Advertisement

Ang Lee now directing his focus back to his homeland

Share
From the Associated Press

Oscar-winning director Ang Lee on Thursday encouraged his native island of Taiwan to reinvigorate its sagging film industry, saying movies have a power to move people and bring them together more than any other art form.

“There is such glamour in movies ... there is tradition and there is future,” Lee told a group of art workers and students in Taipei. “People are exhilarated when they talk about movies. There is a cohesive force for the human heart.”

Lee was making his first visit to his home island since his gay romance film “Brokeback Mountain” received four Academy Awards in March. Among them was Lee’s prize for best director, the first time an Asian has won the honor.

Advertisement

Lee noted that Taiwan’s free, democratic society offered fertile soil for a local filmmaking renaissance. “There are many talents, but they don’t have people to guide them,” he said.

Taiwan’s film industry, which won world acclaim in the 1980s for its realistic portrayal of island life, but has since been undermined by fading viewer appeal and growing columns of red ink. Over the last decade, annual movie production has stalled at around a dozen titles.

Lee said a lack of savvy scriptwriters was crimping the development of the film industry here.

“You can’t keep people in the dark theater without a good plot and good stars,” he said. “When I select a script, I have to make sure there are enough elements there to make a two-hour film.”

For years, Lee said, he had wanted to make a film on a Chinese subject but couldn’t get access to good scripts -- a sharp contrast to the scores of high-quality English-language scripts he receives in the West.

He called on Taiwanese to begin training talented young people, in the expectation they would reap the benefits in five or 10 years.

Advertisement

“Don’t put the focus on me or people of my generation, but on the young directors,” he said.

Advertisement