The eastern cowboy who ambushed Hollywood
PROFILE Ang Lee
Brokeback Mountain, Hollywood’s first gay cowboy film, has not enthralled that bastion of rectitude, the Culture and Family Institute of Concerned Women for America. “Ang Lee is off his rocker if he thinks he can have the same commercial success with two cowboys instead of a cowboy and a cowgirl,” said its spokesman, Robert Knight, who lamented the “perversion of the straight-shooter”.
The critics and other filmgoers could not disagree more. The Taiwanese-American director’s western epic has been praised as lyrical, visually stunning and achingly sad. It has received seven nominations for the Golden Globe Awards — an auspicious sign of its Oscar prospects — and last month was voted film of 2005 by Los Angeles and New York film critics.
This ringing acclamation for yet another daring movie by Lee confirms the 51-year-old director’s talent and astonishing versatility. He made the definitive version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, switched genre to produce and direct The Ice Storm, a ferocious assault on loveless but permissive 1970s America, then triumphed with the Asian martial arts story Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the cartoon classic Hulk, before turning to a love story between two lonely drovers.
It is as if he is taking on Stanley Kubrick’s quest for perfection in different movie genres or the mantle of Monkey, the irrepressible character created by the 16th-century Chinese writer Wu Ch’eng-en, which can clone itself into innumerable personas to bewilder its adversaries. Lee’s explanation is more prosaic: “I do not want to be limited in a certain genre. That’s not a career I want to go through. I have to learn step by step.”
Lee is a small, wry man with a cheeky face and a beatific smile who is apt to giggle and deliver convoluted sentences that are a reminder of his comparatively recent mastery of English. He hardly spoke the language while he was making Sense and Sensibility in 1994, despite his years of living in America. He credits Emma Thompson, who adapted Austen’s novel and starred in the film as Elinor Dashwood, with helping him over the language barrier.
“I learnt a tremendous amount from Emma,” he said. “I was directing Jane Austen with the finest English actors. I had pidgin English. But I didn’t let on I was scared.”
He first read the tale of two lovelorn farm hands four years ago. “I got choked up,” he said last week. “It was a wonderful piece, in beautiful prose.”
Brokeback Mountain was originally published in the New Yorker magazine in 1997 as a short story by Annie Proulx, who wrote the novel that became the film The Shipping News. It is set in the hills of Wyoming in 1963 and follows the converging trails of two loners, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, who tend sheep and barely exchange a word for weeks on end. One freezing night they share a tent and their moment of intimacy becomes a melodrama of parting and subsequent reunion as married men with families.
As far as Lee is concerned the film, more a haunting portrait of rural life than a western, is about love and loss. “Gay or not, it is a vehicle for universal human feelings,” he said. The problems some people will have with it, he has said, are ideological, not moral. “It always confuses me, what Americans call moral issues.”
He envisaged the film as a small, art-house movie — the gay label frightened off backers and, to save money, he was forced to shoot many of the Wyoming scenes in Calgary, Canada — so the talk of Oscars has caught him unawares.
It is his second gay film. His 1993 movie The Wedding Banquet, which he wrote and directed, was his breakthrough, a charming comic farce about a gay Taiwanese New Yorker marrying a Chinese girl to appease his blissfully ignorant parents. The crew assumed that Lee was homosexual until his wife, Jane, a microbiologist, and their sons Haan and Mason visited the set. “Jaws were dropping,” he recalled.
It has not been roses all the way for Lee. Ride with the Devil (1999), his spectacular American civil war movie about lawless American mercenaries, received a critical mauling. And reviewers saw Hulk as less than Shakespearian.
Like the central character in Hulk, Lee is something of a split personality. His meticulous attention to detail and perfectionism can transform him into an ogre who demands dozens of takes. Eric Bana, the Australian actor who played the Hulk’s human persona, Dr Bruce Banner, said: “I would describe him as a sledgehammer wrapped in cotton wool. He’s a very tough man, very tough.”
To make Hulk to his satisfaction (he saw the comic book story as a Greek tragedy), Lee became the personification of menacing rage, spending 10 months enacting the 15ft green monster’s movements himself for the computer-generated imagery. Off set, however, he reverts to an insecure version of Bruce Banner.
He told one interviewer: “When I’m not making films, I go back to the puny human stage. I’m weak, I have a very short attention span, I don’t know how to look after the kids, how to discipline them or look over their homework. I couldn’t do my own laundry. I’m good for nothing.”
- posted on 01/08/2006
The key to his self-mortification and low esteem lies in his background. His grandparents were Chinese landowners who were killed in China’s Communist revolution and Lee’s parents fled to Taiwan, where he was born on October 23, 1954, the second of four children. He was the antithesis of his father, Shang, the headmaster of a secondary school in Pingtung where Lee was a pupil. Shang was a stern disciplinarian who wanted his son to become a teacher — “an honourable profession” and to embrace the Chinese patriarchal culture as he had.
Lee says that he was a shy, docile child whose only escape was watching films. To his father’s chagrin he wanted to be an actor. He said: “The British are very proud of their theatrical history but our society looks down on it, so I always felt a lot of guilt.”
