How Ang Lee, Taiwanese filmmaker, gambled on switching genres to prove himself in Hollywood

Ang Lee is one of the most successful film directors of all time. With nine Oscar nominations and three wins, he has twice beaten Steven Spielberg to the best director prize, becoming the first non-white person ever to receive the award. Parasite ’s Bong Joon-ho was the second. Born in Taiwan to Chinese parents, Lee moved to America to study film, and made his name with the Father Knows Best trilogy, a series of Asian-financed fish-out-of-water family dramas of which 1991’s Eat Drink Man Woman is the stand-out. Since then, he has flitted from genre to genre, tackling everything from costume dramas to comic-book blockbusters with conviction, often teaming up with scriptwriter James Schamus. If there’s one strand connecting these disparate films, it is that they are all, in some way, examples of outsider cinema. Lee has also shown a predilection for literary adaptations, perhaps something to do with his deep feel for character. For his breakthrough, an Oscar-garlanded version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility written by and starring Emma Thompson, Lee himself was the odd one out. He hadn’t read any Austen and English was his second language. Every Ang Lee film ranked, 20 years after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon “I thought they were crazy,” he told The Daily Beast, “I was brought up in Taiwan, what do I know about 19th-century England?” But gradually it came into focus. “In some ways I probably know that 19th-century world better than English people today,” he said to New York magazine, “because I grew up with one foot still in that feudal society.” More excellent adaptations followed. Based on Rick Moody’s 1994 novel, The Ice Storm was a 1970s-set suburban drama, starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver, which played like an unpretentious, non-predatory American Beauty. Lee’s masterpiece remains 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, a heart-rending adaptation of Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story about forbidden love between sheep herders in the American West of the 1960s. “What do I know about gay ranch hands in Wyoming?” asked the director in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, a by-now familiar refrain. But, once again, these tragic characters were the ultimate outsiders. The film made Heath Ledger a star, and would have won the Oscar for best picture but for the squeamishness of the Academy. Whether choosing challenging material, or making use of new techniques, Lee is always testing himself. From a Western perspective, 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , a beautifully balletic take on the wuxia genre starring Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi, was an extraordinary risk. It paid off many times over, winning the Oscar for best foreign-language film and opening the floodgates for Chinese epics such as Zhang Yimou’s Hero. Equally, 2012’s Life of Pi, a CGI-heavy adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel about an Indian boy (Suraj Sharma) stranded at sea with a tiger, was shot in 3D – very rare for a prestige picture. “I thought of 3D half a year before Avatar was on the screen,” Lee claimed in the Chicago Sun-Times. “I thought water, with its transparency and reflection, the way it comes out to you in 3D, would create a new theatrical experience.” Such risk-taking has also lead to some spectacular failures. Lee’s Hulk, made in 2003, five years before the Marvel Cinematic Universe officially started, was far too talky for a summer blockbuster, not that the box office minded. Meanwhile Gemini Man , last year’s action thriller, pitting assassin Will Smith against a digitally de-aged version of himself, bombed, and made audiences positively nostalgic for Martin Lawrence. “I know I’m gonna get beat up,” Lee told The Guardian of his wayward choices, “but I have to keep trying.” He does indeed – and besides, occasional failure is the price of taking risks. For the most part, Lee is an Asian director who has managed to make personal movies on a world stage, mastering different genres while avoiding the generic. “Wherever I shoot my film, it is a Taiwanese film,” he said in Focus Taiwan. Perhaps more to the point, it is an Ang Lee film. In this new monthly feature series exploring Asia’s impact on international cinema, we examine how the continent’s directors have fared in Hollywood, whether its most popular films survived the remake process – and at what cost. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook