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Ang Lee () (born October 23, 1954) is an Academy Award-winning Taiwanese film director. Lee won the 2006 Best Director Oscar for Brokeback Mountain (2005).

Career overview

Many of Ang Lee films have focused on the interactions between modernity and tradition. His films have also tended to have a light-hearted comic tone which marks a break from the tragic historical realism which characterized Taiwanese filmmaking after the end of the martial law period in 1987. Lee's films also tend to draw on deep secrets and internal torment that come to the surface, such as in the gay-themed films The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Brokeback Mountain (2005), the martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director, and the comic book adaptation Hulk (2003).

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. [http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2000/oct00/lee.html Lee's film Brokeback Mountain (2005) won the Golden Lion (best film) award at the Venice International Film Festival and was named 2005's best film by the Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and London film critics. It also won best picture at the 2005 Broadcast Film Critics Association, Directors Guild of America, Writers Guild of America (Adapted Screenplay), Producers Guild of America and the Independent Spirit Awards as well as the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture — Drama, with Lee winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Director. Brokeback also won Best Film and Best Director at the 2006 British Academy Awards (BAFTA). In January 2006, Brokeback scored a leading eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director, which Lee won. He is the first Asian director to do so. The film, however, was upset by Crash for the Best Picture Oscar.

Biography

Education

Ang Lee was born in the town of Chaojhou in PingtungHo Yi. Family and friends praise Ang Lee's quiet dedication. Taipei Times. March 7, 2006., a southern agricultural county in Taiwan. He grew up in a house that put heavy emphasis on education and the Chinese classics. Both of Ang Lee's parents moved to Taiwan from mainland China following the Nationalists' defeat in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Lee's father, a native of Jiangxi Province in southern China, imbued his children with studying Chinese culture and art, especially calligraphy. Lee's grandparents died during the Cultural Revolution because they were accused of being one of the Five Black Categories (黑五類) .

Lee studied in the prestigious Tainan First Senior High School where his father was principal. He was expected to pass the annual Joint College/University Entrance Examination, the only route to a university education in Taiwan. But after failing the Exam twice, to the disappointment of his father, he entered a three-year college, National Arts School (now reorganized and expanded as National Taiwan University of Arts) and graduated in 1975. His father had wanted him to become a professor, but he had become interested in art at college. This early frustration set his career on the path of performance art.

After finishing the mandatory military service, Lee went to the US 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, 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 Best Film and earned him Best Director in the NYU student film festival and was later selected for the Public Broadcasting Service.

Dormancy after graduation

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 (林惠嘉), 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.

In 1990, Lee submitted two screenplays, Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet, to a competition sponsored by Taiwan’s Government Information Office, and they came in first and second respectively. The winning screenplays brought Lee to the attention of Li-Kong Hsu (徐立功), a recently promoted senior manager in a major studio who had strong interests in Lee’s unique style and freshness. Hsu, a first-time producer, invited Lee to direct Pushing Hands, a full-length feature that debuted in 1991.

Debut from Taiwan

Pushing Hands (1992) was a success in Taiwan both among critics and at the box office. It received eight nominations in the Golden Horse Film Festival, Taiwan’s premier film festival. Inspired by the success, Hsu collaborated with Lee in their second film, The Wedding Banquet (1993), which won the Golden Bear in the Berlin Film Festival and was nominated as the Best Foreign Language Film in both the Golden Globe and the Academy Awards. In all, this film collected eleven Taiwanese and international awards and made Lee a rising star.

Lee’s first two movies were based on stories of Chinese/Taiwanese Americans, and both were filmed in the US. In 1995, Hsu invited Lee to return to Taiwan to make Eat Drink Man Woman, a film that depicts traditional values, modern relationships, and family conflicts in Taipei. The film was once again a box office hit and was critically acclaimed. For a second consecutive year, Lee’s film received the Best Foreign Language Film nomination in both the Golden Globe and Academy Awards, as well as in the British Academy Award. Eat Drink Man Woman won five awards in Taiwan and internationally, including the Best Director from Independent Spirit. Hollywood optioned the film rights and remade it into Tortilla Soup (2001, dir. María Ripoll). This is one of the rare occasions in which a Taiwanese film was remade outside the island.

