Ang Lee

QUICK FACTS

• born in Taiwan
• lives in New York
• graduated from the National Taiwan University of Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and New York University
• nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000)
• received Academy Award for Best Director for Brokeback Mountain (2005) along with seven other nominations
• has also won awards at the Berlin Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, British Academy Film Awards, among others
• latest films are Lust, Caution (2007), Taking Woodstock (2009), and Life of Pi (2012)
  

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Ang Lee was born in 1954 to parents who had come to Taiwan after the Communist victory in the Mainland. His father wanted him to become a professor, but Ang failed the the University Entrance Examination and later studied at an arts university in Taiwan. In 1979 he went to the US to study theatre at UIUC and did his MFA at NYU.

While his early short films in college were already winning him some small, prestigious awards and getting him discovered by the Williams Morris Talent Agency, he lived the umemployed artist's life for several years, and his family was supported primarily by his microbiologist wife, Jane Lin. She encouraged him to keep doing his work, and in 1990 he won a government-sponsored screenplay contest in Taiwan.

Those screenplays turned into his first two feature films, Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet, the former being about a Taiwanese family in NY and the latter about a man who immigrates to the US and tries to hide his gay-ness from his Taiwanese parents. The Wedding Banquet, along with with Eat Drink Man Woman (about a family in Taipei) the following year, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at both the Academy Awards and Golden Globes and received various international film awards.

This led to Ang Lee's debut in Hollywood with Sense and Sensibility in 1995, which received 7 Academy Award nominations. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was a collaborative film with Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the US that became an international hit and received 10 Academy nominations, winning 4 of them, including Best Foreign Language Film. It was the first Chinese film to have such huge success and introduced the wuxia genre to the Western world, which paved the way for other Chinese films such as House of Flying Daggers.

Of Crouching Tiger, Ang Lee says, "It's something I've wanted to do since childhood. I had images in my head, growing up" and watching Hong Kong kung fu films. (Another good interview here.)



Ang Lee has not made any wuxia films since CTHD, however. After fail! Hulk in 2003, he drew more critical attention with his independent American-Canadian film based on "Brokeback Mountain, a short story written by Canadian Pulitzer-Prize winner Annie Proulx.

His third film set in China was Lust, Caution, based on the novella by Eileen Chang. Chinese films, he says, he'll go back to after doing an American film or two: ""I always feel the need to come back to my cultural root to re-examine." He likes to go back and forth, as it seems that American films & subject matter refresh him while Chinese projects allow him to take a lot out of him. Here he explains:

"It's a much smaller film industry and also there's not a lot of unions and rules on how things are done. So you get greedy and want everything because it's smaller support, so you have to attend to everything personally to get everything right. You have to train the actors personally. I feel it's my duty to make it right for somebody watching the movie. Also, the experience I draw from is more personal in Chinese. When I'm making an American movie or an English language movie I borrow it and adapt it. It's harder when it's personal."

Tang Wei and Wang Leehom share about Ang Lee and the film in this interview.

His latest movie returns his focus to the United States: Taking Woodstock, based on Elliot Tiber's memoir about the beginnings of the Woodstock Festival. This also happens to be his third film with a gay theme.

After Life of Pi, based on another Canadian novel, he'll probably get his Chinese thing going on again. Wonder what kind of project he will create next!!

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