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Prominent
Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee visits the Philippines to share his
insights on the art of filmmaking to Filipino audience in a tribute
event for him
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In the movie Life
of Pi,
the main character Pi finds himself dealing with a Bengal tiger he
calls Richard Parker in a small lifeboat after a shipwreck. He is
always in danger of being either devoured by the sea or by the tiger.
Somehow, they manage to survive, and Pi ends up grateful for the
tiger. The 2001 novel by Canadian Yann Martel, on which the movie is
based, reads: “A part of me was glad about Richard Parker. A part
of me did not want Richard Parker to die at all, because if he died I
would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a
tiger. If I still had the will to live, it was thanks to Richard
Parker. He kept me from thinking too much about my family and my
tragic circumstances. He pushed me to go on living. I hated him for
it, yet at the same time I was grateful. I am grateful. It’s the
plain truth: without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to
tell you my story.”
The movie version
emphasizes that the tiger scares Pi, and that fear keeps him alert
and alive. This positive aspect of fear is one of the driving forces
of its director Ang Lee to be one of the best film directors in the
world today.
“[Being an] outsider is
scary. You don’t have a sense of belonging. Everybody around you,
potential audience or critics, they’re scary. But I think scare is
good. You tend to do your best when you’re scared. I think if I’m
not scared I can be lazy. My biggest fear is that I keep repeating
myself and I lose my freshness, and I’m not doing my best.
Freshness is important. I feel like every movie that I make is like I
am doing a movie for the first time. I have to somehow pull myself in
that position. Yes, scare is bad. For myself, [with] the insecurity,
I’m doing my best. And that makes me feel alright even if the movie
flops. You still do your best. I think that’s the wonderful thing
about being an outsider,” Lee said in front of reporters,
filmmakers and admirers at the Imax Theater of SM Aura Premiere in
Taguig City in November 28, 2013.
Fifty-nine-year-old Lee was
in the Philippines for the first time upon the invitation of the
Taipei Economic Cultural Office for its Film Cultural Exchange
Program in cooperation with the Film Development Council of the
Philippines. The event, “A Salute to Ang Lee,” consisted of a
showing of Life
of Pi,
which won for him his second best director trophy from the Academy
Awards for 2012; and an open forum, in which he discussed his being a
filmmaker.
In the event, filmmakers
Tikoy Aguiluz, Brillante Medoza and actress Angeli Bayani, whose
film, the Singaporean Ilo
Ilo, just
won best picture in Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards, presented him
with the Lino Brocka Award, the highest honor for lifetime
achievement of the currently dormant Cinemanila International Film
Festival. Lee is considered as the most successful Asian filmmaker
today. In 2006, he became the first Asian and non-white to win an
Academy Award for best director for his film Brokeback
Mountain.
“Thank you, movie god,
for making movies big and small, each one distinguished by mastery of
his craft…We just want to say thank you for your passion and vision
and boundless humanity,” Aguiluz said. “Thank you, Jane Lin, for
supporting an artist, a househusband for six years. Thank you,
Taiwan, for recognizing a son and for giving him the highest
recognition an artist could ever have. Thank you, Ang Lee, for
visiting Manila and inspiring our filmmakers.”
Aguiluz as well as many in
the audience were familiar with Lee’s early struggles as a
filmmaker. Most likely, they have read the touching essay Lee wrote
after winning his second Oscar that circulated in the Internet. The
story could be one of his movies, full of tenderness and emotion.
“That year, I turned 30.
There’s an old Chinese saying: ‘At 30, one stands firm.’ Yet, I
couldn’t even support myself. What could I do? Keep waiting, or
give up my movie-making dream? My wife gave me invaluable support,”
reads the essay, translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Irene Shih
and posted in her blog. “My wife was my college classmate. She was
a biology major, and after graduation, went to work for a small
pharmaceutical research lab. Her income was terribly modest. At the
time, we already had our elder son, Haan, to raise. To appease my own
feelings of guilt, I took on all housework—cooking, cleaning,
taking care of our son—in addition to reading, reviewing films and
writing scripts. Every evening after preparing dinner, I would sit on
the front steps with Haan, telling him stories as we waited for his
mother—the heroic huntress—to come home with our sustenance
(income).