After failing a university entrance exam in Taiwan he went, at the age of 23, to study drama at the university of Illinois but found that acting was beyond him. He said: “I couldn’t speak English so I couldn’t act. Then I started to think about directing.”
He took a master’s degree in film production at New York University and won best director and best film for a short movie in the university film festival. But it was six years before he made his first feature film, scripted mostly in Chinese as were the next two. Even then he was supported financially by his wife, whom he had met in Illinois.
Lee’s atrocious English was holding him back. He was too shy to make friends and stayed within the Chinese community, finding it difficult to comprehend American ways. “Even now with talk shows, I don’t know why people are laughing sometimes. The whole world is very misty — it’s like I live in a cloud.”
He was a surprise choice to direct Sense and Sensibility, which went on to receive seven Oscar nominations but reaped only one (for Thompson’s screenplay). Unable to communicate satisfactorily, he had begun to pay more attention to the film’s texture, colours, and pregnant silences.
These heightened qualities are what distinguish his work, notably in Brokeback Mountain, which has a lean script and imparts a striking freshness to western landscapes.
Lee’s disapproving father began to thaw. Although Shang was the model for the stern parents in Lee’s first three films, he never commented on them. “After Sense and Sensibility, he said, ‘Great. You’ve made some movies. You can retire at 50 and do something sensible, like teaching’.”
Shang softened further after Crouching Tiger, the first major Chinese film backed by Hollywood and an unexpected box office sensation.
The first encouragement Shang offered was when Lee told him he was going to throw in the towel after Hulk. “I was ragged. Every cell in my body was screaming for rest. He held my hand and said, ‘Please don’t. You’ll be depressed’. Then he said he loved Hulk.” Two weeks later he died.
That’s when Lee decided to make Brokeback Mountain. “I never did tell him it was a gay movie . . .”
- posted on 01/08/2006
这些天在飞机的航空杂志上、在一些网友论坛比如包子铺,还是在英国Sunday Times上,哪儿都是影片“断背山”和李安的介绍。
年前英国新法生效,赋予同性伴侣Civil Partnership名称,使其拥有与婚姻完全相同的法定权力。在戴安娜葬礼上唱英格兰玫瑰的Elton象是英国Gay celebrity代表人物之一,在温莎举行盛大招摇的宴会。
同性时代好像有山雨欲来风满楼的感觉。不知道这种趋势背后的社会动机是什么,还是宽容倒成为了一种强加于普通人价值观的时尚。
美国西部牛仔原来还是弄潮儿。社会大众如果能欣然接受,布什总统以后也不用总得跟赖斯小姐公开场合泡在一起了。即使跟Dick再近乎一些,选民们没准也还会把他当牛仔。:)
- posted on 01/10/2006
因为人太多了,得控制数量;)
LingHuChong wrote:
这些天在飞机的航空杂志上、在一些网友论坛比如包子铺,还是在英国Sunday Times上,哪儿都是影片“断背山”和李安的介绍。
年前英国新法生效,赋予同性伴侣Civil Partnership名称,使其拥有与婚姻完全相同的法定权力。在戴安娜葬礼上唱英格兰玫瑰的Elton象是英国Gay celebrity代表人物之一,在温莎举行盛大招摇的宴会。
同性时代好像有山雨欲来风满楼的感觉。不知道这种趋势背后的社会动机是什么,还是宽容倒成为了一种强加于普通人价值观的时尚。
美国西部牛仔原来还是弄潮儿。社会大众如果能欣然接受,布什总统以后也不用总得跟赖斯小姐公开场合泡在一起了。即使跟Dick再近乎一些,选民们没准也还会把他当牛仔。:)
- Re: “断背山”和李安 (Sunday Times, 08 Jan 2006)posted on 01/10/2006
Did Linghu get the news right? :-) John Elton just had a lavish wedding.
Ang Lee just won the Best Director award in the Critics' Choice Award! Beats Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Ron Howard!
- Re: “断背山”和李安 (Sunday Times, 08 Jan 2006)posted on 01/10/2006
宽容,和自由、民主、平等一样,是民主社会的一大特征。可惜,随着多元化对传统道德价值观的破坏,我们正在失去做出有意义的价值判断的能力。宽容也变成青少年常挂在嘴边的whatever的同义词,贫乏可笑。 - Re: “断背山”和李安 (Sunday Times, 08 Jan 2006)posted on 01/10/2006
对不起,打错一词。
宽容,和自由、平等、隐私一样,是民主社会的一大特征。可惜,随着多元化对传统道德价值观的破坏,我们正在失去做出有意义的价值判断的能力。宽容也变成青少年常挂在嘴边的whatever的同义词,贫乏可笑。
chloe wrote:
宽容,和自由、民主、平等一样,是民主社会的一大特征。可惜,随着多元化对传统道德价值观的破坏,我们正在失去做出有意义的价值判断的能力。宽容也变成青少年常挂在嘴边的whatever的同义词,贫乏可笑。
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