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Ang Lee

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Lee accepting the Best Foreign Film award for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at the 73rd Academy Awards

Ang Lee (Chinese: 李安; pinyin: Lǐ Ān) (born October 23, 1954) is an Academy Award-winning film director from Taiwan. Lee won the 2006 Best Director Oscar for Brokeback Mountain (2005).

Biography

Education path

Ang Lee was born in Pingtung, a southern agricultural county of Taiwan. He grew up in a household with heavy emphasis in education and Chinese classics. Lee's father was born in the Jiangxi Province in mainland China and moved to Taiwan following the Nationalists' defeat in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. He imbued his children with learning of Chinese culture and art, particularly calligraphy.

Lee studied in the prestigious Provincial Tainan First Senior High School where his father was the principal of this school. He was expected to pass the annual Joint College Entrance Examination, the only route to enter colleges in Taiwan. However, Lee failed twice in the Exam. In the third year, he entered a 3-year college, National Arts School (now reorganized and expanded as National Taiwan University of Arts) and graduated in 1975. This early life frustration in pursuing academic excellence set his career path into the performance art.

After finishing the mandatory military service, Lee came to the US in 1979 and became a freshman in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his bachelor's degree in Theater in 1980 at UIUC and enrolled into Tisch School of the Artsof New York University, where he received his MFA. He was a classmate of Spike Lee and worked on the crew of the latter Lee's thesis film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads. During his graduate school, Lee finished a 16 mm short film, Shades of the Lake (1982), which won the Best Drama in Taiwan’s short film award. His own thesis work, a 43-minute drama, Fine Line (1984), won the Best Director and Best Film in NYU’s student movie festival and was subsequently selected to be aired on Public Broadcasting Service.

Dormacy after graduation

Lee’s thesis work at NYU drew attention from William Morris Agency, a famous talent and literary agency which later on became Lee’s agent. However, William Morris did not bring Lee any opportunity to make any film in the US. Lee remained unemployed without any income for six years. During this period, he was a full-time house husband and took care of the house chores, while his wife, a molecular biologist, provided the income for the family of two adults and two kids. With the Chinese heritage, this embarrassing situation certainly asserted a lot of social pressure on Lee and his wife, but with his wife’s support and understanding, Lee did not stop pursuing his career in films. He continued to absorb new ideas from movies and performances. He also wrote several screenplays during this time.

In 1990, Lee submitted two screenplays to a competition sponsored by Taiwan’s Government Information Office. Both his works won the prize: Pushing Hands won the first prize and The Wedding Banquet ranked second. The winning screenplays brought Lee to Li-Kong Hsu (徐立功). Hsu, a senior manager in a major film maker, was just promoted to the position and had strong interests in Lee’s unique style and freshness. Lee met Hsu subsequently on his trip back home for the award reception. Hsu, a first time producer, proposed to film Pushing Hands and invited Lee to direct it. With a limited budget, Lee started his full-length commercial debut in 1991.

Debut from Taiwan

Pushing Hands (1992) was very welcome in Taiwan both in critics and box office. It received 8 nominations in Golden Horse Film Festival, Taiwan’s premier film festival. Inspired by the success, Hsu continued to collaborate with Lee to make the second film, The Wedding Banquet (1993), which won the Best Film in Berlin Film Festival and was nominated as the Best Foreign Language Film in both Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award. In total, this film collected 11 local and international film awards and proved Lee as a noticeable director and rising star.

Lee’s first two movies were based on stories of Chinese/Taiwanese Americans and filmed in the US. In 1995, Hsu invited Lee to come back to his hometown to make their third film, Eat Drink Man Woman, which depicts the traditional values, modern relationship and conflicts of a family in Taipei. Once again, this film was very popular and enjoyed excellent reviews. In a second concessive year, Lee’s film received the Best Foreign Foreign Film nomination in both Golden Globe Award and Academy Award, as well as British Academy Award. Eat Drink Man Woman won 5 awards domestic and internationally, including the Best Director from Independent Spirit. This film was such a pleasant piece that a Hollywood film maker decided to have its own version. Tortilla Soup (2001), the American remade directed by María Ripoll, was released in 2001. This is a rare, if not the only, case that a Taiwanese film was remade outside the island.

