The Peak of Brokeback Mountain-- Ang Lee

Before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released its lists of nominees, the New York Times gave an analysis of the traditional Oscar winner. It said that "tear-jerkers, soap operas and feel-good films end up overtaking serious, substantial contenders," singling out the triumph of the "gushy" Forrest Gump over the "socially conscious" Quiz Show. But this year, Brokeback Mountain might break down the barrier that separates the Academy Awards from other American film awards chosen by critics.

The NYT article says Lee "displays an amazing feel for the texture of places--Wyoming and Texas are remarkably vivid--and for the nuances of relationships. But that doesn't quite account for this year's honors.... Brokeback is a perfect chameleon movie, unusual enough to seem brave yet safe enough for staid old academy voters, too."

Upon returning to Taiwan with a Golden Globe, Lee received a warm reception. Everyone's hoping his lucky streak will continue through March, when the Academy Awards are held.

Cut to Taiwan. Who could not be charmed by the refined, avuncular Ang Lee? Early this year, after winning four Golden Globes including Best Picture and Best Director, Lee made a three-day promotional trip to Taiwan. He rushed from appearance to appearance. Though he was exhausted and could barely keep his tearing eyes open amid the flash of the media's cameras, he still captivated the crowd as always.

Lee grew up in Taiwan, and went to America to study and make films. He's been based there for more than a decade now, but he still holds an ROC passport and considers himself a Taiwanese director. No matter how busy he is, he always returns to attend Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards. His friends worry about him--Taiwan only accounts for 1.7% of the film market outside America. It's too small to bother with doing promotion in, but Lee is generous enough to make the trip back and share his experience in filmmaking. You can see his love of Taiwan.

"Even if Taiwan's box office is too small to worry about, that's all right," says Lee. Taiwan always provides him with resources for growth. There's a kind of warmth here, and the goodness of the people is rare in the world. There may be political and social conflicts from time to time, but the people's character has never been lost or warped.

He contrasts the support he receives in Taiwan with the experience of actors such as Zhang Ziyi, who was harshly criticized in her native China for playing a Japanese in Memoirs of a Geisha. "But when I return to Taiwan, everyone tells me I am the pride of Taiwan and Chinese people. When I said 'Happy New Year' in Chinese during the international ceremony, Chinese-language journalists were almost moved to tears." He always meets Taiwan's open-arms welcome with even more warmth.

Taiwanese audiences are familiar with the rise of Ang Lee's career. After graduating from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1984, he had no film work so he stayed at home with his children, cooking and struggling with his screenplays. He kept quiet like this for six years.

In 1990, his screenplay Pushing Hands won a grant from the Government Information Office and became his first film, made by the Central Motion Picture Corporation. In 1993, his popular comedy The Wedding Banquet, about a gay man's sham marriage, unexpectedly won a Golden Bear award for Best Picture at the Berlin Film Festival, and the next year it was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Language category--a first for a Taiwanese film. The Wedding Banquet was made with a budget of just US$750,000, but took in US$32 million in box office receipts from around the world. It was the world's most profitable film that year.

In 1995, Lee signed a contract with Columbia Pictures and went to Hollywood to direct a film based on Sense and Sensibility, the Jane Austen novel set in 18th-century England. That film also won a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

After the disappointing performance of his American Civil War epic Ride with the Devil, Lee made the Chinese-language martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000. It was a box-office smash around the world, and in 2001 it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture. Art director Tim Yip, cinematographer Peter Pau, and composer Tan Dun also won Oscars for their work on the film. It was a huge breakthrough for a Chinese-language film, and the first time in the history of the Academy Awards that a foreign language film performed so well. It was a true milestone in Ang Lee's career.

Lee's life story of struggle to success is motivation for all who feel they are not living to their full potential. But many wonder how this mild-mannered, proper man can make such a broad range of films, with subject matter reaching from England to China, modern times to ancient, action to drama.

On this trip back to Taiwan, Lee met with Jan Hung-tze, the CEO of the Internet company PCHome, to discuss his life in the film industry. Jan remarked that Lee had the ability to bring his audience into a believable world--in Sense and Sensibility, it was pre-Victorian England, and in Brokeback Mountain, it was the American West of the cowboys. How is it, Jan asked, that Lee is able to act as a gateway to these worlds that are so foreign to Asians?

