It was an updated take on the wuxia film, a classic Chinese genre of martial arts stories. “People asked me, ‘How did you do Sense and Sensibility? It’s so British.’ Look, for a repressed Chinese director, repression was easy.” Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ended up making $128 million domestically, by far the most ever made by a foreign film in the U.S.Īfter The Ice Storm, he would return to Asia for inspiration and adapt the novel Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon into a film. Friends were confused: How was a man who’d grown up in Taiwan making such good movies about patrician England and patrician New England? These movies, and later his masterpiece Brokeback Mountain, he explained, all focus on something his post-Mao generation knew well. Next was The Ice Storm, about unsatisfied swingers in 1973 Connecticut. Soon afterward, Lee got his first Hollywood assignment: an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, starring Kate Winslet and Emma Thompson as the novel’s lovelorn sisters.
“I love stirring things up rather than sticking to the Chinese ideal, which is to appeal for calm,” Lee said at the time. His father only then started to reconsider his son’s line of work, an indication of the generational resistance to art as a viable career.
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It was named best film at the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival and became the most successful movie in Taiwanese history. It was his second feature, and Lee was already lampooning the wedding banquets that were a staple of his culture. It’s not like in the movies.”Īfter years of frustration and some acclaim from screenwriting competitions, Lee directed The Wedding Banquet, a comedy about a gay man who must hide his partner and marry a woman ahead of his Taiwanese parents’ visit, a comedy-of-errors decision that culminates in a giant, traditional wedding banquet for the wrong couple. You cannot help but idolize them.” After some time in America, he realized the reality was not the filtered version delivered through a script and soft lighting. They’re having fun, very open, just fantastic. It’s a romanticized version of themselves, lush and colorful. “If you grow up with American movies, you tend to romanticize them, that’s how Americans see themselves, beautiful. All those people were really there,” he said. “When I first came to America, it felt like I was walking onto a set. in 1978, entering the theater program at the University of Illinois and then the master’s program at New York University.Īng Lee wanted to make Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a movie that was by China, for China, while the country was at this turning point. When Lee failed Taiwan’s college entrance exams-a particularly ignominious result for the son of two scholars-he enrolled at a local arts academy.Īfter that, he moved to the U.S. Still, the idea of coming to America to direct movies himself was a remote proposition, certainly one his parents didn’t support.
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That’s how me and most of the world-at least the free world-is dreaming.” In the movies of the Cold War 1960s, America was also “big brother” onscreen, he said, protecting the “little guys” like Taiwan. “Somehow it just captured that world, established that dream, of an American narrative. Hollywood “told the world what to dream,” Lee told me. While his contemporaries in mainland China were being sent to the countryside, Lee watched Billy Wilder, Frank Capra, and Woody Allen, a case study in Woodrow Wilson’s hopes for the form. His mother often went to the movies when she was pregnant with Lee, initiating his love of films in the womb, he joked. Growing up in Taiwan, Lee had ready access to American movies that his counterparts in mainland China did not. The trauma of the Cultural Revolution threaded through his family his father’s parents were killed because they were landlords when Mao assumed power. Born in Taiwan in 1954, Lee was the eldest son of parents who had fled the civil war in China. The best shot after China’s opening-up came courtesy of Ang Lee, who by the late 1990s had made a handful of acclaimed movies for Hollywood studios, including Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm. The holy grail, even in the 1990s, was a Chinese produced movie that made audiences in both countries swoon. From its earliest interactions with Hollywood, China had harbored an ambition to ship its culture around the world, just as the U.S.
While Western leaders like Rupert Murdoch and Bill Clinton were hoping that the American influence would travel to China, Chinese leaders were hoping that they could export some of their values abroad, too.
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