“This kind of life felt
rather undignified for a man. At one point, my in-laws gave their
daughter (my wife) a sum of money, intended as start-up capital for
me to open a Chinese restaurant, hoping that a business would help
support my family. But my wife refused the money. When I found out
about this exchange, I stayed up several nights and finally decided:
This dream of mine is not meant to be. I must face reality.
“Afterward (and with a
heavy heart), I enrolled in a computer course at a nearby community
college. At a time when employment trumped all other considerations,
it seemed that only a knowledge of computers could quickly make me
employable. For the days that followed, I descended into malaise. My
wife, noticing my unusual demeanor, discovered a schedule of classes
tucked in my bag. She made no comment that night.
“The next morning, right
before she got in her car to head off to work, my wife turned back
and—standing there on our front steps—said, ‘Ang, don’t
forget your dream.’
“And that dream of
mine—drowned by demands of reality—came back to life. As my wife
drove off, I took the class schedule out of my bag and slowly,
deliberately tore it to pieces. And tossed it in the trash.”
Lee had been against
several odds in his life. In Taiwan, where he was born in the town of
Chaochou in Pingtung, his father wanted Lee to become a professor
like him, but Lee instead enrolled at the National Taiwan University
of Arts and became interested in drama and the arts, disappointing
his father. He then went to the United States to attend University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he finished his bachelor’s
degree in theater in 1980, and the Tisch School of the Arts of New
York University for his Masters in Fine Arts in film production.
After school, he didn’t have a stable job for several years until a
producer in Taiwan became interested in two of his screenplays,
Pushing
Hands and
The
Wedding Banquet,
which won in a competition sponsored by Taiwan’s Government
Information Office in 1990. Pushing
Hands came
out in 1992 and The
Wedding Banquet in
1993, garnering commercial success and critical acclaim. Those
started the ball rolling for Lee. The two films were followed by Eat
Drink Man Woman (1994).
His first American film is an adaptation of a classic Jane Austen
novel, Sense
and Sensibility,
in 1995. He directed two more Hollywood movies, The
Ice Storm (1997)
and Ride
with the Devil (1999),
before taking on his first wuxia
film,
Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000),
for which he received four Oscars, four BAFTA Awards, a Golden Globe
Award for best director. He made Hulk,
a big-budget, Hollywood superhero movie, in 2003. His Brokeback
Mountain,
based on Annie Proulx’s short story, became a cultural phenomenon
and is the most awarded film in 2005. Life
of Pi currently
caps his constellation of achievements that brought him to many
places including the Philippines.
“I’m really looking
forward to be friends with you, and we shall have more
communications,” Lee said, adding that he is thinking of making a
film in the country. The said project would be a three-dimension (3D)
movie about boxing.
Manila was mentioned twice
in Life of
Pi, Lee
pointed out.
“This is a special movie
for me. [I worked on it for] four years of my life, [and] 3,000
people worked on the movie,” he related. “Twelve years ago, I
read the book. I never thought that it could be made into a movie. I
never gave it a thought actually. I was just inspired by the
philosophy in the book. I am a storyteller; I am filmmaker. [The
book] examines the value of storytelling, the emotional connection
with the unknown. It really drew me in. When I was asked to do this
movie five years ago, I really tried to crack it. I thought I didn’t
know to how to make this movie…but eventually I had a silly
thought. I thought if I had another dimension, maybe 3D, whatever, or
a different way of writing a structure, a story, maybe I can find a
way to tell the story, and at the same time examine it. I can get a
circular film structure and also I can get myself into 3D filmmaking,
which was a totally new cinematic language for me. It was a very
inspiring film experience.”
He continued: “I would
like to think my whole film career is a film school. I never stop
learning how a movie is made. I never stop learning about myself. I
never stop learning how the world works. I’m a curious filmmaker. I
never conquered anything. I am just a curious filmmaker. I hope I get
to explore filmmaking further into the unknown territory.”
