Cultural transcendence
“It’s easy to film other cultures because you are so far removed from them,” answered Lee. “Lust, Caution was a killer because it pulled up and examined knotty [Chinese] cultural issues. It was an extremely uncomfortable film to make.”
Lee excels at blending Eastern and Western cultures, a skill he attributes to growing up in Taiwan, which has been subject to outside cultural influences for centuries. His childhood here, along with his early love of both Hollywood and Hong Kong movies, made cultural conflicts an integral part of his thought processes.
Lee added that he’s been an outsider living in the midst of cultural conflict all his life, noting that in Taiwan he’s a second-generation waisheng ren (waisheng ren are the mainland Chinese who immigrated to Taiwan after 1945), in the US he’s a foreigner, and in mainland China he’s a “Taiwanese compatriot.”
He also admits to having had to learn much while filming his English-language films. His English still wasn’t very good when he shot Sense and Sensibility. Faced with a cast that included the likes of Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant, his desire to do Taiwan and Asia proud became an almost unbearable burden.
He ended up asking the actors to draw their inspiration from nature, which resulted in wonderful, almost poetic scenes. The film ultimately won a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and was lauded by the British Academy of Film and Television as one of the best examples of an Asian adaptation of Western material in the history of film.
Lee’s success with the film led to a string of movies in the West, culminating in his ninth picture, 2006’s Brokeback Mountain. It was only after the film earned him an Academy Award for best director that he acknowledged his own success and accepted he’d been meant to work in the movie industry.
But on returning to a more familiar cultural sphere in order to take on more difficult challenges, his anxiety returned.
“Lust, Caution touches on something that I was afraid to talk about, a sort of shared historical trauma. Though it didn’t feel right to tell this story, I felt that I had to. The film gave young people an opportunity to experience the atmosphere of those times, one that they wouldn’t otherwise have had.”
Lee has directed a wide variety of films over the course of his 22-year career, from art house to science fiction to martial arts. How does he balance the demands of art and commerce?
A long-term resident of the United States, Lee enjoys New York’s creative environment. The photo was taken in New York following the completion of The Ice Storm.