status in America, he initially did not find himself quite “fitting in” with Asian society, either. Born on October 23, 1954, in Ping-tung County, Taiwan, and growing up both in Hualien and later in Tainan City, he faced increasing difficulty conforming to his own culture’s expectations, particularly that of the model Chinese son. His father, Lee Sheng, a traditionalist in his Confucian emphasis on education as well as subjection to authority and conformity, was disappointed by his son’s failure in the important national university entrance exams (Lee twice failed this exam that every Taiwanese youth spends his middle school and high school years preparing for—both times he developed a mental block after panicking on the mathematics section). He had attended his father’s own high school, Tainan First Senior High School, the best in the city. Lee Sheng was frequently disappointed by his son’s lack of attention to books and poor performance at school; in the summer, during the school holiday, he would have both his sons practice calligraphy and study Chinese classics. Tainan First Senior High School was a strictly-regimented place where students wore the standard school uniform—identical khaki pants and short-sleeved shirts embroidered with their student number—and studied in crowded classrooms in sweltering tropical heat. Lee frequently escaped to the Chin Men Theater to watch movies, the only thing he was “good at.”10
After his repeated failure at the university entrance examination, Lee finally enrolled in the Theater and Film program at the Taiwan Academy of Arts (now the National Taiwan University of Arts) which, when he attended in 1973, was a three-year vocational school rather than a prestigious university, a real step down in status in the eyes of his father.11 Worse, he was majoring in Theater and Film, a field not considered gentlemanly and respectable, and in the conservative 1970s environment of Taiwan, one viewed with a jaundiced eye. People in the entertainment business in Taiwan at that time were considered somewhat akin to vaudeville entertainers in early American theatrical history—one step above prostitution and debauchery. Lee’s proper, highly-educated father was appalled and shamed by this career choice; friends of Ang Lee’s parents would deliberately not ask about him—and instead ask about his younger brother, Khan—to avoid embarrassing Lee Sheng. It was almost unthinkable in Chinese culture for the son of a high school principal to go into acting.
Nevertheless, Lee was delighted with his experiences at the Taiwan Academy of Arts and felt immediately at home acting onstage. In his own words, “My spirit was liberated for the first time.”12 Clearly, this type of cathartic experience had not been available to him growing up in a heavily academic environment, where his father was often a silent, fearsome presence (according to childhood friends, Lee’s father did not speak at the dinner table and relaxed, casual conversations would take place there only when his father had left the room). One of his most memorable roles was Tom Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie—a drama best-known for its intergenerational conflicts, and the son’s ultimate flight from parental control. While originally he had entered the Academy to avoid conscription into Taiwan’s mandatory military service—he was planning to take the college entrance exam again, for the third time, to transfer to a better school—he instead fell deeply in love with drama. His father allowed him to stay at the Academy, with the appended promise that after graduation he would go abroad for further study. Lee was clearly a gifted performer; he acted in numerous roles, and in his second year at the Academy he won a top acting prize in a national competition. In his third year, he made a Super-8 film as a graduation project—the film was called Laziness on a Saturday Afternoon (Xingqiliu xiawu de lansan, 1976), an 18-minute black-and-white silent film about a kite. This film would later be included in the application materials that would gain him acceptance into New York University’s film school.13
American Education
In 1978 Ang Lee went to the United States and, with financial support from his family, entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a theater major.14 Within a few months of beginning his studies there, he turned 24; thus he was considerably older than his fellow students, since he had been obligated to complete his two years of government-required military service in Taiwan following his time at the Academy. In addition to the drawback of being older, his English was heavily accented and far from fluent. Therefore, he faced inevitable difficulties with his drama performance courses because it took him longer to read scripts and memorize his lines than it did his American classmates.15 However, during his time at the University of Illinois, he began experimenting with directing rather than acting and discovered a way to use his artistic vision that rendered his accented and grammatically imperfect English less of a problem. Although he had enjoyed acting and performing, he now threw himself into this new medium. He directed a production of Ionesco’s The Chairs, and studied the plays of Bertolt Brecht, Harold Pinter, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill. Describing his experience from that period, he says: “the look of Western theatre struck me in a big way. … I got very good at it.”16
Lee graduated from the University of Illinois with a B.F.A. (Bachelor of Fine Arts) in Theatre/Theatre Direction in 1980. After graduation, he went on to the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University to complete a master’s degree in Film Production. At NYU, Lee enjoyed a very prolific early period producing student shorts. These films included The Runner (1980), Beat the Artist (1981), I Love Chinese Food (1981), and Shades of the Lake (1982). Shades of the Lake, also known as I Wish I Was By That Dim Lake, won Best Short Film in Taiwan’s Golden Harvest Film Festival. This second-year film project also won a full scholarship for Lee to continue his studies at NYU. In addition, during this early period in New York, Ang Lee had the opportunity to work with fellow NYU classmate Spike Lee. The two worked together on Spike Lee’s student film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1984), with Ang Lee acting as assistant cameraman.
In 1983, Lee married Jane Lin, a fellow Taiwanese student at the University of Illinois who was majoring in microbiology. The two had met for the first time in August 1978 (a week after he had arrived in the United States) on an international student outing to a Little League game in Gary, Indiana—they happened to sit next to each other in a car full of Taiwanese students. They continued to get to know each other during their time together at the university. Lin, interviewed by John Lahr in the New Yorker in 2003, described their courtship: “He just talks—about everything. I fall asleep, I wake up, he’s still talking.”17 The year they married was also the year Lee’s father retired. Lin’s mother questioned the match. According to Lin, her mother said, “Why did you pick this one, with all the other nice boys around—engineering and regular people?”18 Married in New York City, the two said their vows in a civil ceremony reminiscent of the famous courthouse marriage in The Wedding Banquet (Xiyan, 1993) which so embarrassed Lee’s mother just as it had the mother in the film. In addition, again echoing The Wedding Banquet, Lin became pregnant on their wedding night, but she would not permanently join her husband in New York until January 1986, when she finally graduated with her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois.