Lee appeared shy and
child-like before the audience, which endeared him more to his
admirers. He gave his thoughts on the nature of his films and making
it in Hollywood.
“I have very unique
career. I started making mainstream movies [like] my first three
movies especially The
Wedding Banquet.
In America, you might call it spoof or comedy, but in Taiwan it’s
just a bizarre comedy of manners. So I was doing mainstream Taiwanese
films, low-budget, but they made it in New York as independent
filmmaking. They were released outside of Taiwan as art-house because
they were in foreign language, and I happened to win many awards over
the years,” he said. “I refuse to mix in Hollywood. I refuse to
be called Hollywood even though I can make a very expensive movie. In
some ways, I still like to think I cannot be categorized. I want to
have my independence…I have done the cheapest movies; I have done
the most expensive movies. I would like to have that freedom to
express myself.”
He continued: “Sometimes
when we talk about independent [movies], you have to be either wacky
or very different in film language, austere, so you can be in film
festivals, so you can get the attention of film critics. I never
really do that. I just express myself, doing what I think as my best,
finding my audience. Sometimes, it works out for me. Sometimes, I hit
both like Brokeback
Mountain.”
After making Hulk,
Lee thought he wanted to retire, “but I didn’t want to retire
with a big, expensive, not successful, angry movie. So I just grabbed
anything.”
“I thought Brokeback
Mountain was
a cheap movie about gay cowboys nobody wants to see, strictly
art-house. I just didn’t want to be angry,” he revealed. “I
told the producers if you want me to make this movie, anybody that
gets on my nerves, just get them away from me. And who knows, that’s
one of my biggest commercial success. With all my artistic
achievements, so to speak, winning awards, I also do well
commercially except The
Ice Storm, which
is a commercial flop, but I think it is critically acclaimed. You’ll
never know. I think movie is spiritual, as long as you do your best.
I don’t want to set boundaries. I don’t want to set a style. I
think my most expensive movies such as [Life
of Pi],
such as Hulk,
I think of them as art films, and smaller movies such as The
Wedding Banquet or
my very first movie Pushing
Hands, to
me they’re commercial films in terms of language. It really doesn’t
matter. Making this impossible movie like this is no different when I
made my student films. I just try to make it work.”
“It’s tougher in
American filmmaking to make independent films,” Lee said. “This
movie (Life
of Pi) is
very inspiring to me, how it works around the world. It didn’t work
so well in America, which used to be the leader of the market. The
whole world stood up for themselves. Eighty-five percent of the
income comes from outside North America. Even in North America,
Canada is better than America. So I think that’s good news for all
of us. Many movies in the established film language and business such
as Hollywood…you don’t have to follow it, you have the chance to
make it and find your audience. You just have to be patient and
little by little find where your audiences are, and I think there are
more chances in making movies.”
“I think Hollywood keeps
changing,” he further said. “There are filmmakers who never
really adjust to the way Hollywood operates. I’m one of those
persons who can manage that. It’s painful. There were times I
worked in China. A couple of movies got shot there, and the Western
press kept asking me, do you have freedom to do what you want? That
particular question. They expected me to say no. After a while I got
irritated. I would tell them, you know, the most un-free place to
make a movie is America. Not politically, of course, but American
film, particularly in Hollywood, it’s an establishment. It’s not
only financially, it’s film language, how things operate, ideology.
All those have to function certain ways. I think that bothers me.
Movie after movie, I try to break away but I also have to negotiate
with it.”
He addressed those who want
to make it to Hollywood: “So for those of you who want to make
bigger movies, of course, nobody makes bigger movies like the
Americans. It’s like if you want to contribute to science, in space
shuttle, you have to work in America. If you’re a great basketball
player, you want to play in the NBA. It’s the major league. There’s
a certain culture and way of thinking that you have to deal with. You
can work against it but you cannot ignore it. For those of you
interested in bigger filmmaking…mainstream movies [with] broader
appeal, if you’re talented in that and you want to break into
Hollywood, you have to know the operation, you have to know the film
language, and you have to know how to deal with it. You don’t want
to be a slave of that culture, of that establishment. You want to
show something different. I cannot tell you in a few words, but what
you have to be aware of [them]. You have to have good producers.”
