It has been a long time coming, but Chinese cinema looks as though it has finally taken over the world. From Hong Kong, John Woo has conquered Hollywood with Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II.
The art-film cognoscenti have long been enamoured of the precision and craftsmanship of mainland China’s Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. And, after years of trying, Jackie Chan has cracked the multiplexes (and wallets) of the West wide open.
But it is a softly spoken 46-year-old who is arguably the most remarkable figure of this dazzling generation. Ang Lee, Taiwan-born but a long-time resident of the United States, has in less than a decade forged a body of work that has put him at the forefront of the world’s independent film-makers.
The Wedding Banquet remains one of the most profitable low-budget films of the 1990s. Sense and Sensibility received seven Oscar nominations (one actual statuette materialised, for Emma Thompson’s screenplay). The Ice Storm is generally acknowledged as the finest treatment yet of the emotional emptiness of the 1970s ”me” decade. And it is conventional Hollywood wisdom that Lee will be the first Chinese film-maker to win the best director Oscar – though whether it will be for his new film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is anyone’s guess.
In the flesh, Lee cuts an unassuming figure, a far cry from the stroppy weirdness of most American directors of his ilk, or the expensive suavity of other Chinese film-makers feted in the West. No Wong Kar-wai sunglasses for Ang Lee — he’s neatly dressed but hardly cuts a dash in his suburban-store threads and he never raises his voice above a gentle mutter.
On the other hand, he doesn’t seem as bemused by Hollywood success as John Woo, whose discomfort in the face of the West’s fan worship is palpable whenever he has to appear in public.
”I feel very sorry for John Woo,” says Lee, with real feeling. ”I was glad that he did Face/Off, but I feel he is unhappy making this movie Mission: Impossible II. I’m glad it made so much money, though.”
Woo’s blood-and-fire Hong Kong thrillers were achieved through the freedom granted by the armies of willing helpers typical of Hong Kong’s film-making community; now, Woo has jumped straight into the upper echelons of studio Hollywood, where every line of dialogue and every foot of film is subject to executive interference and control. Lee, on the other hand, has trodden a much more measured path, negotiating his way through the more liberal environs of New York’s independent film circuit. But even Lee has no firm answer to the question of how, exactly, the Chinese have managed it.
”It’s kind of a chi [energy] thing,” says Lee, deadpan. ”Everything is rotating. I think this generation, wherever we come from, shares a similar cultural background. We’re brought up with Chinese melodrama but through education or whatever, we turn to other things. Now, in the climate of a declining film industry, no one knows what to do. Then boom-boom-boom, one or two films catch attention at film festivals and a world audience and we just keep making movies.”
Sitting alongside Lee is James Schamus, the academic-cum-producer who has worked on all of Lee’s feature films. Schamus, currently associate professor of film theory at Columbia University, was there at the start of Lee’s film-making career, when after six years of trying, Lee finally made his debut, Pushing Hands, in 1992.
Schamus, a short, bespectacled New Yorker, talks lucidly about Chinese film-making’s tradition of ”cross-national transactions” and Asian cinema’s propensity for ”co-financing interface structures”. Schamus gets excited about the reaction he sees ”against an uninformed but well-meaning critical community, which has often tended to pigeonhole Chinese directors into a specifically art-house idiolect. So that if you’re from Taiwan, you’re going to be an Edward Yang or a Hou Hsiao Hsien.”
At this point Lee interjects wearily: ”Long takes …”
Lee and Schamus together are conducting a war on several fronts. Firstly, as they are both acutely aware, Far East film-makers are generally the preserve of the international festival circuit and their highly crafted films win plaudits but do little box-office. On the other hand, it is a challenge to turn a relatively sophisticated Chinese movie into a significant international hit. ”I have two sons in America,” says Lee, ”and all they care about in Chinese culture is Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Those movies present probably the worst, most raucous part of Chinese culture. I want to straighten that out. So my parental affection comes into the project.”
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is based on the fourth ”episode” of a five-strong series of novels by Wang Du-lu and is quite obviously Lee’s attempt to integrate Asian and American cinema. Filmed with all the aesthetic grace you would expect of one of China’s auteur directors, it also contains the kind of spectacular, gravity-defying martial-arts action that Hong Kong’s commercial cinema specialises in and is wrapped up with the sweetener of two of the region’s most internationally bankable stars, Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-fat.