During his time at NYU, Lee spent two years making the lengthier film A Fine Line (1985) as a master’s thesis. This film, which is the story of a young Chinese girl, Piu Piu (Ching-Ming Liu), and a rough-neck Italian boy, Mario (Pat Cupo), was an earlier, more rudimentary version of the East-meets-West formula in his first trilogy of feature-length films, especially Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet, for which he later became known. Made over a period of two years, this film displayed Ang Lee’s nascent talent for the East/West cultural dialectic, and also his eye for location (the film was shot largely in New York’s Chinatown and Little Italy, as well as in New Jersey, and on and around the Jersey River). He also worked with the then-unknown actor Chazz Palminteri on this film. The 43-minute A Fine Line won the New York University Film Festival’s top two awards for Best Director and Best Film—a great honor for the new Master of Fine Arts in Film Production—and was later aired on PBS. In addition to garnering the praise of both the NYU community and the larger film community in New York, Lee’s film attracted the attention of the top U.S. film agency William Morris. As Lee related in Stephen Lowenstein’s My First Movie:
I decided to go back to Taiwan. … But before I went I wanted … at least to show the film at the school’s film festival. I realized later that it was a big deal because a lot of people were from outside film school and a lot of Asians were watching. Anyway, I was packing up all my stuff. … I got a phone call and they said, “This guy from William Morris is looking for you.” And I said, “William who?”19
Although he had not heard of the agency, the William Morris agent tried to convince him to stay in America and pursue whatever opportunities he could to develop screenplays and work on films. Lee relates how, having decided the prospects for a Chinese filmmaker in the United States were slim, he was intending to head back to Taiwan to make a name for himself in his native country. At the time he received the phone call from William Morris, he had already packed everything he owned into eight cardboard boxes to be shipped to Taiwan the following day. As a result of the last-minute offer from the William Morris agency, Lee decided to take the gamble of staying another half-year in New York while waiting for Jane to finish the final semester of her doctoral program. It was a fateful decision.
Reversal of Fortune
Ang Lee has described the next six years of his life as “development hell.”20 His eldest son Haan had been born in 1984, and his son Mason followed in 1990. Lee spent the six years between A Fine Line and Pushing Hands being a house husband of sorts, cooking, and looking for filmmaking opportunities. He wrote screenplays, and his agent occasionally found him work as a production assistant on other films while he tried unsuccessfully to pitch his own. It was a lonely and difficult time for Lee, living in the New York suburbs with sometimes very little to do: much the same way actor Sihung Lung does in the film Pushing Hands (more can be found on this topic in chapter 3). John Lahr details how at one point Lee in desperation would go nearly daily to hit a tennis ball around at the local tennis court. When he became overly distraught, his wife would take him to his favorite restaurant, Kentucky Fried Chicken.21 Lee has often praised his wife and family publicly for not giving up on him and his dream during this period, saying that he would not have become a filmmaker if it had not been for Jane’s support. During the six years Lee was not working, she brought home the salary from her job as a microbiology researcher while Lee stayed at home taking care of their children. While somewhat more common in the United States, this situation (a wife supporting the family as the main breadwinner) is considered an embarrassment in Chinese culture. Neil Peng, screenwriter on The Wedding Banquet and close friend of Lee from these early days, observed that “the artist has a tempo of his own,” implying that the six-year break gave Lee a chance to prepare himself for his directing career. “During those six years, Ang Lee never gave up his film dreams. He kept a huge movie database in his brain and would work on dozens of scripts at the same time.”22
In 1990, with the birth of his second son, Lee was 36 and had little to show for his years of effort. It is difficult to imagine the now world-famous director languishing through his thirties as year by year he grew no closer to his goal. With his poor English, no one was interested in financing his movies. James Schamus and Ted Hope at Good Machine had seen Lee’s graduate thesis film A Fine Line; in 1991, when they began to organize Good Machine as a firm to help worthy directors finance good projects with less-than-Hollywood budgets, they connected with Lee. According to Schamus, who met him just as his luck was changing:
It was clear when Ang left the room why he had not made a movie in six years. … The idea of flying this guy to Los Angeles for a story meeting—forget it. When he left the office, I turned to Ted and said two things. One was “Boy, this guy can’t pitch his way out of a paper bag.” And two: “He wasn’t pitching a movie; he was describing a movie he’d already made. He just needs somebody to realize it.”23
In the meantime, Lee had entered a screenwriting contest held by the Taiwan government in order to strengthen the fledgling Taiwanese film industry. As the principal submission, he sent the screenplay “Pushing Hands,” and, almost as an afterthought, he included in his submission a three-year-old screenplay that had never excited any producer’s interest entitled “The Wedding Banquet.”24 Unbelievably, the breakthrough for Lee occurred as a result of this contest. In late 1990, these two screenplays won the two top prizes in the contest, and as a result, Lee was given US$16,000 in prize money to make the winning script, “Pushing Hands,” into a film. The new head of Taiwan’s Central Motion Pictures Corporation threw his support behind the new film and gave Ang Lee an additional US$400,000 to make it.25 Pushing Hands was filmed entirely in New York; apart from the main actors, most of the crew was American. The culture-straddling experience of this early “international” production foreshadowed Lee’s future career trajectory. Pushing Hands was hugely successful in Taiwan; it was the third-highest-grossing Mandarin-language film of 1991, and won two major Golden Horse awards (Taiwan’s version of the Academy Awards) as well as the Asian-Pacific Film Festival’s Best Film award. Nevertheless, despite the popularity of Pushing Hands in Taiwan, the film is little known in the West. This is due to the fact that since Lee wrote the screenplay with a Taiwanese audience in mind (in order to win the contest), the film enters deeply into Chinese cultural psychology and, due to its centralized theme of filial piety, sits more comfortably in the Taiwanese film aesthetic. However, because of the huge success of Pushing Hands in Taiwan, Central Motion Pictures Corporation offered Lee a small budget to make the second film, The Wedding Banquet, with the stipulation that the movie be made in under six weeks. The newly-formed film company Good Machine stepped in to help with the financing for both films, and James Schamus began what would be a decades-long collaboration with the director.26