“You have to know your
craft to either adapt or negotiate to make a difference. You have to
know your stuff,” he added.
His being an outsider was a
popular topic with Ang Lee, which he himself frequently mentions. Lee
is an outsider in many ways. His family settled in Taiwan from
mainland China. Then he went against his father’s wishes to be a
filmmaker. He went to the United States and became a househusband for
several years.
“Over the years, I
realized there’s nothing I can do to change that,” he related.
“My family, my parents went to Taiwan. I grew up in Taiwan. We’re
the outsiders; we’re not native Taiwanese. Then I went to America
as a foreigner, smaller, weaker. Everybody seemed to be smarter. I
didn’t speak their language so everybody looked smarter to me. They
sounded smarter and they looked bigger. So it was very intimidating.
Then when I went back to China, I’m Taiwanese. I’m not really
rooted in any nationality or culture, except the Asian tradition or
Chinese culture, which kind of drifted away from us. It’s
like a dream. So I’ve been believing in fantasy and have faith
something that doesn’t exist anymore so that makes me a drifter.”
For Lee, being an outsider
is not a negative thing. He said: “I like being accepted as an
outsider. I want to be alright being an outsider. I think hardly
anybody has absolute cultural roots, race or society that you can say
this is exactly [where I belong], I want to stay there. Most people
are forced to do that for solidarity of society, to deal with people.
Politically, it’s more powerful. But most of us are not made up
that way. We’re made up with many different elements in life. And
we can be all complicated and un-decisive. [We’re] outsiders, one
way or the other. But I like to think that a more civilized way to
deal with an outsider is to accept that. I consider myself an
outsider. I gradually make peace with that. And I would like to be
accepted that way. And anybody who comes out as outsider, it doesn’t
have to be categorized in a certain way. I will accept him and
appreciate what he can offer.”
And being an outsider has
advantages for Lee.
“The thing about [being
an] outsider—and I made many movies as an outsider—the benefit of
that is you’re objective. You haven’t really attached to it. You
get to the subtext really fast,” he said. “People say how did you
do The Ice
Storm?
It’s 20th-century American, seventies experience in the suburbs.
It’s so accurate. You grew up in Taiwan. How did that happen? To
me, I don’t know why that’s difficult. I see the subtext right
away. On the contrary, when I make Chinese films, it’s very hard
for me to see the subtext, what the movie is really about, the
undercurrent, but the text I am familiar with. On the other hand,
when I’m the outsider, the text I have to diligently adapt to,
learning and checking with filmmakers. I didn’t make those movies
overnight. I love learning, the learning curve. I love to work with
people, getting inspired, and to learn from them.
“I just made an Indian
movie. The important thing the Indian audience feels ownership of the
movie which happens and I’m very proud of that. I don’t want to
be an outsider coming in and imposing my way of thinking. I want to
learn from them. The thing with an outsider is accuracy I think is
actually easy because you don’t assume you know. You diligently
study and you research. And you’re very careful about accuracy. The
subtext you see right away. Actually, that’s the benefit. The
disadvantage of course is the culture, the mood of it, how you smell
like it, how do you smell Wyoming. I don’t know gay cowboys. People
are shocked at what appears in their eyes. How did that happen? How
did it feel seventies American? I think that’s a lot harder. I have
to admit I’m quite talented that way; I’m very good at guessing.
I check with people and my guess is right on.”
He further said: “I think
at the end of the day, movie is inspiration. It’s not about
statement like I know this thing, I made a movie, I made a statement,
you watch. It’s really about inspiration. It’s a provocation. I
think you make it enough so that people can make the movie in their
heads. I can never make a movie that’s as good as how people
imagine [it to be]. So actually I did half of the job. I’m a
skilled filmmaker. That’s what I do. But the rest of the movie you
have to invite audience to project themselves, their fantasies, their
emotions into the movie. It plays in their heads. For that end, I’m
merely a filmmaker. I provide provocations. It’s not like I know
all these things all my life. It’s filmmaking. I think that’s the
wonder of it. And this is something I love to do.”
