In The Scene: Ang Lee

By Ellen Cheshire and James Wicks

Ang Lee came to the fore in the 1990s as one of the ‘second wave’ of Taiwanese directors. After studying at New York University, Lee returned to Taiwan where over the next three consecutive years he directed three comedy-dramas focusing on aspects of the East vs. West culture and its impact on the family – Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman. Considering Lee’s background it is surprising that he should be approached to direct the most British of novels, Jane Austen’s Sense And Sensibility. It was a tremendous critical and commercial success. Since then Lee’s projects have been both eclectic and striking – he took on the American suburbs of the 1970s and the war-torn American South of the 1860s in The Ice Storm and Ride With The Devil. But it was his triumphant return to the East with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon which has transformed him into an internationally successful director.

He followed this with his somewhat flawed foray into the Marvel Universe with Hulk. His heartbreaking adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain brought him international critical and commercial success.  But forever the genre and language-hopping director, Lee’s next films were much smaller in scale and reach –  Lust, Caution (a Chinese erotic espionage thriller) and Taking Woodstock (American comedy-drama). His most recent film was an adaptation of Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi pushed the boundaries of CGI animation and showed how a director with great visual flair could enhance a film with 3D. His continual desire for embracing new technology divided critics and audiences for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, an adaptation of Ben Fountain’s 2012 Iraq-war set novel, and The Gemini Man with Will Smith.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ellen Cheshire has a BA (Hons) in Film and English and a MA in Gothic Studies and has taught Film at Undergraduate and A Level. She has published books on Bio-Pics, Audrey Hepburn and The Coen Brothers and contributed chapters to books on James Bond, Charlie Chaplin, Global Film-making, Film Form, Fantasy Films and War Movies. She is also one of a team of four writers for the new A Level WJEC Film Text Book published in 2018. For us, she has written In the Scene: Jane Campion and  In the Scene: Ang Lee, and contributed to Silent Women: Pioneers of Cinema eds. Melody Bridges and Cheryl Robson (voted best book on Silent Film 2016) and Counterculture UK: a celebration eds. Rebecca Gillieron and Cheryl Robson.

With a foreword by Professor James Wicks

James Wicks, Ph.D. writes about pop culture. He is the author of two books. Transnational Representations: The State of Taiwan Cinema in the 1960s and 1970s (Hong Kong University Press, 2014), and An Annotated Bibliography of Taiwan Film Studies (Columbia University Press, 2016) with Jim Cheng and Sachie Noguchi.

He grew up in Taiwan, completed his dissertation on Chinese Cinema at the University of California, San Diego in 2010, and is currently a Professor of Literature and Film Studies at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California where he teaches World Cinema and Postcolonialism courses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aurora Metro Books
• Release date: May 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9780993220753

Ellen Cheshire

ELLEN CHESHIRE is a freelance film researcher, writer and lecturer. She has published books on biopics (for Columbia University Press), Ang Lee and Jane Campion (for Supernova Books), Audrey Hepburn and the Coen Brothers (for Pocket Essentials), and has contributed chapters to books on James Bond and Charlie Chaplin (for Taschen Books), silent film and counterculture (for Supernova Books), fantasy films (for MS Publications) and war movies (for Ian Allen). She has lectured in film and media at the University of Chichester and Chichester College. In 2016 she was Film Historian for Worthing WOW’s Heritage Lottery funded project celebrating 120 years of film in Sussex.

Book preview

Ang Lee: The Master Chef

He’s a fucking genius… he’s a God, one of the nicest people on the planet, exclaimed an exuberant Greg Wise when I interviewed him about working with Lee on Sense and Sensibility. Many years ago I met Ang Lee and James Schamus at a private party at the Barbican Centre and Ang Lee was exactly how I had imagined he would be: quiet, reserved, sincere, a real gentle man.