All three of Ang Lee’s early films continued his fascination with the East/West dialectic. Pushing Hands, completed in 1991, tells the story of an aging tai chi master forced to adjust to living in America with his son, who is married to a Caucasian woman. The Wedding Banquet, released in 1993, is a comedy/drama about a young Taiwanese-American in New York who tries to hide his homosexuality from his tradition-bound parents by agreeing to marry a Chinese woman who wants to obtain U.S. citizenship. This screenplay, written with Neil Peng, was based on the similar experiences of a Taiwanese friend. The low-budget (US$750,000) The Wedding Banquet was a huge hit, bringing in a worldwide profit of US$32 million—thus becoming the most proportionately profitable film of 1993, surpassing even Jurassic Park.27 This film also garnered Lee his first Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.28
In 1994, Lee followed the success of The Wedding Banquet with the globalization and feminist treatise Eat Drink Man Woman, set, for the first time, in Taipei. This film combined Chinese cooking—a hobby which he claims “strengthens my spirit”—with a tender and nuanced story about the relationships between a widowed father and his three daughters.29 After the phenomenal success of The Wedding Banquet, Lee was approached by many Hollywood studios; however, he was interested in pursuing instead a more personal mission: “I felt a desperate need to establish myself as a Chinese filmmaker, so I needed to go back home. … Eat Drink Man Woman was actually the first movie—and so far the only movie—I have made in my [birthplace], Taiwan.”30 Lee discusses how during his six years as a house husband, cooking for his family, he dreamed of making a film that would use food to make people’s mouths water—a sumptuous feast that would tempt and arouse the audience with food in the same way movies often use sex.31 The film brought Ang Lee his second Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.32
Taiwanese scholar Ti Wei explores the importance of economics and location in Ang Lee’s early trilogy. He quotes Lee:
Making Eat Drink Man Woman was my first experience of the [dual] pressure for artistic achievement and box-office performance. I had never thought much about that when I was making Pushing Hands or The Wedding Banquet. … After The Wedding Banquet was a hit, distributors from all over the world offered high prices for my films. The international market model for my films was formed: the “mainstream popular market” in Taiwan and Asia plus the “art-house cinema” in the U.S. and Europe. … I began to think much more about the taste of the global art film market. … Therefore I found myself caught between the Chinese and the Western.33
The success of Lee’s early trilogy attracted the attention of major studios in Hollywood. His next three films would be English-language films made with access to international funding and audiences. Producer and director Sydney Pollack of the Mirage production company was among those who admired how The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman managed to be touching and romantic without being maudlin or sentimental. When he was seeking a director to bring the Jane Austen novel Sense and Sensibility to the screen, he and colleague Geoff Stier turned their attention to Ang Lee. When producer Lindsay Doran and screenwriter Emma Thompson heard this choice, they were struck by how right it seemed, and became even more convinced after finding the same line in the Eat Drink Man Woman screenplay as Thompson’s own—when the older sister says to the younger sister “What do you know of my heart?” For his part, Lee was surprised to be asked to direct this British classic (he confessed later that when he saw Jane Austen’s name on the screenplay, he thought the producers must be crazy), but he agreed to do it; one of his first acts as director was to ask Emma Thompson to play the lead role of Elinor Dashwood.34 Directing an entirely British cast in period dress on location in Britain was no small feat; more is detailed in chapter 6 on Sense and Sensibility.
The success of Sense and Sensibility in 1995, with its seven Academy Award nominations and a win for Emma Thompson (Best Adapted Screenplay), moved Ang Lee from the marginalized category of “foreign-language film director” to a leading force in Hollywood. His next film, The Ice Storm, explored another culture and period in time—suburban America during the post-Watergate era of the 1970s. The critical success of The Ice Storm, which starred A-list Hollywood actors, followed by Ride with the Devil, a U.S. Civil War film sympathetic to the plight of Southerners, further demonstrated Lee’s ability to penetrate the essence of whatever subject he tackled, no matter how unique or how remote.
Taking Flight—International Celebrity
While Chinese audiences lamented the lack of public recognition for his English-language films’ achievements, Ang Lee was about to pull his biggest coup yet—the film he’d been dreaming about making since childhood. At the beginning of his career almost ten years earlier, when making Pushing Hands on a shoestring budget in 1991, Lee was quoted in an interview published by the Taipei International Film Festival: “The thing I’d most like to do is make a classical Qing-dynasty-style martial arts film—I already have my eye on a novel I’d really like [to base it on].”35 In a later interview, Lee admits he had wanted to work with the Chinese martial arts genre since boyhood, and a friend of his, knowing of his fondness for the work of Wang Dulu, recommended this particular series in 1994. When he read Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with its strong central protagonist, Jen, he was convinced that there was a movie in the material.36 In 2000, his hopes were realized (he jokingly describes this movie as the result of a midlife crisis): he was able to assemble an astounding group of Chinese cast, crew, and musical talents, drawing top performers and artists from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (from Asian A-list actors Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh to Hong Kong–American pop singer Coco Lee and world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma) and filming in China, in places as diverse as the Gobi Desert and the Taklamakan Plateau north of Tibet, near the Kyrgyzstan border. Lee has mentioned in an interview that his fight choreographer, Yuen Wo Ping, had doubts about the Western audience’s ability to accept physical flight in a martial arts film:
I had long talks—no, debates—with Mr. Yuen [Wo Ping] about whether or not to do the qinggong [a martial arts skill which enables practitioners to defy gravity] flying thing. From his experience, he [didn’t] think the West would take to it, but to me it’s a metaphor, and it’s visually very interesting. [So] I worked his team to death.37
Lee decided to gamble on the flight sequences, with actors suspended from wires so they could appear to fly up walls and over rooftops, with a particularly challenging and hard-to-film scene in the treetops of a bamboo forest. It was a difficult shoot, as Michelle Yeoh, a female lead, broke her knee in the first fight sequence and had to be sidelined for three months out of the five-month shoot. Also, during filming, the cast and crew experienced difficulties like poor weather (in the driest place on earth—the Gobi Desert—it rained for days) and freezing cold. The film cost US$12 million to make, a record-breaking cost for a Chinese film; Lee contributed his own salary to get the film finished. The film, advertised in a trailer that did not include spoken dialogue so that audiences would not necessarily be aware that it was a subtitled film in Mandarin, became an international sensation. However, it did not win the Oscar for Best Film in 2001 (as noted, this award went to Gladiator—another film evoking the culture of a remote time and place; critics have even noted the similarity between the astonishing replica of old Beijing, with its warren of alleyways, and Gladiator’s computer-enhanced evocation of ancient Rome).
