THE LIFE OF ANG
Award-winning filmmaker honoured by the British film industry
Formative moments in the lives of great artists can occur almost anywhere.
Ang Lee's came on the train from London to Plymouth. It was a wet winter day in early 1994 and the Taiwanese filmmaker was steeling himself for Sense and Sensibility, an adaptation of the Jane Austen novel and his first entirely English-language project. At that point, the film was to be shot in Ireland for tax reasons — but Lee, then 39, felt he owed it to Austen to see first-hand the Devonshire countryside in which her story was set, “just so I knew what I'd be imitating,” he chuckles.
Lee, now 66, takes up the tale. “It had been raining hard when we'd left London, but the moment our train emerged from the tunnel into Devon was one of the most magical in my life. It was bright and sunny, at around four o'clock and the late afternoon sun was hitting those rolling hills in the most beautiful way. I could already see Marianne Dashwood tumbling down the hillside and being rescued by Willoughby on his white horse. And I thought: `We have to do it here.'”
It was, he explains, a pivotal point — “a sign that this English period piece, something I had never imagined I would make, actually belonged to me. And if I could make that movie, then I could dare to go anywhere.”
At the BAFTA film awards in 1996, Sense and Sensibility won three awards, including best film. And at the same event 25 years later — via one of the most far-reaching and head-spinningly eclectic careers in modern cinema — he received the BAFTA Fellowship, the highest honour in the academy's gift. The director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi describes the accolade as “overwhelming. For some reason, Britain has always been good to me. Even aside from Sense and Sensibility, it was the only place in the world where The Ice Storm (his provocative 1997 thriller) made any money.”
It not being an optimal time for international travel, Lee accepted the Fellowship remotely, although he isn't stuck at home. In fact, he's in Wellington, New Zealand, on a “research trip” to the visual effects house Weta Digital to test some technology for a forthcoming project that may or may not be his long-planned Muhammad Ali/joe Frazier boxing film Thrilla in Manila (it's all under wraps). He flew there from Taiwan — where, as in New Zealand, “life is almost back to normal” — although his interim stretch in a quarantine hotel has taken its toll.
Still, the emotion in his voice can't be solely put down to 14 days of confinement. The BAFTA Fellowship has come at the end of a turbulent, frustrating decade, in which Lee's two most recent films, made in the wake of his world-conquering 3D adaptation of Life of Pi, have been met with muted ticket sales and indifference from the industry at large. The issue was the medium itself. As Hollywood beat a sheepish retreat from 3D, Lee became obsessed with unlocking what he saw as its enormous artistic potential.
Since the transition to the talkies, films have purred along at 24 frames per second.
But Lee designed both his Iraq war drama Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and his Will Smith-led action thriller Gemini Man to be projected at 120 frames per second, creating an ultrasharp and fluid three-dimensional image with none of the customary stutter or blur we've come to associate with the art form long known as the flicks. When seen as Lee intended, these films looked nothing like film as anyone knew it. The problem was, only a handful of cinemas on Earth (and none in the U.K. or U.S.) were actually capable of screening them, and the technologically compromised mass-market versions failed to win many fans.
Innovation is how Lee sees cinemas winning back customers after the pandemic — not just highframe-rate projection, but smarter seating arrangements, more immersive sound and sharper images. “There's more to cinema than absorbing a story,” he says, adding that the experience should feel “collective and participatory — things a TV screen at home could never provide.”
He doesn't envy younger filmmakers in the same boat today. “Studios have learned how to control that kind of production,” he says. “If I made Hulk now, I wouldn't be able to do what I did. The industry has made it much harder to wiggle and stretch.”
Hulk's mixed commercial and critical fortunes hit Lee hard — and, coupled with the death of his father, he was “exhausted and sad” and seriously contemplating retirement. Instead, he got in touch with his old producer friend James Schamus and asked if a small project they'd discussed three years before had ever got underway. It had not, so Lee got back to work. This was Brokeback Mountain, which he now describes as “the easiest movie I ever made. Nothing could go wrong on it — it was as if it was blessed.” That good fortune followed Brokeback Mountain to the BAFTAS and Oscars, and also the box office, where it has topped US$178 million worldwide.