During his early international successes, he hid behind the rumour that he did not speak English very well, letting his long-time working partner James Schamus do all the talking: a job Schamus took on with passion, humour and enthusiasm. Schamus and his production company Good Machine (co- founded with Ted Hope) were a driving force behind Lee’s early feature film projects from Pushing Hands to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In 2001, it was bought by Universal and merged with their independent arm, Focus Features. But Schamus has remained a constant, taking on producing and frequently screenwriting responsibilities for most of Lee’s films until 2009’s Taking Woodstock. After a three film absence they are back together as Schamus takes on producing the in- development for Thrilla in Manila. He can be seen as the lynch- pin for all Lee’s career-defining films and yet when asked why he does not want to share the limelight à la Merchant Ivory he becomes quiet and says that he is honoured to take the back seat.

This is Lee’s story. And like any good movie it starts with adversity as we see the hero triumph over personal difficulties and family dramas, fall in love, struggle for many years before finally becoming an ‘overnight’ sensation. In the US film magazine, Premiere’s list of the top 100 most powerful people in the film industry in 2000, Ang Lee was not ranked. By 2001, he is ranked at number 59, sandwiched between Tim Burton and Leonardo DiCaprio. He achieved this miracle by directing the highest grossing subtitled film in the US, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. He went from ‘art-house hero to Oscar contender and mainstream player.’

Since then, he has consistently defied categorization: is he an art-house and mainstream filmmaker? Which genre will he tackle next? Which new technologies is he going to push to the limit? For many, Ang Lee is an unknown auteur, shying away from the spotlight, letting his films take centre-stage. While his films are familiar to many, the man behind the camera remains elusive. Given that the films demonstate a sensitive portrayal of family angst and subtle emotions in a wide variety of languages and genres, many were surprised that one person had directed them all − and some were even more surprised to learn that the director is a heterosexual Taiwanese man.

Early Years

Ang Lee was born in Pingtung, Taiwan, and was brought up in a middle-class academic household. However, his family were not native Taiwanese. They had been wealthy landlords living in mainland China, but during the Revolution, the Communists executed his father’s entire family. His father, Shang Lee, then a District Administrator, was the only survivor. He managed to escape capture and death and fled to Taiwan. Thoughts turned to a solitary life of religion and contemplation and of becoming a monk when he met, Su-Tsang Yang (another lone survivor from the Communist slaughter). They soon married, and when Lee was born in October 1954, it brought new hope for the Lee family. In the Chinese tradition, everything rested on the shoulders of the first born. Lee had a great deal of responsibility and a pressure to conform that was not the same for his younger brother and two sisters. His father, Shang Lee, having taken up a new career in his new homeland, was the principal of the local high school which Lee attended, and it was his hope that Lee would follow him into a teaching career.

In this heavily academic family, Lee found his artistic nature and creativity stifled. His parents found his lack of academic achievement hard to bear. Having failed his university entrance examinations twice, Lee went ahead on his own and enrolled at the Taiwan Academy of Arts in Taipei. Standing on stage for the first time, he knew he had found his home and his future calling. Two years at drama school, where he studied traditional Chinese theatre acting and directing, was followed by two years compulsory national service in the Taiwanese army.

By 1978, Lee was eager to travel and pursue his love of theatre and performance on a bigger stage. What bigger stage than America? He continued his studies at the University of Illinois where he undertook a BFA in Theatre, but he soon realized that his poor command of English would limit any fulfilling career as an actor in the United States and so his interest turned instead to screenwriting and directing. It was at the University of Illinois that two major contributing factors occurred: he made his first forays into film directing with a series of short 8mm films and secondly, he met and in 1983 married fellow Taiwanese student, Jane Lin, who was studying Microbiology.

After graduating, they moved to Westchester in the State of New York where they still reside. She began working as a Microbiology researcher and he continued his studying for a MFA in Film Production at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Children soon followed − Haan, their eldest son, was born in 1985 and Mason, in 1990. After two years in the making, Lee finally completed his university thesis project, Fine Line, in 1986. It was well-received at New York University where it won its two most prestigious awards, as well as within the local independent film community. But the hoped for offers to direct a mainstream film did not come his way. What did follow were six years of development deals coupled with childcare before Lee was able to make his first feature film.

