PAST MASTER

Taiwan’s most famous director reveals how a
mid-life crisis allowed him to take his
film-making to new heights

By Ed Lawrenson

There is a scene in Ang Lee’s latest thriller, Lust, Caution, that sums up the director’s feelings about the Chinese. The movie’s main protagonist, Wong Chia Chi, rides through Hong Kong on a tram with her fellow student actors, elated after making a show-stopping stage debut, but too genuinely modest to discuss it. “That is a classic scene,” says Lee “because it means something to me and to the character and to the Chinese people. It sounds silly, but if people don’t see Chinese people being shy, then they will forget that’s how they used to be. We are not shy anymore and in 10 years that shyness won’t exist, even in memory.”

This desire to preserve almost forgotten parts of China’s past is what drove him to make Lust, Caution. Set in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the film traces the story of a young student actress drawn into a plot to seduce and assassinate a high-ranking member of Wang Jingwei’s puppet government.

“If I didn’t make this movie, then nobody would have,” says Lee. “The old people will die, my parent’s generation will be gone and nobody will remember the collaboration, the repression, the shame. Western people, non-Chinese people might not get it, but I feel the urge to save something on celluloid before it slips through our fingers, into oblivion.”

Lust, Caution breaks new ground for Lee in the explicit sex scenes between Hong Kong actor Tony Leung and Chinese newcomer Wei Tang. The film follows their relationship, culminating in no-holds-barred treatment of their encounters in the bedroom that earned the film a NC-17 certificate in the US and some majors edits in Mainland China. As a man who has described himself as “repressed”, Lee made life difficult for himself in choosing to adapt Lust, Caution. “To make a movie like this, you have to let that repression out,” he says. “It is very painful and I wouldn’t want to do it again, but you always have to find something new if you’re honest. You have to find another level of fear for it to feel real. Otherwise you are sort of faking it, like faking an orgasm, ha ha, which is kinda boring.” Lee says that his more uninhibited approach grew out of a mid-life crisis. “I finally had to admit that I’m not young anymore and lust was one of the things I had to face up to by not being too shy to deal with it.” It’s a revealing remark in that although Lee’s films may be epic, they have an emotional directness that has always been evident in his work. His second film, The Wedding Banquet, explored the tension between Taiwanese and Western traditions that the young Lee must have felt on relocating to the US back in 1975: a touching family comedy that revolved around a New York-based Taiwanese gay man who pretends to have a wife to throw his conservative parents off the scent.

It was his follow-up film, the 1993 comedy Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, that marked Lee’s first big success. It was a tale of a widowed chef in Taipei and his relationship with his three daughters, featuring mouth-watering sequences of the dishes he serves up for them. it was perhaps inevitable Lee would get the call to leave Taiwan and work overseas. However, it wasn’t Hollywood that knocked on his door but English actress Emma Thompson. Having recognised in his Taiwanese work Lee’s shrewd observation of family ritual, she asked him to direct her screenplay of Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s novel of two sisters yearning for love. Bringing an outsider’s eye to Regency England, Lee was unfazed by the unfamiliar setting and directed what is the freshest Austen adaptation in recent years. Enticing terrific performances from a cast including Thompson and Alan Rickman, he also established a reputation as a brilliant director of English-speaking actors. Soft-spoken in interviews, Lee is nonetheless a tough taskmaster with his actors; Sense and Sensibility actor Hugh Grant called him “The Brute” for his directorial methods.

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing for Lee. Despite huge successes with the likes of Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, his one attempt at a Hollywood blockbuster, The Hulk, was such a flop that Lee considered retiring. “Physically, it was such a big endeavour that my body was protesting. I had problems sleeping. Then the distribution of that film really hurt me. And the negative comments did, too. I thought of retiring. I am proud of The Hulk and love film-making but I didn’t think I could take any more.”

He chose to make Brokeback Mountain, the story of gay love affair between a ranch hand and a cowboy, as a way to end his career “on a benign note”. Small and under-hyped, the movie was the opposite of The Hulk behemoth. “it was a story about love and on set you could feel it. When we finished, i thought it would be OK if this was my last film. How wrong was I?”

Wrong indeed. Brokeback Mountain won him an Oscar and “rescued” his career. The fact that Lee’s crowning directorial moment was a gay cowboy film is typical of the way he takes themes such as love or loss and applies them to any situation. With Lee it’s all about the story, which when told with such artistry is ultimately universal. Long may he keep telling them.