Lee turned his attention to his next project, the big-budget film Hulk (US$150 million), with jubilant enthusiasm, joking that it was “my next ‘Green Destiny,’” a reference to the name of the sword in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.38 The film signaled a crossover for Lee to the domain of American pop culture connected with Marvel Comics, animated movies, and various television series. Little did he know that he would soon be caught in the morass of script difficulties—he and James Schamus wanted to emphasize the Greek tragedy in the plot while Universal Studios insisted on a “whammo” (a car chase or an explosion, according to producer Joel Silver) every ten pages.39 These competing interests in the screenplay led to a narrative, tone, and pacing that was neither big-budget blockbuster nor small-budget art-house, but an awkward combination of the two. Computer-generated imaging (CGI) problems (for creating a realistic-looking Hulk) would cause the budget to spiral out of control. Depressingly capitalistic marketing ploys (including 150 items with the Hulk logo, from garbage bags to skateboards) added to the enormity of the problem: “They’re marketing everything that’s green.”40 Hulk was an artistic and financial disaster, and for Lee, an emotional ordeal as well. After two years of work on the film, longer than any other he had worked on previously, he saw the film become his first major public failure.
Humility and Grace
Time media critic Jim Poniewozik was quoted in 2001: “Lee is able to remake his style for each movie to suit the narrative needs of that movie. In a way, he kind of suppresses his own individuality. There’s a certain humility to the way that he directs them … to serve the greater interests of what the movie needs to be.”41
Lee has a tremendous humility, in that he seems to disappear into his films with no brash directorial presence.42 He has a gentle touch with his art, which has led film critics to make “chameleon-like” a common phrase used to describe his style. It is true that his films have been amazingly diverse, each requiring an enormous amount of strenuous preparation and labor. He has ruled over the sets of Civil War America—he staged realistically-mounted battles with hundreds of extras for Ride with the Devil. He has wrangled many sheep for Brokeback Mountain.43 He has filmed in the poorly-lit conditions of British Heritage–protected mansions for Sense and Sensibility. He faced adverse weather conditions in China filming Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—and also possible censorship from the Chinese government, which was concerned his film might have “anti-authoritarian” elements. He worked in New Canaan, Connecticut, despite the town’s protests during The Ice Storm: when residents read Rick Moody’s novel and found out the controversial subject matter in the film, many withdrew sites which had been promised for filming. He introduced wuxia (martial arts) movies to the Western mainstream and set a new standard for this genre that was followed by other Chinese directors such as Zhang Yimou.
Although Lee projects a soft-spoken air of self-effacement, it can sometimes be forgotten that he has been responsible for bringing out some of the finest performances from the earliest days in the careers of Zhang Ziyi, Kate Winslet, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Elijah Wood, and a very young Katie Holmes, and has worked with all the giants of Asian film, Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh (a Bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies, 1997), Tony Leung, and Joan Chen, as well as Tan Dun and Yo-Yo Ma, some of the greatest living Asian actors and musicians. He has brought some of the best performances out of some of the greatest British and American actors, including Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant, Hugh Laurie, Gemma Jones, Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Connelly, and Anne Hathaway, and encouraged astounding turns from the young Tobey Maguire and Christina Ricci. He has a particular talent for bringing the best work out of his younger actors; for Brokeback Mountain, his three principal leads, Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Michelle Williams, were nominated for a range of acting awards. His influence has included meeting Prince Charles (in 1996, following the popular reception of Sense and Sensibility), as well as having the president of Taiwan, Chen Shui-bian, visit him at home (at the same time visiting Lee’s father Lee Sheng, his former school principal). In Tainan after the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lee was stunned and deeply moved to be mobbed in the street by fans in his hometown.
In May 2001, Lee was awarded an honorary doctorate from NYU which thrilled him, and above all, thrilled his father. The son that had once brought academic shame now had a Ph.D.
