Cold Snap in the Low ‘70s

Coming to America was a conscious choice, but staying was decided by a twist of fate. In 1984 Ang Lee had finally completed his master’s thesis--a film short called “Fine Line”--for his degree at New York University, but the possibilities of working in this country were not promising. “I was packing up, getting ready to return to Taiwan,” he recalls. “I asked myself, who wants a Chinese filmmaker here?”

Then in February 1985, “Fine Line” won the best director and best film awards at the university’s annual film festival. A William Morris agent was duly impressed by Lee’s effort and managed to sweet-talk him into sticking around--and signing a five-year contract. Well, why not? Lee’s wife, Jane, was still completing her studies at the University of Illinois, and they had just had their first child, a boy, the year before.

“So I gave myself half a year or so to see what would happen,” Lee says in a Chinese restaurant in midtown Manhattan. He’s a medium-built, mild-mannered fellow given to murmuring in a monotone and wearing a poker face leavened with a soft smile. This evening he looks a bit bleary-eyed from putting the final touches on his latest film, “The Ice Storm,” a Fox Searchlight release that reaches Los Angeles theaters on Friday. (It opened in New York late last month.) “But once you’re in the cycle,” he continues, “you just get sucked in.”

“Sucked in” seems an apt term for a director whose career has been no less than a whirlwind since his breakthrough in 1993, “The Wedding Banquet.”

That was a modern-day comedy of errors featuring a Chinese yuppie in New York trying desperately to hide his homosexuality from visiting parents--resulting in obfuscation and disguise, mistaken identity and misunderstanding, and, finally, as in all good comedies, revelation and reconciliation.

The time was ripe for a cross-cultural fable, and the film delighted both critics and audiences. It won the top prize, the Golden Bear, at the Berlin Film Festival--sharing it with a more traditional mainland China melodrama--then it got an Academy Award nomination for best foreign language film. Variety hailed it as “the most profitable film in the world in 1993.” Made for a meager $750,000, “The Wedding Banquet” brought in a world theatrical gross of $30 million. Not bad for a second film.

Success breeds opportunity, and Lee has been on the run ever since, making nearly a movie a year. After “The Wedding Banquet” he went back to his native Taiwan to make another domestic comedy, “Eat Drink Man Woman.” Then came a bigger surprise, a shocker to some: Ang Lee, that Chinese director, was tapped to helm “Sense and Sensibility,” Columbia’s film adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic on manners and mores in 1800s England. The result was respectful praise and seven Oscar nominations--though none, as many pointed out ruefully, for the director.

It was his longtime collaborator James Schamus who brought him the novel “The Ice Storm” while they were working on “Eat Drink.” At first Lee struggled with the desultory narrative. Then, he says, “I got interested in it after page 200.”

On the face of it, the story seems so very un-Ang Lee. It’s about the sex, drugs and consumer culture careen of confused teens and adults in the affluent bedroom community of New Canaan, Conn. The year is 1973--the age of Watergate, America’s failure in Vietnam and an ice storm in the northeast.

Lee displays his knack for distilling stories to their essence when he sketches the film in broad strokes: “The romantic late ‘60s sink into the suburbs. The experience of boundaries is not quite known yet; it’s all so chaotic.”

In 1973 Lee was in Taiwan, so in preparation for shooting, he steeped himself in the social history and cultural lore of those times.

“It was an era of embarrassment, that’s the essence of the movie, “ he explains. “It’s very uncomfortable to watch. Everything’s very amusing, wacky, but seriously not quite right. The path to liberation is not as fun as they thought it would be.”

Lee is especially pleased with the first-rate slate of actors the project attracted: Kevin Kline and Joan Allen play Ben and Elena Hood, a couple on the edge of transition, and Sigourney Weaver is their neighbor Janey Carver, with whom Ben is carrying on a tawdry affair.

When asked about the switch from working with British to American actors, Lee points out that the adult actors in the current production were also theatrically trained. “They work at about the same level [as the British],” he says. “[However] they’re easier to work with than British actors because they seem to know movies better. America is a more movie-oriented country, and England is more stage-oriented, speech training, television. American actors just merge into your movie. [For British actors,] if you put a camera in a place they’re not comfortable with, that they’re not facing, they feel uneasy.”

Lee praises both Kline and Weaver, and he believes that the younger players--Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood and Tobey Maguire--”stole the show.”

Lee says that as a Libra, he’s always trying to find the balance. Maybe that’s why when he is asked about the little tempest stirred while shooting in New Canaan, his first reaction is to brush it off. “Don’t write about that!” he says, his voice rising for the first time.

The pristine town found it annoying enough to have traffic diverted for the location shooting, but when they got wind of what Moody’s book was about, they were none too happy about the possibility of being portrayed as a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah--or, at best, Peyton Place. The New Canaan Advertiser complained in an editorial, “New Canaan will be depicted to the movie-going world as a cesspool of depravity and a raunchy hotbed of illicit sex.”

But Lee is quick to point out that the movie has cut down on the sex in the book, and producer James Schamus says they smoothed it over with the townsfolk, even donating a film script to the local library to assure them of their intentions.

“Eventually they let us finish shooting, but it was a lot of pressure,” Lee concedes. “When you’re not welcome somewhere, it creates a lot of psychological pressure.” The production shot eight weeks in New Canaan, then three more on sets built at the Harlem Armory.