Coming to Hollywood

Lee’s extraordinary three dramas knocked out the door to Hollywood for him. In 1995, Lee directed Columbia TriStar’s British classical Sense and Sensibility. The switching from Taiwanese to British films did not stop Lee from claiming fames in the film festivals. Sense and Sensibility made Lee the second time director of the Best Film in the Berlin Film Festival, and it was nominated in 7 Academy Awards and won the Best Adapted Screenplay by Emma Thompson. It also won the Best Film in Golden Globe Award. After these successes, Lee directed another two Hollywood movies: The Ice Storm (1997) and Ride with the Devil (1999). Although the critics still generally favored these works, the box office was not impressive, which paused Lee’s uninterrupted popularity from the general audience and art schools since his first full-length movie.

Wu Xia and superhero

In 1999, Li-Kong Hsu, Lee’s old time career partner and supporter in Taiwan, invited him to make a “ Wu Xia” movie, a traditional Chinese genre. Excited about the opportunity to fulfill the long time fantasy since he was a kid, Lee assembled a team from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China and directed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). The release of this film to American market received a surprising welcome. As a foreign film speaking its native language with captions, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon not only has ranked top at the box office but also was nominated on both the Best Picture and the Best Foreign Language Film in the Academy Awards, with other nominations. In the end, it won the Best Foreign Language Film as well as 3 technical Oscars. Lee, again, showed his talent in delivery a work in a way that is artistic but also accessible to the general public. Lee introduced Wu Xia movies to the western mainstream and also made a new page for this genre that was followed by other Chinese directors such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige.

Lee returned to Hollywood to take the challenge of directing Hulk (2003), his first mega budget movie, rich in CGI-scripted special effects and based on a superhero comic. Although Lee invested tremendous amount of efforts in this movie, however, the outcome was not satisfying. He received mixed reviews. The audience did not appreciate its tone distinct from other superhero movie, and neither did every critic. After Hulk’s setback, Lee had thought about retiring early, but his father, proudly approving his son’s choosing a beloved career, encouraged him to move on and maintain the course.

Climbing the Mountain

Lee decided to turn to a smaller budget to make a low-profile independent film. He started a project based on Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning short story, Brokeback Mountain. The movie about the forbidden love between two homosexual Wyoming cowboys was released in 2005. Opposite to Lee's plan, this movie immediately caught the attention and initiated intensive public debates. Aside from the social issue, the maturity of Lee’s directing skills with his compassionate to the human emotions in Brokeback Mountain has been easily sweeping the major film festival and accumulated numerous best director and best film awards worldwide. Lee, in his fifth appearance in the Academy Award, eventually won the Oscar for the Best Director. He became the first Asian director to win this title. However, Brokeback Mountain lost the Best Picture competition to Crash (2005), a story about race issues in Los Angeles. Lee, now regarded as a favorite role model in Taiwan, acknowledged that he was not happy about the seemly political decision of not letting a movie about homosexuality to win the Best Film.

Career overview

Many of his films have focused on the interactions between modernity and tradition. His films have also tended to have a light-hearted comic tone which marks a break from the tragic historical realism which characterized Taiwanese filmmaking after the end of the martial law period in 1987. Lee's films also tend to draw on deep secrets and internal torment that begin to come to the surface such as the gay-themed films The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Brokeback Mountain (2005), the martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and the comic book adaptation Hulk (2003)

He received the Dartmouth Film Award in 2002, along with Meryl Streep.

Lee's film Brokeback Mountain (2005) won the best film award at the Venice International Film Festival and was named 2005's best film by the Los Angeles film critics. It also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture — Drama, with Lee winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Director. Lee also won the Best Director award for the film at the 2006 British Academy Awards (BAFTAs). In January 2006, Brokeback scored a leading 8 Academy Award nominations including Lee for Best Director, which he won. He is the first Asian director to do so.

Films

Director

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See Also: Films directed by Ang Lee

Writer

Actor

Editing

Producer

Awards

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