In his Chinese-language autobiography A Decade in Film, Lee says that when he received the script for Sense and Sensibility, he thought to himself, "Are these people nuts?" He had no idea why they would ask him to direct this film. Though Hollywood often "borrows" talent from abroad, never before had it gone so far as to hire an Asian director to make a period piece set in 18th-century Britain.

By the time he'd read halfway through the script, though, he got it--his last three Chinese-language films had all had themes of struggle between "sense" and "sensibility." These two, he thought, were the unwritten common elements of Eastern and Western cultures, and in a flash he grasped the essence of Jane Austen's novel.

Opportunity only presents itself to the prepared, and Ang Lee was ready to take on the task. However, it was his first time working with big international stars like Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant, and he couldn't help but be apprehensive. The shooting was a tense experience for him, and he encountered many difficulties.

Lee says that while filming Sense and Sensibility, he was often brushed off--"How can this guy direct? He can't even speak English properly," some of the film crew would think. But perhaps his laissez-faire approach and the actors' toughness were factors in the dramatic success of the film.

The film was shot on location in England. The surroundings were agreeable, but the pressure was too great for Lee. When he gave directions on set, not all of the actors would listen to him. After they'd wrap for the day, Lee would keep his distance from the actors. He is shy by nature and feels uncomfortable in social settings. Thinking he wouldn't know what to say, he never joined the cast for meals. He'd just munch on dry cereal, giving himself stomach problems.

Lee says he often breaks the rules, and looks for new ways out of cultural habits. There is no great secret to this: With passion, willingness to study, a bit of brains, and the right actors, any director can be successful.

Perhaps it's because he's back home, but while talking with Jan, Lee is willing to show his confidence. "To be frank," he says, "I'm just very good at filmmaking. I was born to do this work. Westerners often focus on my culture, race, or nationality, provoking my producer James [Schamus] to come out in support of me and say, 'Because he is smarter than you are. He is very good at what he is doing.'" This straightforward talk gets a big laugh and applause from the audience.

Though the Western media often portrays him as a cultural chameleon, Lee himself feels that he isn't so lacking in essential qualities. "As a Taiwanese director, I have to hang on through all the hardships. I have to make sure my greater self can conquer those petty insecurities because I have to bring pride to the group," he says.

Ang Lee's unwillingness to give up allows him to express himself, but he is also able to work with teams of different backgrounds. His gentle toughness is a product of his diverse Taiwanese upbringing and education. His father was born to a large family in Jiangxi, China. After coming to Taiwan, his father was made principal of two highly reputable high schools in Tainan. He had high hopes for Lee, but Lee just wasn't cut out for academics and failed the college entrance exams twice running. Lee says that this is his greatest failure in life.

He then went to America to study, but didn't listen to his father's admonitions to continue all the way to a PhD. He holed up at home and lived off of his wife's earnings. His wife, Lin Huei-chia, had always been a good student. She attended Taipei's prestigious First Girls' High School and National Taiwan University. After obtaining a doctorate at the University of Illinois, she took a position in a microbiology lab. She's highly independent. Lee describes her as "cool"--so cool she sees nothing remarkable in her husband's being a film director.

A reporter asked his wife's reaction to his Golden Globe win.

"As long as she's not scolding me for being too busy to pay attention to my family, it's OK. It's usually tough to get ahold of her--she's always in the lab. We don't have a maid, either--we do all the housework ourselves," Lee says. In the past, he says, she didn't take much of a role in his life. The whole family did attend the Oscars together in 2000, but it wasn't until Brokeback Mountain that she got "excited" about his work. She'd collect reactions to the film from the Internet to show him.

Whether it was his early Chinese-language "Father Trilogy," his Hollywood film Sense and Sensibility about sisterhood, or his dissection of a family in The Ice Storm, core values always revolved around family relations in the films of Ang Lee. It wasn't until the American Civil War picture Riding with the Devil that Lee worked outside his own realm of experience, but perhaps due to the cold subject matter, it was the first of his films to perform below expectations at the box office. He didn't know why American audiences didn't take to the film.