Lee could not pin down how
he chose what movie to make.
“Every movie I picked I
don’t know why I’m attracted to it,” he said. “Like I grew up
in Taiwan, what do I have in common with gay cowboys in Wyoming? But
when I read the short story I cried. What hit me? And I tried to find
out with the movie. And it was a very satisfying experience. And I
went to different places. Emotionally, I got attached to it. As a
filmmaker I have many, many satisfaction.”
On making movies out of
books, he commented: “Book is good. I had to write my first two,
three movies, because I was young and nobody gave me scripts. And I
had to write. I felt writing is really painful. You’re alone. There
are writers who say, how do you deal with work? How do you deal with
so many people? I just have to type it down or write whatever I
imagine, and that’s it. To me, it’s the opposite. We work with
people, watch out for locations, do your research, you get all
sources of inspirations. Books are wonderful. They’ve done their
research. With two, three years of writing, there’s already lots of
material for you. But writing, you take out something blank, you have
to make up everything. To me, that’s lonely and painful. Once
established, I was happy not to write anymore. But I do work closely
with the writer.”
But when things are not
working out for him and the writer, he joked: “It’s your book;
it’s my movie. See you at the premiere.”
He revealed: “Aside from
Brokeback
Mountain,
the books I chose are not necessarily my favorite books because they
make me want to do something cinematically, not because the words,
the book itself attracted me. Something hits me like The
Ice Storm for
example. It obviously doesn’t have a story. It’s not movie
material.”
He mentioned one image that
struck him while reading The
Ice Storm,
and the movie progressed to reach that particular scene.
When asked about future
movie projects or dream projects, he answered: “I don’t have a
checklist. I think I’m unique. Most filmmakers, they have a few
things in development and they choose which one is ripe…I never do
that. I’m a one-movie-at-a-time kind of guy. Once when I’m in
pre-production I stop reading. I don’t care about others unless
it’s really, really important like Brad Pitt sent to you his script
; you better read. Other than that, the movie turns to be my life.
And somehow towards the end, something pops out, catch my attention.
I think they catch my attention because it’s an extension of the
movie I’m making. I think one thing leads to the next. They’re my
life. That’s the way I live my life. I cannot imagine how my life
is without movie-making. One thing I know, I know my wife would kick
me out of the house. That’s the big reason. I’m not joking.
Between movies, I’m like this at home (acts
like a drunk slob).
I’m like no good for anything. She’ll not tolerate me. Go make
another movie. I think as long as I still have the stamina to make
movies, I think I still want to make it.”
But Lee admitted that
sometimes making movie can take their toll on him, especially the
aspect of working with other people.
“Making movies is fun but
sometimes dealing with people is not fun,” he revealed. “It
reminds you of a reality. This world has gravity. No matter how much
you fly, like in Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon,
you still have to land and deal with people. And the more experiences
I have, the more I can see where people come from. You can get really
irritated. It can get on your nerves, and I have problems sleeping.
Those times I would think about quitting but I still want to make
movies. I don’t know what keeps me up. I feel like I’m the slave,
not a master of filmmaking. When a movie wants to see the audience,
they give me a call. I get possessed. There are a couple of movies
that I felt, I don’t want to do you, just leave me alone. I don’t
want to be your medium. Just leave me alone. And I couldn’t. For
the young filmmakers, if you feel that way I think you should do
movies. Because people I know who make movies, they’re that kind.
They don’t know what makes them keep making movies. They just have
to do it. We’re the slaves.”
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Ang
Lee (third from left) receives the Lino Brocka Award of Cinemanila
from director Brillante Mendoza; Angeli Bayani, actress of the
Singaporean film Ilo
Ilo,
which recently won at the Golden Horse Awards; and director Tikoy
Aguiluz
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