Lee Shall Overcome
Having bagged an Oscar for the angst-ridden Brokeback Mountain, director ANG LEE lightens the tone with his new movie, a paean to the Woodstock festival. He explains why he chose to honour the high-point of hippy culture
Tara Brady, 12 Nov 2009
When art house audiences fell for Taiwanese cinema during the Taiwanese New Wave of the nineteen nineties, one name emerged to rule them all. Hou Hsiao-hsien may have condensed the turbulent WW2 years into City of Sadness, a stately 157 minute epic. Edward Yang may have possessed the ability to make anything look dreamy. But it was Ang Lee, a kid from the Taiwanese sticks, who immediately garnered mainstream attention with such crowd pleasing indie comedies as The Wedding Banquet and Pushing Hands. The director, who graduated from NYU alongside his near namesake, Spike Lee, is cheered by the recollection.
“It wasn’t one of those New Waves that is written about later but that you don’t really notice at the time,” recalls Mr. Lee. “And it didn’t matter that I was based in America. We were all in touch. We all knew there was something happening. We all had ideas about Taiwanese identity and Chinese identity.”
It is, perhaps, one of the few times in his career that Ang Lee has not been an outsider. His friendly, easy manner has made him Hollywood’s most sought after actor’s director, having ushered Emma Thompson and Heath Ledger to Oscar victory. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director; he took the statue home in 2006 for Brokeback Mountain. But he has always stayed slightly adjacent to the movie establishment, returning to Asia for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Lust, Caution and alternating between $100 million dollar budgets and angular dramas. Ride With The Devil looks at slaves who fought for the south during the American Civil War; The Ice Storm takes on seventies suburban swingers; the cowboys in Brokeback Mountain are gay.
“I like to think I’m un-categorical,” he laughs. “But I guess I’ve always been kind of an outsider. So I’m always on the lookout for other outsiders to make movies about.”
The filmmaker met his latest leftfield hero while he was doing a promotional tour for Lust, Caution. He ran into Elliot Tiber, the man who brought the festival to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel (not Woodstock) on a TV talk show and was immediately taken with his story. Lee and long-time screenwriter-producer partner James Schamus have since adapted the material into Taking Woodstock, a pretty mosaic of the fabled shindig.
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