How Ang Lee earned his filmmaking stripes
By Jake Coyle |
November 25, 2012, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
IS there anything Ang Lee can't do?
The pithy answer might be: Large, angry, green men. Yes, Lee's "Hulk" was not well received. But in his incredibly varied filmography, Lee has steadily steered films that could very well have turned disastrous into box-office hits and Oscar bait.
Combining martial arts with drama? "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" became the highest grossing foreign language film ever, more than double any previous foreign film. A film about gay cowboys? "Brokeback Mountain" was nominated for eight Oscars, winning three, including best director.
Few filmmakers have been so drawn to such delicate material where even slight shifts in tone or execution could mean the difference between a hit or a flop. That couldn't be truer for Lee's new film, "Life of Pi," a supreme balancing act for a filmmaker accustomed to working on tightropes.
In an interview the day after "Life of Pi" premiered at the New York Film Festival, Lee sat down with obvious relief. Asked how he was doing, Lee exhaled: "Better than I thought."
The first screening had gone well: the 3-D "Life of Pi" was greeted as a success and immediately added to the Oscar race. For even Lee, knowing which side of the sword a film of his will fall isn't clear until the first audience sees it.
"I've been holding this anxiety for a long time. It's an expensive movie," said Lee. "It's really like the irrational number of pi. For a long time it felt that way - not making sense."
"Life of Pi," contains, Lee says, "all the no's" of filmmaking: kid actors, live animals and oceans of water.
The movie is adapted from Yann Martel's best-selling 2001 novel, in which a deadly shipwreck maroons a boy (Suraj Sharma) on a lifeboat, accompanied by a Bengal tiger.
Not only does filming such a tale involve considerable challenges, the story is ultimately a spiritual journey - and matters of God and faith are far from typical blockbuster fodder. For those reasons and others, the project went through several directors, including Alfonso Cuaron, M Night Shyamalan and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Lee, then, was a kind of savior, one of few directors capable of corralling all the difficult elements of "Life of Pi." His imprimatur helps carry it, given that the cast is one of unknowns (Sharma, only 17 when cast, hadn't previously acted), digital creations (a combination of real tigers and digital effects were used) and international actors (Irrfan Khan and Gerard Depardieu).
Elizabeth Gabler, president of Fox 2000 Pictures, calls the film - the budget of which exceeded US$100 million - a huge gamble.
"Why do I dare, a Chinese director, do Jane Austen when I still speak pidgin English?" Lee said, referring to his 1995 film "Sense and Sensibility." "It's still a leap of faith, you're taking a risk. Every movie is unknown. If it's known, then no studio would lose money."
Lee was born and raised in Taiwan, where he initially pursued acting. Artistic endeavor in 1960s and 1970s Taiwan, he says, was considered a low profession, not the choice of his father.
Lee emigrated from Taiwan to attend college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then film school at New York University. The 58-year-old still lives in the New York area with his wife and two sons.
His first three films, all in Mandarin and revolving around Chinese families, were followed by "Sense and Sensibility," his Hollywood arrival. But it was 1997's "The Ice Storm," an adaptation of Rick Moody's novel about a Connecticut family's disaster in the swinging 1970s, that Lee says changed his perception of filmmaking.
"A movie is really provocation," says Lee. "It's not a message, it's not a statement."
"Life of Pi" was certainly full of lessons and trials. Lee spent a year making a 70-minute pre-visual animation of the middle chunk of the film set at sea to hone his skills.
The end results in the movie, achieved with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, are perhaps the best 3-D work since James Cameron's "Avatar."
For the film's star, the gentle, humble, self-deprecating Lee was a mentor. "He makes you so calm that you just let him mold you into whatever he wants to mold you into," Sharma said.
Lee may be "a Zen master" like Sharma claims, but won't abide one thing: Anyone who doesn't cherish the chance to make a movie. "If you don't give 100 percent, I get mad," he said.