Making History: The Academy Award for Best Direction
When the Academy Awards were broadcast at 9:00 a.m. on March 6, 2006, millions of people in Taiwan sat transfixed around television screens throughout the island. The question of whether the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would give the Best Director award to Ang Lee was a topic of discussion nationwide prior to the broadcast. It had been in the headlines of the newspapers for several weeks. When Lee’s name was read as the winner of the Best Director award in the Academy Awards live ceremony, a collective cry went out in public places throughout Taipei City. Lynn Lin, an executive at a Taiwanese engineering firm, who was watching the live news coverage of the Academy Awards at a local restaurant that morning, said “My colleagues and I don’t usually follow the news, but their eyes were glued to the screen of the television in the restaurant and everybody who was watching the broadcast cried out when they heard [Ang Lee had won].”44
When Lee, in the auditorium, heard his name read as the winner of the Best Director Academy Award, he stood up and hugged Jane Lin—the wife who had faithfully supported him and never given up on his dreams—seated beside him. As he made his way to the stage, he gave actor Jake Gyllenhaal a half-embrace, no doubt confident that everyone in the film would soon be honored by a Best Picture win. Arriving at the podium, he said softly, “I wish I knew how to quit you.” The audience waited uncertainly; then Ang Lee laughed, to signal the joke. Still, the meaning was obscure; did he mean that he didn’t want to compete for Academy Awards anymore, or that he wanted to quit moviemaking?
He continued his speech: “I want to thank two people who don’t even exist. … Their names are Ennis and Jack, and they taught all of us who made Brokeback Mountain so much about not just the gay men and women whose love is denied by society, but just as important, the greatness of love itself.” He praised the artistry of Annie Proulx (writer of the original short story), and screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. In the audience, Diana Ossana had begun to cry; in a gallant display of old-world charm, Larry McMurtry offered her his handkerchief. “Thank you members of the Academy, for this great honor,” Lee continued. He thanked everyone at Focus Features, including David Linde and James Schamus. He thanked his wife Jane and his boys Haan and Mason by name, saying, “I love you. On Brokeback, I felt you with me every day.” Jane beamed at her husband. “I just did this movie after my father passed away. More than any other, I made this for him.”
In his acceptance speech, Lee made a point of sharing the honor with the Chinese people around the world, regardless of their country of origin: “And finally to my mother and family and everybody in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China.” In making this statement, he invoked the transnational identity shared by the people of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China; similarly, he was recognizing his position in a Chinese filmmaking tradition without national boundaries or borders. In addition, following the growing trend at the increasingly multicultural and multilingual Academy Awards, he spoke in Mandarin at the end of his speech, saying “Xiexie dajia de guanxin,” which means “Thank you for caring.”
In Taipei that morning the euphoria could be felt in the streets, in convenience stores, in restaurants, in parks; even the taxi drivers grinned widely and said, “I’m so happy to hear the great news about Ang Lee.” Asia celebrated with great pride and joy.45 Newspapers praised his win for days, calling him, “The Glory of Asia.”
Brokeback Mountain—After the Academy Awards
The peace on Lee’s face as he won the Academy Award for Best Director belied the controversy that had surrounded Brokeback Mountain both prior to and following the awards ceremony. Immediately following the Best Director win, Brokeback Mountain went on to lose to Crash (2004) for Best Picture of 2005. It was a startling upset—Brokeback Mountain had been heavily favored to win—so unexpected that even the Crash producers were visibly caught by surprise (demonstrated by their stunned appearance and seemingly unrehearsed acceptance speech). Brokeback Mountain’s loss stirred up a new wave of controversy almost immediately. For example, after the ceremony, just minutes after Lee won his Best Director award, reporters in the postshow interviews bombarded him with questions about whether Brokeback Mountain’s loss was a snub against homosexuals. It was a familiar topic—James Schamus and Ang Lee, as well as the principal actors, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, had continually dealt with the homosexuality controversy since the film had been released. In this case, without taking the reporters’ bait, Lee replied with utter grace: “You’re asking me a question and I don’t know the answer … Congratulations to the Crash filmmakers.”46
When Brokeback Mountain lost as Best Film in 2006, critics of the Academy’s decision were up in arms. For example, Annie Proulx wrote a sour-grapes rant for The Guardian in Britain, accusing the Academy of homophobia and caustically skewering the entertainment industry of Los Angeles, which kept the Brokeback Mountain controversy going on into its second week.47 CNN picked up the story “‘Brokeback’ author: We Were Robbed,” in which Proulx described Academy voters as “living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city.”48 Even Lee’s own brother, Khan Lee, who runs a Taiwan-based company in television production and film distribution, weighed in with the claim that America “kept the top award at home” for reasons of “nationalism.” This charge of not giving the top award of Best Film to an Asian-directed movie was made under the premise that the award, if given to Lee’s film, would be perceived as going “abroad” to Asia, rather than being given to the all-American, LA-produced Crash. This theory seems far-fetched, however, because of the thrust of the film’s narrative—what could be more American than a story about two cowboys? If the film had won Best Picture, it surely would not have been viewed as a distinctly “Asian” victory.
In addition to these arguments, the film continued to be caught between the agendas of gay advocacy groups and American conservatives. Gay activists praised the cultural breakthrough represented by Brokeback Mountain, which they described as “frankly gay love in a mainstream movie starring A-list actors”49—conveniently omitting the fact that Heath Ledger, Michelle Williams, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Anne Hathaway were not A-list when they were cast. Meanwhile, conservatives actively condemned the film. In a particularly biting polemic, Stephen D. Greydanus, film reviewer for the online Decent Films Guide, said that Brokeback Mountain “may be the most profoundly anti-Western film ever made, not only post-modern and post-heroic, but post-Christian and post-human.”50 Conservatives accused Lee of making a “gay western Wuthering Heights,”51 and claimed that liberal media and critics were using Brokeback Mountain as an excuse to “shove the gay agenda down people’s throats.”52 The 78th Academy Awards ceremony was labeled “the year of the gay agenda”53 because the top two contenders for the Best Actor award were both actors playing homosexuals: Brokeback Mountain’s Heath Ledger was in a very close contest with Philip Seymour Hoffman (star of the biopic Capote, 2005) for Best Actor.
