Eastern promise
Ang Lee is a rare creature in the world of cinema. No matter the genre – period drama, arthouse, big-budget blockbuster – he brings a far-eastern sensibility to his work that is without compare. “I’m Hollywood in Asia and Asia in Hollywood,” he tells TARA BRADY
THERE’S SOMETHING alchemical about Ang Lee. The director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – the biggest grossing foreignlanguage title of all time – has converted countless nominally arthouse titles – Brokeback Mountain, Sense and Sensibility – into global box-office gold.
Is he a tentpole chap with an arthouse sensibility or vice versa? The Hollywood director of Hulk and the Chinese auteur behind Lust, Caution can’t say for sure. But he suspects that timing is just as important as the geography.
“You have to give credit to arthouse as a phenomenon because starting in the late 1980s, that arthouse expansion made a lot of international titles,” says the Oscar winner. “I just happened to catch that wave with my second film, The Wedding Banquet. So I ended up in a peculiar place because it was a mainstream film in Taiwan but not elsewhere. I’m arthouse here and mainstream there. I’m Hollywood in Asia and Asia in Hollywood, so I’m somewhere between all of it.”
It certainly didn’t hurt that Lee emerged as a global presence just as the dominant language and iconography of pop culture shifted eastwards.
“Globalisation has changed,” nods the film-maker. “The culture exchange is not so one-way any more. Especially since the rise of Asia and particularly China economically and culturally. The language of culture and cinema has changed.”
Today Lee is in London to chat about his latest, characteristically international venture. Life of Pi is adapted from the French Canadian author Yann Martel’s Booker-Prize winning novel and explores the odd spiritual life of a shipwrecked Indian boy. A fantasy adventure defined by carnivorous islands, luminous flying fish and an adolescent stuck on a raft with a Bengal tiger, the book was thought to be unfilmable until Lee turned it into a $200 million (€152m and counting) hit.
“When I read it first, I put it aside,” admits Lee. “I introduced my wife and my son to it. And we talked about it for a couple of weeks. I didn’t think it was impossible. For me, there’s no such thing as an unfilmable novel. It’s not movie-friendly though.
“The situation was interesting. But in the book it drags on forever. It’s an endurance. I don’t think you can torture your audience in that way. It would be arthouse at best.”
In addition to the structural challenges, would-be adapters faced any number of logistical and technological difficulties. Post-Avatar 3D could, Lee realised, allow his digitised tiger to come to life. But 20th Century Fox weren’t so keen at first. This was a prestige picture, not a genre piece.
“Four years ago, it simply wouldn’t have been possible to make this,” notes Lee, who shot Life of PI with stereoscopic cameras, rather than cynically adding 3D effects in post-production. “It would have been a very different movie. I fought to do it in 3D because this is not an action movie. But I just didn’t think the movie would be possible otherwise. It was very hard for me to put together evidence why I should. Because I was trying to figure out why myself. I think Avatar legitimised it as a tool for storytelling instead of just an effect and Hugo and this film have taken that further.”