It's enough of an all-consuming process that Lee doesn't contemplate his next film until he has seen through the present one. He said: "I'm still surviving this one."
The pithy answer might be: Large, angry, green men. Yes, Lee's "Hulk" was not well received. But in his incredibly varied filmography, Lee has steadily steered films that could very well have turned disastrous into box-office hits and Oscar bait.
Combining martial arts with drama? "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" became the highest grossing foreign language film ever, more than double any previous foreign film. A film about gay cowboys? "Brokeback Mountain" was nominated for eight Oscars, winning three, including best director.
Few filmmakers have been so drawn to such delicate material where even slight shifts in tone or execution could mean the difference between a hit or a flop. That couldn't be truer for Lee's new film, "Life of Pi," a supreme balancing act for a filmmaker accustomed to working on tightropes.
In an interview the day after "Life of Pi" premiered at the New York Film Festival, Lee sat down with obvious relief. Asked how he was doing, Lee exhaled: "Better than I thought."
The first screening had gone well: the 3-D "Life of Pi" was greeted as a success and immediately added to the Oscar race. For even Lee, knowing which side of the sword a film of his will fall isn't clear until the first audience sees it.
"I've been holding this anxiety for a long time. It's an expensive movie," said Lee. "It's really like the irrational number of pi. For a long time it felt that way - not making sense."
"Life of Pi," contains, Lee says, "all the no's" of filmmaking: kid actors, live animals and oceans of water.
The movie is adapted from Yann Martel's best-selling 2001 novel, in which a deadly shipwreck maroons a boy (Suraj Sharma) on a lifeboat, accompanied by a Bengal tiger.
Not only does filming such a tale involve considerable challenges, the story is ultimately a spiritual journey - and matters of God and faith are far from typical blockbuster fodder. For those reasons and others, the project went through several directors, including Alfonso Cuaron, M Night Shyamalan and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Lee, then, was a kind of savior, one of few directors capable of corralling all the difficult elements of "Life of Pi." His imprimatur helps carry it, given that the cast is one of unknowns (Sharma, only 17 when cast, hadn't previously acted), digital creations (a combination of real tigers and digital effects were used) and international actors (Irrfan Khan and Gerard Depardieu).
Elizabeth Gabler, president of Fox 2000 Pictures, calls the film - the budget of which exceeded US$100 million - a huge gamble.
"Why do I dare, a Chinese director, do Jane Austen when I still speak pidgin English?" Lee said, referring to his 1995 film "Sense and Sensibility." "It's still a leap of faith, you're taking a risk. Every movie is unknown. If it's known, then no studio would lose money."
Lee was born and raised in Taiwan, where he initially pursued acting. Artistic endeavor in 1960s and 1970s Taiwan, he says, was considered a low profession, not the choice of his father.
Lee emigrated from Taiwan to attend college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then film school at New York University. The 58-year-old still lives in the New York area with his wife and two sons.
His first three films, all in Mandarin and revolving around Chinese families, were followed by "Sense and Sensibility," his Hollywood arrival. But it was 1997's "The Ice Storm," an adaptation of Rick Moody's novel about a Connecticut family's disaster in the swinging 1970s, that Lee says changed his perception of filmmaking.
"A movie is really provocation," says Lee. "It's not a message, it's not a statement."
"Life of Pi" was certainly full of lessons and trials. Lee spent a year making a 70-minute pre-visual animation of the middle chunk of the film set at sea to hone his skills.
The end results in the movie, achieved with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, are perhaps the best 3-D work since James Cameron's "Avatar."
For the film's star, the gentle, humble, self-deprecating Lee was a mentor. "He makes you so calm that you just let him mold you into whatever he wants to mold you into," Sharma said.
Lee may be "a Zen master" like Sharma claims, but won't abide one thing: Anyone who doesn't cherish the chance to make a movie. "If you don't give 100 percent, I get mad," he said.
It's enough of an all-consuming process that Lee doesn't contemplate his next film until he has seen through the present one. He said: "I'm still surviving this one."
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