In addition to the ongoing polemical debate, Brokeback Mountain continued to face censorship, not only in the U.S., where it was banned by towns in several states including Washington and Utah, but in countries abroad as well. On the eve of its scheduled opening, the Bahamian government’s Plays and Films Control Board banned the showing of Brokeback Mountain, sparking off protests by gay activists, free-speech advocates, and theater owners in the Caribbean country. Chavasse Turnquest-Liriano, liaison officer for the control board, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “The board chose to ban it because it shows extreme homosexuality, nudity and profanity, and we feel that it has no value for the Bahamian public.”54 Brokeback Mountain was also completely banned in China (where, until 2002, homosexuality was considered a mental illness), and in Turkey the film was given a strict rating limiting its audience to viewers over 18.
To add to Brokeback Mountain’s woes, another attack came from the inside: actor Randy Quaid, who had played the fairly minor role of Joe Aguirre in the film, sued Focus Features and Brokeback Mountain’s producers James Schamus and David Linde, claiming he had been tricked into taking a low salary for the film. At the end of March 2006, Randy Quaid filed a $10 million lawsuit against the producers, claiming they misled him into believing that the film was “a low-budget art-house film with no prospect of making any money” so that he would sign on for a nominal sum. Quaid said he agreed to “donate” his performance rather than request his customary seven-figure fee plus a percentage of the box office gross, because the filmmakers convinced him it was a low-budget picture with no commercial potential. Quaid said in the lawsuit that he originally was approached in 2004 by Ang Lee, who told him, “We have very little money; everyone is making a sacrifice to make this film.” The film then went on to become a box office hit, grossing around US$160 million worldwide. Quaid charged in the lawsuit that he was the victim of a deliberate, preplanned “movie laundering scheme” intended to obtain his services as an actor in Brokeback Mountain “on economically unfavorable art-film terms.”55
This is an ungrounded charge, since the film’s makers historically faced repeated obstacles in raising backing for the screenplay, the rights to which were purchased by the screenwriters themselves. All producers considered the film a risk; screenwriter Diana Ossana became one of the producers herself. Having finally received tentative backing, the small group consisting of screenwriters Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, along with James Schamus and Ang Lee, set out to make a small film that no one else had dared to make for eight years previously—they clearly were not expecting the film to be a financial success. Diana Ossana, in an essay entitled “Climbing Brokeback Mountain” published before the charge was brought, confirmed that “Brokeback Mountain was filmed on a tight, modest budget.”56 She even relates how her family and friends pitched in to help with details around the set. In addition, Lee has said this film is the first he had made with such a small budget since making Eat Drink Man Woman in 1994. No one expected the film to make any money. The lawsuit was finally dropped in May 2006, with Quaid claiming to have been paid a bonus, and Focus Features denying any settlement had been made.
Despite the Academy Award loss to Crash for Best Film, Brokeback Mountain was still a record-breaking film and an international phenomenon. During the awards’ season leading up to the Academy Awards in early March, the film became one of the most honored movies in cinematic history. The list of the awards won by the film is long; it had more Best Picture and Director wins than previous Academy Award–winners Schindler’s List (1993) and Titanic (1997) combined. Just to name a few, it won various awards at the Golden Globes, the British Academy (BAFTA), the Producers, Directors, and Screen Actors Guilds, the Writers Guild of America, the NY Film Critic’s Circle, the LA Film Critics Association, the National Board of Review, and the Film Independent Spirit Awards. In addition, indicative of its cultural importance, Brokeback Mountain may ultimately be remembered for its parodies—one of the clues that the film truly penetrated the national consciousness and left a lasting legacy. The parodies include countless late-night television skits, over 150 YouTube videos satirizing the trailer and film which have been uploaded by viewers in an irrepressible online homage, and a fake Marlboro advertisement with two cowboys saying to their cigarettes “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Host of the ceremony, political wit Jon Stewart, added his voice to the mix when he said: “Not all gay people are virile cowboys. Some are actually effete New York intellectuals.”57
Indeed, there has been an explosion of scholarship on Brokeback Mountain in academic circles, and the cultural impact of this film, nine years after its release date, has yet to be fully measured. Two full-length volumes of scholarly essays have appeared thus far. The first, Jim Stacy’s Reading Brokeback Mountain: Essays on the Story and the Film (2007), is a collection of fifteen critical essays and a selected bibliography of nearly 130 scholarly sources on the film compiled from various disciplines, including literature, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and popular culture. The second, The Brokeback Book: From Story to Cultural Phenomenon (2011), is an eclectic collection of both scholarly and personal essays edited by William R. Handley, in which the contributors situate Brokeback Mountain in relation to gay civil rights, the cinematic and literary western, the Chinese value of forbearance, male melodrama, and urban and rural working lives across generations and genders. Unquestionably, few films have inspired as much passion and debate—or produced as many contradictory responses—as writers, journalists, scholars, and ordinary viewers continue to explore the film’s ongoing cultural and political significance.58
After Brokeback: Lust/Caution and Taking Woodstock
After his astonishingly diverse forays into English-language film with Hulk and Brokeback Mountain, Lee returned to Chinese-language cinema with the film Lust/Caution, based on a 26-page short story by noted twentieth-century Chinese author Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920–1995). Set in Shanghai’s golden period between the 1930s and 1940s, the story focuses on a young secret agent who tries to seduce and assassinate a pro-Japanese collaborator working for the Wang Jingwei government, a puppet government set up during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai during World War II. The film is shot in a film noir style appropriate to the time period it portrays, representing Ang Lee’s first experimentation with the genre of film noir and espionage-thriller.