Coming to Hollywood

Lee’s extraordinary three dramas knocked out the door to Hollywood for him. In 1995, Lee directed Columbia TriStar’s British classical Sense and Sensibility. The switching from Taiwanese to British films did not stop Lee from claiming awards in the film festivals. Sense and Sensibility made Lee a second time director of the Golden Bear film in the Berlin Film Festival, and it was nominated in 7 Academy Awards and won the Best Adapted Screenplay by Emma Thompson. It also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama. After these successes, Lee directed another two Hollywood movies: The Ice Storm (1997) and Ride with the Devil (1999). Although the critics still generally favored these works, the box office was not impressive, which paused Lee’s uninterrupted popularity from the general audience and art schools since his first full-length movie.

Wu Xia and Superhero

In 1999, Li-Kong Hsu, Lee’s old partner and supporter, invited him to make a movie based on the traditional Chinese “Wu Xia” (A martial art and chivalry) genre. Excited about the opportunity to fulfill his childhood dream, Lee assembled a team from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). The film was a surprising success worldwide. With Chinese dialogue and English subtitles, the film became the highest grossing foreign film in many countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Director at the Academy Awards. It ended up winning Best Foreign Language Film and three technical awards. The success of "Crouching Tiger" demonstrated that Lee's artistry had a general appeal; it also inspired such established directors as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige to explore Wu Xia films for Western audience.

In 2003, Lee returned to Hollywood to direct Hulk, his first big-budget movie. Even though the film was based on a comic book superhero and was filled with obligatory CGI special effects, Lee used the genre to tell the tortuous story between a father and his son. The movie was a disappointment amongst both critics and audiences. After the setback, Lee entertained retiring early, but his father encouraged him to continue making movies.

Climbing the Mountain

Lee decided to take on a small-budget, low-profile independent film based on Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning short story, Brokeback Mountain. The 2005 movie about the forbidden love between two Wyoming cowboys immediately caught public attention and initiated intense debates. The controversies notwithstanding, Brokeback Mountain showcased Lee's skills in probing depths of the human heart. 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 boxoffice hit. "Brokeback" was nominated for a leading eight Oscars and was the frontrunner for Best Picture heading into the March 5th 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 the upset. Lee said he was disappointed that his film didn't win Best Picture *, but in this, his fifth, appearance in the Academy Awards, he did win Best Director, becoming the first Asian and the first non-Caucasian ever to win the award.

Films

Director

  • Lust, Caution (Chinese: 色戒) (2007)
  • Brokeback Mountain (2005) (won Academy Award for Best Director) (nominated Academy Award Best Picture)
  • Hulk (2003)
  • The Hire (BMW Short Movies) - Chosen (2002)
  • Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Chinese: 臥虎藏龍) (2000) (nominated Academy Award Best Director and Best Picture) (won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film)
  • Ride with the Devil (1999)
  • The Ice Storm (1997)
  • Sense and Sensibility (1995) (nominated Academy Award Best Picture)
  • Eat Drink Man Woman (Chinese: 飲食男女) (1994)
  • The Wedding Banquet (Chinese: 喜宴) (1993) (nominated Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film)
  • Pushing Hands (Chinese: 推手) (1992)
  • Fine Line (1984)
  • Shades of the lake (1982)
  • I Love Chinese Food (1981)
  • Beat the Artist (1981)
  • The Runner (1980)
  • One Day of Ma-Chuan Chen (Chinese: 陳媽勸的一天)
  • Laziness in a Saturday Afternoon (Chinese: 星期六下午的懶散)
See Also: Films directed by Ang Lee

Writer

Actor

Editing

Producer

Awards

References

External links

1954 births | American film directors | Best Director Golden Globe | Best Director Academy Award winners | Hulk films | Living people | Taiwanese Americans | Taiwanese film directors | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign alumni | English-language film directors

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