Born and raised in Taiwan, Lee, 44, left in 1978 to study in the United States. First he took a degree in theater from the University of Illinois, then went on for a master’s at New York University’s famous film school. Next he spent six years at home being, as he openly admits, a “househusband.” He did the cooking and wrote scripts, while his wife, a molecular biologist, served as breadwinner for the family.

In trying to pitch his ideas to potential producers, Lee hit a roadblock. “I’m very talkative, but still there’s a cultural difference,” he concedes. “It’s very hard to sell yourself and your ideas. It’s just very different if you didn’t grow up here.”

“In those days Ang couldn’t pitch his way out of a paper bag,” says Schamus, who was approached by Lee for his first film, “Pushing Hands.”

“But then when he started describing the film he wanted to make, I turned to Ted Hope [his partner at Good Machine] and said, ‘This guy sees things like a director. He’s going to be a great filmmaker.’ So we took him on.”

In 1991 Lee had won a script competition sponsored by the Taiwan government, which also offered a small production grant. “Pushing Hands” was a minimal-budget production about a Chinese man and his recently arrived from Beijing father trying to cope with life in modern America--the son managing, the father not doing so well.

But it was his second film, “The Wedding Banquet,” which Schamus helped him write, that made him famous. The following year he completed “Eat Drink Man Woman,” the story of three sisters in Taipei, living in their father’s house, and how they leave home, one by one. Lee’s films are often preoccupied with the changing nature of the family, as well as the necessity for the individual to grow up and move on. “Eat Drink” won another round of praise, though more subdued. Kenneth Turan, The Times’ film critic, wrote, “Though it is only Ang Lee’s third feature, it is a strikingly confident one, and viewers will be understandably eager for the next course to appear.”

The next course would turn out to be “Sense and Sensibility,” which delved into a whole new continent of cuisine. When he joined the project, Lee felt a little behind things, as well as intimidated by the prospect of working with the Oscar-winning Emma Thompson, who was not only one of the leads but who also wrote the screenplay.

In a press conference last year, Thompson discussed how difficult it must have been for him. “It really was awesome because he was coming into a British crew, a British cast, a British script,” she says. “All these actors knew each other, as well, and they’re going around saying, ‘Oh yes Jane Austen, we can do that!’ Then Ang turns up and says, ‘Actually I would like something a little different.’ I’m sure that’s why the film has the quality that it has because we were all knocked off center. There had been endless adaptations of Austen, and Ang required more, and what he required was extremely subtle.”

Up to then Lee had been working with semi-professionals in his Chinese films, some of whom he put through acting exercises he had learned in the U.S.

Winston Chao, star of “The Wedding Banquet,” recalls that, “Ang Lee was as stern as a schoolmaster.” In England, the director found himself working with highly trained professionals who sometimes had their own distinct way of seeing things.

Observes Lindsay Doran, who produced “Sense and Sensibility” and is now president of United Artists, “They’re used to directors who are either mean and rude or gentle and nice; but having a director who’s gentle and nice but also rude was a new experience for them--and still is every day!”

Schamus believes that many misinterpret Lee’s mild-mannered demeanor as a sign of weakness. “Instead, he’s a very determined guy who knows just what he wants.” At the same time, he’s motivated by a basic spirit of collaboration--and decency--which results, says Schamus, in the fact “that actors end up loving to work with him.”

“I offer something new,” says Lee. “It’s happening--Chinese filmmakers are choosing to do projects for personal reasons, not for reasons of identity. Identity has a lot to do with how you grow up--that I cannot deny, cannot change.

“ ‘Sense and Sensibility’ has no Chinese flavor--that’s not why I was chosen to do it,” he continues. “It’s because in essence I’m a filmmaker who combines satire with romantic drama. I like that--nobody stresses my Chinese background--it’s what you can do to contribute to the movie.”

Like many Chinese, Lee has a strong sense of privacy and doesn’t talk easily about his family. But when he does mention his wife and two sons, he does so with obvious warmth.

After finishing “The Ice Storm,” the first order of business was a private matter: to move. For more than a decade his family had been crammed into a rented 800-square-foot apartment in White Plains, outside New York City. His wife has been begging for a bigger space, one they own.

Answering the call of the whirlwind has its price. “I’ve just been so busy making films,” Lee says, shaking his head. “I haven’t had a break. But after this it’s really time to move. My kids are getting big.”

This summer the Lees moved into their dream house in Westchester, N.Y., not far from White Plains. “We’re used to it,” he says, “and it’s close to my wife’s job. Me, I don’t mind the commute.”

Did Jane like his last film? “Oh, she really loved it; she was very moved by it,” he says with pride. Then breaks into a small laugh, “My sons couldn’t get into it, you know. They just thought it was ‘girls’ ’ stuff.’ ”

His next project is yet another departure. It will be an adaptation of the book “A Woe to Live On,” which Lee wryly describes as “a Civil War western with men and guns, ambushes and raiders.” When he will do another Chinese film is anyone’s guess. So far he’s had trouble finding a suitable script, though he keeps looking.

Yes, Lee says, he’s happy with “The Ice Storm,” which took the screenplay award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, but he also feels that it may prove a shocker to those expecting the gentle comedies he’s made in the past. “I don’t know how the audience will take it--it’s a tough movie,” he admits. “But the end is still redemptive, compassionate.”