Previously, Ang Lee purchased rights to the Eileen Chang short story “Lust, Caution,” which is relatively unknown in the West. Coincidentally, the publisher New York Review Books, teamed with well-known American translator Karen Kingsbury, brought out a translation of Chang’s works entitled Love in a Fallen City in October 2006. Eileen Chang, who has been listed alongside Chekhov, Hawthorne, Balzac, Auden, and Colette, is already renowned in China for her prolific essays, short stories, and novellas which reflect her experience growing up in a wealthy but dysfunctional family. As a young woman in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, she was able to publish the stories and essays (collected in two volumes, Romances, 1944, and Written on Water, 1945) that quickly established her as a literary phenomenon. The rise of Communist influence made it increasingly difficult for Chang to continue living in Shanghai; she moved to Hong Kong in 1952, then immigrated to the United States three years later. She never returned to China for the rest of her long life. Eileen Chang is a famously rich and complex stylist who is now considered one of the greatest Chinese authors of the twentieth century. According to Kingsbury:
“Lust, Caution” is a rather unusual story within Chang’s oeuvre, because it’s indebted to Cold War spy fiction and the Hollywood tradition of the action-suspense thriller. … Chang’s early-period storytelling takes place at the intersections of late-Qing and early modern cultures. Her story “Lust, Caution” crossed those earlier divides. It’s more entirely, less ambiguously modern.59
Eileen Chang’s work has attracted other directors in the past; two well-known film versions of her stories are Red Rose White Rose (Hong meigui, bai meigui, 1994) and Love in a Fallen City (Qing cheng zhi lian, 1987). However, these films have never garnered much attention outside of Asia. While Lee’s Lust/Caution seemed a timely opportunity to give Eileen Chang’s brilliant fiction a greater audience beyond Asian borders, the unexpected result was that the film instead touched off a major controversy in China about patriotism (by contrast the film was revered in Taiwan and Hong Kong), and the main actress, Tang Wei, was excoriated for her anti-patriotic actions in the film and banned from the film industry (she was finally allowed to make a film again in late 2010). Since Lee had weathered the now-historic controversy over Brokeback Mountain, it was a shock to once again be at the center of a maelstrom over another one of his films.
Not surprisingly, following the challenging experiences of making Brokeback Mountain and Lust/Caution, Lee pointedly stated that after making a series of brutally emotional films, he needed to choose a ligher topic. Taking Woodstock is Ang Lee’s “happiest” film, a film that meditates on the meaning of nostalgia and transformation. Lee has said he wanted to make a film that “bookends” with his bleak view of the 1973 aftermath of 1960s excess—this is the prequel to The Ice Storm. Taking Woodstock tells the story of a Greenwich Village artist, Elliot Tiber, who inadvertently helps to spark a cultural revolution by offering the organizers of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival a venue at his family’s Catskills motel. Emboldened by the burgeoning gay rights movement yet still tied to tradition in the form of the family motel business, Tiber steps in to help after Woodstock Ventures loses its permit from the nearby town of Wallkill, New York. The venue is switched to Max Yasgur’s adjacent farm near White Lake, which becomes the center of the counterculture celebration that would ultimately be remembered as one of the greatest events in the annals of rock and roll history. Lee wanted to capture the innocence of the time, a time of naïve hope and spirit, absent of political cynicism. Producer and screenwriter James Schamus has attributed the film’s relatively tepid reception to the fact that the movie did not attempt to restage any of the musical performances of the Woodstock concert itself, and he added humorously that when people see an Ang Lee film, they want to be “sublimely depressed.”60 The film also became known as Lee’s third foray into the topic of homosexuality as Stephen Holden has stated “the movie explicitly connects Woodstock to the gay-liberation movement,” although as Holden admits “[it is] a relationship that is made much more emphatically in Mr. Tiber’s memoir.”61
The Second Academy Award for Best Director: Life of Pi
Seven years after winning the Academy award for Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee found his film Life of Pi nominated for an astonishing eleven Academy Awards. This had not seemed likely at the beginning of the filmmaking process. Life of Pi was a huge gamble for Lee and Fox 2000, with a budget of over US$100 million, and another US$25 million for the 3D alone. Lee has said in interviews that he was motivated to do the impossible: to make a film out of a novel that was unfilmable. In Life of Pi, Lee took on an entirely new technology and revolutionized the field—again. Lee has said: “I wouldn’t have been able to do this without doing Hulk”62—referring to the fact that he was again a pioneer in a new cinematic language (3D), the language of the future of technological development in film that was just in its beginning stages (as CGI was when Lee made Hulk):
It was really intimidating, more so than Hulk I believe … [I knew it would] be just as expensive and with technology that’s unknown to me and I didn’t know if it would work or not. … Rolling such a big dice and not really knowing whether it would work or not in the mainstream, it was pretty scary.63
Some of the challenges Lee faced were framing the story, a first-person narrative, as a third-person narrative, which he solved by using the framework of the story told by Pi to the Canadian writer, and the challenges of the “fantastic” or nonrational elements of the story:
The book provides you a grand illusion and it defends it. It’s very hard to do in movies so I thought of a narrator that has a first-person sort of feeling but also a third-person perspective. So I thought that it could be the older Pi telling the writer his story. That was a break for me. Then I thought if I do it in 3D, maybe people will be more open to something new (chuckles).64
The filming of Life of Pi began with a two-week shoot in India in March 2011. After ten days in Pondicherry, where the story opens, Lee moved the crew to Munnar, a small town in the hills of South India. He also shot for several months in Taiwan, in a huge water tank created in an airport hangar in Taichung, where Lee designed a pool for the film’s ocean scenes nearly on the scale of Titanic (1997). He also faced the practical concerns of finding a 16-year-old boy actor to star in the film: Suraj Sharma’s final monologue involving violence, murder, and cannibalism was an extremely challenging piece of acting for an untrained actor, reminiscent of the performances Lee pulled out of his young cast in The Ice Storm. In addition, Lee spent an entire year on the editing process alone, seamlessly weaving the tiger from both a real one and a digital creation.
