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| Birth Name(s) : Ang Lee |
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Full Ang Lee Biography
Ang Lee (Chinese: 李安; pinyin: Lǐ Ān) (born October 23, 1954) is an Academy Award–winning film director from Taiwan.
The director's cut of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon premiered on the Ivy League campus of Dartmouth College in 2000. He received the Dartmouth Film Award in 2001, along with Meryl Streep. At Dartmouth, he also taught Kai Wong filmmaking.
After finishing the mandatory military service, Lee went to the U.S. in 1979 to study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he completed his bachelor's in theater in 1980. Thereupon, he enrolled at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University, where he received his MFA. He was a classmate of Spike Lee and worked on the crew of his thesis film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads. During graduate school, Lee finished a 16-mm short film, Shades of the Lake (1982), which won the Best Drama Award in Short Film in Taiwan. His own thesis work, a 43-minute drama, Fine Line (1984), won NYU's prestigious Wasserman Award for Outstanding Direction and was later selected for the Public Broadcasting Service.
Lee's NYU thesis drew attention from the William Morris Agency, the famous talent and literary agency that later represented Lee. At first, though, WMA found Lee few opportunities, and Lee remained unemployed for six years. During this time, he was a full-time househusband, while his wife Jane Lin (Chinese: 林惠嘉; pinyin: Lín Huìjiā), a molecular biologist, was the sole breadwinner for the family of four. This arrangement, an embarrassment in Chinese culture, put enormous pressure on the couple, but with Lin’s support and understanding, Lee did not abandon his career in films but continued to generate new ideas from movies and performances. He also wrote several screenplays during this time.
The 2005 movie about the forbidden love between two Wyoming cowboys immediately caught public attention and initiated intense debates. The film was critically acclaimed at major international film festivals and won Lee numerous Best Director and Best Film awards worldwide. In addition, "Brokeback" became a cultural phenomenon and a box office hit. "Brokeback" was nominated for a leading eight Oscars and was the frontrunner for Best Picture heading into the March 5 ceremony, but lost out to Crash, a story about race relations in Los Angeles, in a controversial upset. There was speculation that the film's depiction of homosexuality might have been the reason for that upset, while others speculate that Crash was simply a better movie. Lee said he was disappointed that his film did not win Best Picture, but was honored to win Best Director, becoming the first Asian to ever win the award.
Lust, Caution is being distributed by Focus Features and premiered at international film festivals in the summer and early fall of 2007. In the US, the movie received a NC-17 rating (no one 17 and under admitted) from the MPAA mainly due to several strongly explicit sex scenes. This was a challenge to the film's distribution because many theater chains in the United States refuse to show NC-17 films. The director and film studio have decided not to appeal the decision. In order to be permitted to show Lust, Caution in mainland China, however, Lee removed 9 minutes from the film to make the content suitable for minor audiences according to government restrictions.
Ang Lee's next film is rumored to be A Little Game, based on the play by Gerald Sibleyras and Jean Dell. Long-time collaborator James Schamus is also currently attached to the script.
Lee lives in Westchester, New York, with his wife and son, Mason Lee. Mason is pursuing a career in acting, and is currently in the play Zanna, Don't! with the Play Group Theatre.
Ang’s Chinese language films show a fair amount of linguistic diversity, which is rarely found at all in most Chinese films. In Pushing Hands, Mr. Old Chu had a fat T'ai Chi Ch'uan student who spoke Cantonese. In The Wedding Banquet, Wai-tun Gao’s would-be bride of convenience Wei-wei, spoke to her parents on the telephone in the Wu dialect (Shanghainese). And the Chinese restaurant's owner spoke Mandarin with a Sichuan accent. In Eat Drink Man Woman, most of the younger generation spoke Mandarin with a Taiwanese accent; a matriarch spoke Mandarin with a Hunan accent. There was also a scene in Eat Drink Man Woman where an old man spoke to Jia-Chien in Taiwanese, while she responded in Mandarin. While Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh were criticized by Mandarin speakers for what they considered Mandarin with poor accents in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Yeoh pointed out in an December 28, 2000 interview with Cinescape that “My character lived outside of Beijing, and so I didn’t have to do the Beijing accent.” When the interviewer Craig Reid remarked that “y mother-in-law has this strange Sichuan-Mandarin accent that’s hard for me to understand,” Yeoh responded “es, provinces all have their very own strong accents. When we first started the movie, Cheng Pei Pei was going to have her accent, and Chang Zhen was going to have his accent, and this person would have that accent. And in the end nobody could understand what they were saying. Forget about us, even the crew from Beijing thought this was all weird.” In Lust, Caution, languages range from Cantonese, Shanghainese, Mandarin, Suzhou dialect, to foreign speaker spoken Hindi, Japanese and English. |
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