The Importance of Taiwan

In sheer desperation, he turned back to his native Taiwan and entered a screenwriting competition sponsored by the Taiwanese Government through their Central Motion Picture Corporation. He submitted two scripts and won first and second prize. The top prize of $500,000 enabled him to make his first feature-length film, Pushing Hands.

Meanwhile, James Schamus and Ted Hope at Good Machine, a newly-formed production company based in New York, were searching for directors who had made impressive student shorts but had yet to make a feature film. They approached Lee’s agent and were informed that Lee had development deals all over the place and that he would be too expensive for this young company.

Luckily, a few weeks later, a mutual acquaintance brought them together and with Lee’s plea of I’ve been sitting here almost six years in development hell. If I don’t make a movie with the little amount of money that I have right now, I will die, which persuaded James Schamus to take a gamble on Lee. Their working relationship was established and, unusually for the film business, it is still thriving, decades later.

The Central Motion Picture Corporation, which was so instrumental in launching Lee’s career, had been formed in the early 1980s. Their objective was to finance films that would enhance Taiwan’s image overseas. Their finance, combined with brave films that attempted to show Taiwan’s changing political and social environment, such as Chen Kun-Hou’s A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985) and Edward Yang’s Taipei Story (1985) had met with considerable international success on the festival circuit but created little interest at the domestic box office. Audiences preferred to be entertained by commercial films from Hollywood and Hong Kong’s action flicks, rather than being lectured to by these worthy films. Home-grown films were a relatively new form of artistic expression in Taiwan.

In 1949, Taiwan had seen the arrival of a number of refugee filmmakers from mainland China but their first films, tightly controlled by the government, were primarily works of propaganda attacking Communism and supporting local government. Over time, the government’s control has dwindled and interest from private production companies within Taiwan and Hong Kong has seen a broadening of film production. Yet it was not until the arrival of the Central Motion Picture Company that a wider reputation was sought for these films. In the early 1990s, when Lee began making films in his native Taiwan, he was considered, along with Tsai Ming-Liang (Rebels of the Neon God (1992) and Vive L’Amour (1984)) to be one of the forerunners of a new generation of filmmakers who had grown up in Taiwan on a diet of Western films but who wanted to use cinema as a way of dramatizing their experiences of growing up on a small island. They wanted to use the medium to focus on small intimate subjects that were closer to home and that affected the family and its immediate social impact.

In the documentary The Taiwan New Cinema (1998), Lee said that he wanted to show the variety of life … the experience of growing up in Taiwan. The films they made were stylish while the storytelling aimed to be universal and yet personal. These films attracted success both in Taiwan and to a worldwide art- house audience.

In an interview at the 1994 Seattle Film Festival, Lee commented on this burgeoning awareness of Asian filmmakers: Asians are getting on to the world stage. I don’t think we’re the most sophisticated filmmakers in the world yet – we still need to grow. But the energy is pretty tremendous, and the aesthetic – the colours and texture – is fresh and attractive. That’s what audiences are looking for. By comparison to Hollywood, which is producing more clichés and more movies about movies, the Asian films are like fresh air.

By this point, Lee had firmly established himself as a fresh voice in the Taiwan cinema establishment. His first three films Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman, had all won awards and Lee was gaining an international reputation which ensured that there would, once again, be harmony in the Lee household. Lee’s chosen profession had disappointed his father − he did not want a filmmaker for a son. In Taiwan, anything to do with the entertainment industry was still considered to be low class, and as a consequence, Lee was thought to be disgracing his family. If it was not for the success of these early feature films, Lee firmly believes that a rift would have formed between him and his father. In an interview for The Guardian (‘Ang Lee: My Family Values’, Elaine Lipworth, 26 April 2013), Lee spoke about his now late father, recalling him saying that: Even when I was successful, he would say, ‘Now it’s time to do something real.’