Lee’s efforts paid off—again. When he was called to the stage for the Best Director Academy Award in 2013 for Life of Pi, the entire audience rose to their feet in a standing ovation. Lee bowed deeply before them, with typical modesty, before beginning his speech. During his acceptance speech, Lee first thanked the “movie god,” then author Yann Martel for “writing this incredible, inspiring book” and then the 3,000 people who worked on Life of Pi with him, including crews from India, Canada, and Taiwan. He gave special thanks to Taiwan, where over 90 percent of the film was made. “I [could not] make this movie without the help of Taiwan,” Lee said in his speech. “I want to thank everybody there [who] helped us, especially the city of Taichung.” He thanked the audience, saying, “Thank you [for] believing this story and sharing this incredible journey with me.” Poignantly, along with his family in Taiwan and his sons, Lee thanked his wife Jane Lin in his speech, saying, “We will have been married thirty years this summer. I love you.” For those familiar with the history of support Lin offered her husband at the beginning of his career to achieve his dreams, this was very touching, indeed. Lee concluded his speech with a salutation in Hindi: “Namaste.”
Following the ceremony, Ma Ying-jeou, the president of Taiwan, sent a telegram to congratulate Lee, and Jason Hu, mayor of Taichung, pledged to award him an honorary citizen’s medal from the municipal authorities of Taichung, and thanked Lee for bringing more recognition to Taiwan by making his film there. Lee won Best Director for Life of Pi over the highly-favored Steven Spielberg for Lincoln (he had also won over Spielberg, up for Munich, in 2006). Interestingly, just as Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash in the same circumstances seven years before, Life of Pi did not win Best Picture; that award went to Ben Affleck’s Iran hostage-crisis drama Argo.
Conclusion: Security/Insecurity
Taiwan has produced an “autobiography” of Ang Lee in Chinese, entitled “A Ten-year Dream of Cinema.” This book, edited by Zhang Jingpei in 2002, was put together from interview notes and written as a first-person account. By Zhang’s indication, Lee does not like to sit for interviews and rarely grants them, suggesting instead that “If you want to understand me, it’s all in my films.”65 John Lahr echoes this in his interview where Lee describes himself as “lacklustre” in real life, a man who only comes to life when working. “I don’t have a hobby,” he says, “I don’t have a life.”66 Ang Lee thus asserts that he cannot be fully known or understood apart from his films—that the films he has made are the most articulate record of who he is and what his motivations are.
His films have always been full of risk, both topically and stylistically. His willingness to walk the line between the known and the unknown, and his humility in making his art with a seeming detachment from the outcome, is what makes his work so extraordinary. A quotation from Lee sums up the Taoist-inflected thought behind his filmmaking:
Nothing stands still. That’s important in my movies. People want to believe in something, want to hang on to something to get security and want to trust each other. But things change. Given enough time, nothing stands still. I think seeking for security and lack of security is another [important theme] in my movies.67
The singlemost remarkable aspect of Lee’s career—besides its success—is that it almost never started. It now seems nearly incomprehensible that the world-famous director did not make his first feature-length film—basically did not begin his career—until the age of 37. It is even more astonishing to consider that from the age of 31 to 37, while living in New York, he could not find work. Six years is a long time to hold on to a dream of filmmaking, especially when all evidence points to its impossibility: Lee’s wife was supporting the family financially, his father had given up hope on his eldest son’s future, and Lee was already in his thirties, growing older and older, without any prospects or hopeful signs. It is interesting to think about Lee at the age of 37, just before his luck changed—his life going nowhere, shuttling back and forth from New York to California chasing endless possibilities, with dozens of half-written or fully-completed screenplays that no one in America would produce. The turnaround had yet to come for this quiet man with a foreign accent who could not find anyone in Hollywood to take him seriously.
Despite the apparent hopelessness of these early days, when things changed, they changed dramatically. Although Lee got his foot in the door when he won the Taiwan government’s contest to make his first movie, Pushing Hands, his international career did not truly begin until The Wedding Banquet, when he won the top prize in the Berlin International Film Festival and realized his life would never be the same again. After Sense and Sensibility, Lee’s work was praised but almost no one knew his name (and those who saw his movies thought they must have been directed by a woman). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon made his name recognizable on a wide scale for the first time, and finally he achieved world renown with the Best Director win for Brokeback Mountain. Thus, from the age of 37 to the age of 51, the director emerged from humiliating obscurity, rejection, and failure, to become the most celebrated Asian filmmaker in history.
Ang Lee’s example is one of tenacity and sheer determination; he made almost a film a year for the first six years of his career: 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1997. He is a director who dared to imagine the impossible; even while making Pushing Hands on a shoestring budget in 1991 he was dreaming of making a martial arts epic that would redefine the genre. He is a director who is not afraid of failing; he had already failed so often and so completely that he was more able to take risks—like making Brokeback Mountain. He is a director unafraid of the powerful emotions evoked by volatile periods in history—Watergate, the Vietnam War, the American Civil War, World War II China—unafraid of the power of a personal narrative despite its political implications—Brokeback Mountain, The Wedding Banquet—and unafraid to tamper with the time-honored traditional filming of a British classic—Sense and Sensibility. His fearlessness has even led him to risk failure on a spectacular level—for example, with the artistically visionary but commercially disastrous Hulk. The extravagance of Lee’s success and failure comes from his being already inured to failure—he had nothing left to lose.
Lee summed up his directing experience in a New York Times interview in 2012:
My ideas and not me are at the center of attention. A movie seems to have a life of its own. You don’t create it, you initiate it because you get a call. It’s not about dictatorship. You have to be humble, you have to be tender, communicate sensitively, admit your shortcomings, share your dreams and allow them to be told.68
Ang Lee’s films are noted for their widely divergent genres and unpredictable subject matter. However, Lee’s films share a single thread: his own unique vision; his own dreams. While his films may appear dissimilar to viewers, they are all simply a part of Lee’s own imaginative world, a world that he inhabits. Lee lives inside his films, where they are all part of the same world—his own.