”Because anticipation is high,” Lee explains, ”I try to scoop up all the audience without disgracing myself. In Asia I have to deliver the film like a summer blockbuster, like a Jackie Chan movie; but afterwards I have to bring the movie to the West and release it like an art-house film, because of subtitles. I try to please everyone.” He giggles. ”I look at American movies, the big muscles, and try to apply that to Chinese film-making.”
Lee’s student years, in which he bounced from Taiwan to the United States, offer the perfect primer for his cross-cultural agility. Born and raised in Taiwan, the son of a schoolteacher, Lee spent two years at the country’s academy of art, doing plenty of acting in the film and theatre department. He transferred to a drama college in Illinois in 1978, when he was 23; two years later he won a place at New York’s crucible of talent, the NYU’s film-making course.
Though Lee excelled at NYU, it wasn’t the springboard for him that it became for contemporaries like Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch. He spent almost two years making his ”thesis” film, a Chinatown-meets-Little Italy love story called Fine Line. But by 1986, Lee was so dispirited with America’s lack of interest in Chinese-inflected movies that he was on the verge of moving back to Taiwan with his wife and son. Winning an award at a film festival stopped him. In Lee’s words, he’d become a ”hot student”.
Six years of frustration followed, when one project after another bit the dust. Broke and desperate, Lee eventually heard about a script competition set up by the Taiwanese government and knocked together a screenplay called Pushing Hands, about an elderly t’ai chi master living with his son’s family in the New York suburbs. He also sent in, as an afterthought, a little number called The Wedding Banquet, which had been lying in his bottom drawer for a while.
Pushing Hands took the top prize, The Wedding Banquet the second. Though Lee vastly preferred Banquet, the offer by Taiwan’s Central Motion Pictures office to fund the prize-winner (to the tune of $400 000) was too good to turn down.
In 1992, Lee finally became a film director.
This is where Schamus, and his company Good Machine, came into the picture, producing Lee’s New York-based movie. Good Machine also came on board Lee’s second film, The Wedding Banquet, which unexpectedly hit a chord with its unfussy, intelligent appreciation of immigrant pressures. Released in the summer of 1993, The Wedding Banquet became one of the year’s most profitable movies. Lee then headed back to Taiwan to make the cooking-equals-love movie Eat Drink Man Woman, his first attempt at continent-hopping film-making. (Says Schamus: ”Chinese films have a different way of working with crew and actors.
The position of director is pretty much revered. It was a shock when we went on set in Taiwan and it was all ”Mr Director this, Mr Director that.”
Lee’s transfer to the big league came from the most unlikely of sources – an offer to direct Emma Thompson’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, at the height of the mid-1990s Jane Austen revival.
”How can you resist working with Emma Thompson?” asks Lee. ”In that film I didn’t think I did anything new for myself as a film-maker, but I was bringing myself up to a new level. For an Eastern director, it was the first significant Western movie. Sense and Sensibility scared me because I had to prove I can endure a studio production, I can direct the English language, I can work with a movie star, and so on.”
With that success, Lee and Schamus next embarked on The Ice Storm, the adaptation of Rick Moody’s 1970s-set novel, which again hit a chord with audiences, this time wallowing in 1970s nostalgia. ”To me The Ice Storm was the newest period piece, a costume drama so to speak,” says Lee. ”It was very scary, too, because it was so fresh in people’s memories.”
Schamus concurs: ”People working on the movie were so into it. A lot of the unity of the movie’s design came about because of Ang’s ability to organise all the departments together in pre-production in a way that got everybody behind the vision of the film very early on. It was quite specific – he would do thematic charts, every scene, every image, and we’d sit through these endless pre-production meetings going through every scene.”
It’s through comments like these that you can sense the ferocious single-mindedness that must lie behind Lee’s easy-going facade. But in company with Schamus, he has clearly found a relationship that serves his talents perfectly. ”I’m not a business guy, I’m a director,” he explains, ”but I don’t like to work for hire. I don’t like to deal with studios. I don’t like to have conversations with executives. I pitch to the studio, then never talk to them until the test screening.”
If, as everyone expects, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon takes off like the thoroughbred it is, Lee will have cemented his place as a cross-cultural colossus, bridging styles, genres and languages in a way no film-maker has managed before. And what of the future? ”I don’t know,” he mutters in a quiet voice. ”I can make movies for ever.”