Although his career from the mid-1990s onwards has been based mainly in the USA, the importance of growing up in Taiwan cannot be under-estimated. Lee has said of his formative years there: …whatever I do, whatever I absorb outside [Taiwan], my nature remains very Taiwanese... The basic me was growing up here, mixed with a lot of other things. Taiwan is like this. Wherever I shoot my film, it is a Taiwanese film. −Ang Lee, Focus Taiwan, 1 October, 2016.

Becoming an Auteur

Many of Lee’s films have a muted visual style that, time and time again, offers beautiful and subtle framing used to enhance the emotionality of the characters and the scene. He can also be one of the most overt and flashy filmmakers, pushing technology to its limits (and perhaps beyond), with films such as Life of Pi and Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk.

The beauty of Lee’s films comes from his attention to the small details and his work on performance. Lee’s early training as a performer has made him sensitive to the needs of his actors. Greg Wise attributed this to Lee’s understanding of humanity. He’s a very sensitive guy – he can understand. What I found was that he was interested in the energy of the performance. Greg Wise is one of the many actors whose breakthrough performance has been in an Ang Lee film. Many of the actors in his films have received nominations or awards for best performance and Lee is especially skilled at eliciting performances from his actors which reveal inner turmoil and repressed emotions.

His work with young actors is astonishing too, the role of Wai-Tung in The Wedding Banquet was Winston Chao’s feature film debut, as was Jewel’s in Ride With The Devil, Tang Wei in Lust, Caution, Suraj Sharma in Life of Pi and Joe Alwyn in Billy Lyn’s Long Halftime Walk. Adam Hann-Byrd (in The Ice Storm), Kate Winslet (in Sense and Sensibility), Ziyi Zhang (in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) had only appeared in one other feature film when they took on the challenging roles Lee had created for them. Even well-established actors such as Kevin Kline (in The Ice Storm) or Michelle Yeoh (in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger, Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams (in Brokeback Mountain) have given possibly their finest performances in one of Lee’s films.

Despite the seemingly eclectic body of work that Lee has produced, the films share a common warmth and humility, with a healthy dollop of cynicism on the side. He has worked across a number of genres and at first glance, Sense and Sensibility, Ride With The Devil, Hulk and Taking Woodstock, may seem to have little in common. But these films share a common thread that link them together − they focus on the lives of ‘ordinary’ people (an important feature of Taiwan cinema). Over and over again, Lee shows us how cultural, national, family and individual identities contradict each other. This sensibility creates the underlying focus of Lee’s work − that of identity. Throughout his films, the understanding of oneself and how one fits into society is manifested in four key areas: The Father Figure, The Outsider, Rites of Passage and The Generation Gap. These four areas are not only personal to Lee, but also more generally to the Taiwanese people, in as much as identity for the Taiwanese is complex because their relatively short and contradictory history cannot accommodate the diversity of culture and relationships bound up within it.

Whether the characters are Lee’s and Schamus’s original inventions, or those adapted from previously published material, the films are full of characters of great depth, caught up in richly entertaining tales.

Shooting a movie is like shopping for groceries. In the editing room, that’s when you cook the meal, is how Lee describes filmmaking in Time Magazine (29 November 1999). Lee must be a very careful shopper ensuring that he has the right balance of herbs and spices to complement the main dish. His work in the ‘kitchen’ demonstrates that it is the finished meal that is important and not the individual ingredients.

Indeed, his method could be regarded as antithetical to the auteur theory. He cherishes every person’s involvement in the filmmaking process. When asked how the stunts were done in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon he deflected any personal glory by answering: I had an amazing fight director. Lee’s work demonstrates how the bigger picture is made up of much smaller individual elements, which when combined, make the difference between a good picture and an outstanding one.

The Devil is in the Detail

One of the ways in which Lee has mastered the art of the small detail is in his actors’ use of micro-expressions. His films are packed with instances where the slightest of glances or the smallest of gestures can say more than pages of dialogue. Lee’s films are about people and how they react under a certain set of circumstances, whether they are women growing up in 1990s Taiwan, or young women growing up in 18th Century England. He demonstrates that men growing up in 1970s Connecticut and young men growing up in Missouri in the 1840s are often faced with the same trials