That frustration led him back to the Chinese world and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. While on that film, he felt under great pressure, and it had been a lifelong dream of his to make a kung fu epic. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon challenged the conventions of the traditional Chinese martial arts genre, and though it won him many accolades in the end, the process was tough.

One difficulty was the actors' accents. Hong Konger Chow Yun-fat and the Malaysian-born actress Michelle Yeoh both speak Mandarin with a noticeable Cantonese accent, but Lee didn't want to release separate Cantonese and Mandarin dubbed versions of the film. He also felt that dubbed dialogue doesn't have the same emotional effect as the actors' original, so he decided to have them speak Mandarin anyway. He had the two work with dialogue coaches for five months, but they still had trouble with Mandarin pronunciation. Lee didn't know what to do--at times he felt like strangling the actors and then doing himself in. While shooting on location in Xinjiang, China, the harsh climate also presented difficulties for the cast and crew.

The release of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon after three years of work was the high point of Lee's career. The film was called a Chinese version of The Matrix. The airborne chase scene ending in a battle atop stalks of bamboo brought the martial arts aesthetic to its apex. It was powerful yet graceful as a Chinese landscape painting, and audiences were awed.

Pay attention and you will notice that the Ang Lee films that get so much attention at international film festivals, including Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and most recently Brokeback Mountain, were all adapted from literature. There's an old saying in Hollywood that a director can ruin a book and make a great movie or stay faithful to the book and make a terrible movie--evidence of the sticky situation many directors have when shooting a film based on a novel.

Lee says that actually not all of those original novels were masterpieces. Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm were both written by younger authors whose craft was not yet mature. The late martial arts novelist Wang Dulu was older when he wrote Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but the story was too complicated and only about half of it could be used. The many directors who've tried to adapt the epic martial arts novels of famed author Louis Cha have found themselves in the same situation--they can only choose a handful of characters from the novels and throw away the rest of the story, trying to capture its essence in the parts that move them most. "Only Brokeback Mountain was faithful to the original. It's only 30 pages long, but each word is like a jewel worth taking into account," says Lee.

The film may be faithful to the original story, but traces of Lee's style are evident. There's a scene in which Jack has his in-laws at his house for Thanksgiving, and while watching television, he teaches his son and his father-in-law a lesson--it's a scene many Taiwanese could relate to. Lee left out the opening of the story, in which an elderly Ennis dreams of Jack, who's already passed away. He put in a final scene, in which Ennis hangs the shirts they wore in their youth in the closet together--the double meaning is powerful.

Brokeback Mountain depicts same-sex love, and Ang Lee has said on many occasions, "Everyone has a Brokeback Mountain in the heart." Many could not help but ask if there was a "special someone" deep within Lee's own heart.

In response, Lee jokes that he's already used this line twice before--"In everyone's heart there is a Green Destiny sword," and "In everyone's heart there is a Hulk"--and he won't use it again next time. In his own analysis, Brokeback Mountain is the story of two people in a Garden of Eden free of worries, symbolizing a romantic vision of love. Perhaps they've caught hold of it, but they don't necessarily understand or take possession of it, and in the end they feel the ache of regret.

Brokeback Mountain signified a redemption to Ang Lee. It made him regain his passion for film. After making two big films in a row--Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000 and then Hulk in 2003--Lee was mentally and physically exhausted. Before deciding whether he'd take on the Brokeback Mountain project, he went back to Taiwan with his son to visit his father. In the past, his father had always wanted him to switch careers: "Make movies until you're 50--by then you should be able to win an Oscar. Then you can retire and go teach!" This time back in Taiwan, his father saw how depressed he was and urged him to press on with filmmaking. During the second week of filming, Ang Lee's father passed away.

Lee says, "That's just the way my life has gone. It's been great, and I have been so lucky. Many people work harder than I do and never get to make movies. In all my years of running around making movies, my wife never left me and my kids didn't turn out bad. I still have my friends, Taiwan still cares for me, and I've made film after film. I'm satisfied." With these words he sums up his life before the age of 50. Experience is precious, so he would feel guilty if he kept it to himself. He shares his experience with everyone. Moviegoers will always look forward to the next appearance of Ang Lee.