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Heath
Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain.
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Ang
Lee won the Best Director Award for Brokeback Mountain
at the 78th Academy Award.
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Ang Lee with his wife and children.
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The Taiwan-born, New York-based moviemaker Ang Lee once again
hit the headlines in Hollywood and indeed around the world when
he picked up the Best Director Award at the 78th Academy Awards
for Brokeback Mountain. As the most successful director ever to
have emerged from China, at least in terms of the number of awards
he has collected, Lee demonstrates his profound understanding
of human emotions through the characters he works with. With a
long list of blockbusters to his name, including Wedding Banquet,
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Senses and Sensibility, The Ice
Storm and now Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee has achieved artistic
and commercial success on both sides of the Pacific.
His use of typically mild oriental tongues to express his understanding
of the world is widely held as the secret of Ang Lee’s success.
In Brokeback Mountain, he explores what was regarded even in America
as a sensitive topic: the homosexual relationship between two
young cowboys who tumble into love while herding sheep through
the Wyoming mountain range during the early 1960s. He handled
the subject – and touched his audiences -- with restrained
expression of the emotions. After the Oscars, Ang Lee told journalists
that his cultural roots lie in China, and that his success stems
mainly from his Chinese upbringing.
Born and raised in Taiwan, Ang Lee moved to the United States
in 1978. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater from
the University of Illinois, he went on to New York University
to complete a Masters of Fine Arts in film production. Ang Lee
often says that he uses Chinese thinking and ideologies when directing
a Western film, while he prefers to adopt western visual perceptions
when directing Chinese films. He compares the Chinese and Western
cultures to the right and left cerebra of his brain, and says
that the combination and balance of the two inspire him when making
his movies. He subtly blends the two cultures to bring something
altogether fresh and different, even exotic, to fans of Hollywood
film.
In many of his films, Ang Lee explores family-related issues.
His The Ice Storm is a scathing criticism of the values and ideals
of upper-class American society in the 1970s. Both of the families
in the movie have two children, and at first they appear perfectly
normal and supportive. But through a series of similar experiences,
and the way in which the families struggle to communicate both
within and with each another, it becomes clear that deeply rooted
problems exist. Director Lee uses the children to exemplify the
parents’ failures, and their mistakes impact heavily and
harshly on the adults in their lives.
A Childhood Dream Comes True
The mild mannered Ang Lee looks more like a scholar than a film
director. Most of his films leave audiences spellbound with their
touching plots about moral principles and ethics or cultural conflicts.
His most significant contribution to film culture is his ability
to get inside the cultures and characters he depicts and inject
them with insight and maturity in a way that transcends stereotypes
of Asian or Western film.
Born to an intellectual family in Taiwan in 1954, Ang Lee’s
father was a school principal and was very strict with his education
when Ang was young. For a long time, he was made kowtow to his
parents during major Chinese festivals – a formality that
has since died out. Even in such a conservative family environment,
Ang Lee developed a natural love for film and performance art.
In 1973, he was recruited by the Film and Drama Department of
the Taiwan National Art Institute in Taipei. It was there that
his formal film studies began, and he once grabbed the Best Actor
Award in a college drama competition. His further education in
the United States enabled him to gain a better understanding of
Hollywood movies.
Ang Lee loved the martial arts from an early age, and he describes
his Academy Award winning film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
as the realization of his childhood dream. The movie perfectly
represents traditional Chinese culture and its martial arts skills.
Its characters and plot reveal tolerance and personal loyalty,
two important morals advocated by traditional Taoist ideology,
and the enthralling martial arts action is fascinating to watch.
It comprehensively satisfied its Western audiences’ curiosity
about the mysterious and exotic Chinese culture, and thus claimed
the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film in 2000.
Efforts Behind the Screen
There are plenty of Chinese film directors and actors plying
their respective trades in the West, and trying hard to blend
their own culture with that of the West in their work. But Ang
Lee undoubtedly stands out as the most successful. He does have
an advantage: Ang Lee stayed in the States upon finishing his
master’s in New York, and he was able to delve into and fully
understand American film culture. At the same time, his early
Chinese upbringing is rooted in his character. He could therefore
perfectly portray both the rational love that is treasured according
to traditional Chinese concepts and the passion and desire that
excited his Western audiences in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Ang’s career path, however, has not always been a smooth
one. Though he graduated as the top of the class, employment prospects
were scarce at that time. He stayed home without a job for six
years. During that time, he put a lot of thought into familial
relationships, life values, morals, ethics and emotion and thus
became an “expert” in human nature.
To Ang Lee’s mind, film is a means of reflecting the complexities
of human nature, complete as it is with the worries, sorrows,
and achievements and delights of life. A beautiful, spotless soul
is, he reckons, a premise for achieving that reflection. Some
of the greatest movies ever made have provoked this eternal topic,
and Ang has used his intimate familiarity with the cultures of
the East and West to bring about touching life stories through
the language he knows best: film.
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