Conquering new mountains

Ang Lee originally saw Brokeback Mountain, about the love affair between two cowboys, as a small arthouse film, he tells Donald Clarke

Ang Lee, introverted, shy and polite, is not the sort to explode into a room. The Taiwanese-born director of such masterpieces as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Ice Storm has little trouble maintaining any simmering desires to dance on the table or juggle the crockery.

That said, he was, even by his own contained standards, looking pretty miserable when I last met him. Ang was in the middle of promoting his intriguing, if not entirely satisfactory, adaptation of the Marvel comic, The Hulk. He has since admitted the experience was so draining it almost scared him away from film.

"It was exhausting," he says with a faint shiver. "I really didn't like the release of Hulk. I thoroughly enjoyed making it. Then I got all these notes from the studio. I had to change composers. That really damaged my nerves. Then it had to be sold like it was Spiderman. That really unnerved me."

But he must have known what he was letting himself in for when he agreed to direct a comic-book adaptation. This was no quirky independent release.

"I think film-makers live in a dream. It is like going into a bad sexual relationship. You know you shouldn't be doing it, but you do it anyway."

Once he had dusted himself down, Ang decided to embark on a quiet little project that would play in a few art-house cinemas and at a few festivals without much bothering the hoi polloi.

Some years earlier he had come across a characteristically raw story by Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News. Brokeback Mountain, which charts the passage of a love affair between two cowboys over a 20-year period, is infused with the same sort of resigned despair that characterised so many great romantic pictures of Hollywood's golden years. "If you can't fix it, you got to stand it," the story ends.

The phrase sums up a confused, intermittent coupling between two married men in the 1960s and 1970s, but flower it up with a few adverbs and it could be Bette Davis talking to Paul Henreid at the end of Now Voyager.

Ang and his regular producer, James Schamus, toyed with making Brokeback Mountain into a film for some years. Then Hulk intervened and the director decided to let somebody else have a bash.

"After Hulk I asked James about it," he explains. "And he said that nobody else could really get it off the ground. The story still haunted me. James said let's just do it for a small budget and for a small audience. I wanted to do it to help me heal."

Before it was even released in the United States, this small film had been identified as one of the year's most significant cultural artefacts. Featuring achingly touching performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain suggested that mainstream - well, mainstreamish - Hollywood might finally be opening itself up to gay themes.

The picture won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and began to accumulate some hysterically positive reviews. Then, like so many films released in 2005, it got drawn into the culture wars.

"We've actually discussed whether to do some sort of action," Robert Knight of the conservative Culture and Family Institute huffed. "But the consensus was, why give it that much credit, or why call attention to it?"

The day before we meet I watched Lee squirming before the audience at a Bafta screening. He never intended Brokeback to be a landmark film, he explained. It was never his purpose to break new ground. He seemed genuinely concerned that the film was attracting so much attention.

"Did I mention I was getting nervous?" he laughs. "Now it's going to play in the shopping malls and the smaller towns. How will it be received? I don't know. It's nerve-wracking. When I got into the film I didn't think I was doing anything brave or outrageous. After all, I thought it was just going to play in the arthouses."

Much of the media attention has focused on the love scenes between Gyllenhaal and Ledger. Some gay commentators, notably Philip Hensher in the Guardian, have complained that straight actors get rather too much credit when they agree to get it on with people of the same sex.

But many theatrical agents would still rather see their clients in a Toilet Duck commercial than a gay sex scene. What about the teenybopper audience? What about Republicans in Tuna Fish, Iowa? The two young actors are to be congratulated on exhibiting a modicum of professional bravery.

"As soon as they came in they said: 'What do I have to do to get in this movie?' " Lee explains. "I had met other actors who wanted to do it, who were very polite, but who just didn't express themselves the way these guys did. Actors are desperate for good roles and these are really good roles."

Lee admits to being a shy man, so it must be difficult for him to take the actors through their sex scenes.

"The best way is to not talk about it, to just block it out," he says puzzlingly. "They have to deliver. They are actors. I think subconsciously I did try to make those scenes very complicated technically in order to distract them. So then they feel bad if they mess it up for the sound guy or the camera guy. That helps keep them busy."

While musing on the actors' feelings about the love scenes Lee says an interesting thing. He explains that, while the stars did indeed seem relaxed, he wasn't so sure how the writers felt. (Brokeback Mountain was adapted for the screen by the veteran western writer Larry McMurtry with help from his long-term collaborator Diana Ossana.)

The original story is unequivocal about the nature of the relationship between the two young men. So, what exactly is Lee driving at here?

"They are big figures in the western," he says of the script's originators. "They love the story. I don't know how much they can stomach the gay lovemaking. I don't know. I don't know how comfortable they are."

I'm still not clear. Is he implying they were not comfortable with the way the scenes were directed?

"I don't know, to be honest with you. We have a lot of mutual respect. But I am just guessing from the way it was written. It is very much of a mystery how gay they are. It leaves you a lot of room. I am not sure what their position is."

Make of that what you will. Proulx and McMurtry, poets of buttoned-up emotion, must surely be delighted with the undercurrent of profound misery which, only occasionally addressed directly, permeates the film.

Repression is one of Ang Lee's favourite themes. It is there in his adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. It is bubbling beneath the domestic conflicts of The Ice Storm. Hulk could be seen as an essay on the dangers of trying to contain strong emotion.

Commentators have insisted on calling Brokeback Mountain a "gay western", but the film does not fit any genre templates. It is an Ang Lee picture before it is anything else.

"I don't really mind when they call it a gay western," he says. "They can call it that if it gets them in the theatre. The thing I didn't like was, for an unsophisticated audience, when they see 'gay cowboy' they maybe expect comedy. They might be disturbed when they get drama.

"But the western is full of homoerotic connotations, just as martial arts films are to some in the Chinese community. The cowboy's job is nursing animals. That's a very maternal thing to do. They can be shy before women, but talk to their horses and livestock. I think the western is very suitable for a story like this. It hasn't been done before, but that doesn't mean it's not out there."

One argument against classing Brokeback Mountain as a western concerns the film's period. Like earlier quasi-genre pieces such as Hud or Bad Day at Black Rock, Ang's picture is set some decades too late to satisfy cowboy purists. It seems significant the film opens in 1963. This was the year sex began for Philip Larkin, but the world of Brokeback seems untouched by any carnal revolution. The characters have few words to express what is happening to them.

"I told the production designer: we are doing a period movie in a timeless place," Lee laughs. "For somebody like these characters there is no vocabulary for the way he feels. He probably never heard the word 'gay'.

"When one of the wives sees them kissing in 1968 she doesn't really know what she is looking at. Later, when they have a fight, it is 1977 and maybe by then she might have read a magazine article or something. But in 1968 in that world she would have little idea."

The eye-wateringly beautiful vistas of the American west, the considered performances, Proulx's taut narrative and Lee's eye for the tasteful shot have, notwithstanding the objections of the Culture and Family Institute, made Brokeback Mountain one of the most ecstatically-received films in recent memory. Lee must surely have achieved the healing balm he was seeking.

He mutters and shuffles a partial assent. There will be no dancing on tables just yet.

Brokeback Mountain opens on Jan 6