Lee comes home to northern California film fest

By Kirk Honeycutt

SAN RAFAEL, California (Hollywood Reporter) - The tribute to Ang Lee at the Mill Valley Film Festival was something of a homecoming for the Oscar-winning director of "Brokeback Mountain" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

When the Taiwanese filmmaker brought out his first movie, "Pushing Hands," in 1992, the San Francisco Bay Area festival "was the only place in the world that would show my film," Lee told the audience Friday. "Even Sundance turned it down."

Then in 1997, Mill Valley screened his suburban drama "The Ice Storm" when he was still a virtually unknown director. When he finally returned to Marin County several years later to live for the better part of a year while doing special visual effects at George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic for "The Hulk," he was world famous, having made the most successful Chinese-language film ever with "Crouching Tiger."

Lee's latest film, "Lust, Caution," an intense psycho-sexual drama set in Japanese-occupied China during World War II -- which has opened to significant box office in Asia, especially Taiwan and Hong Kong, but divided Western critics so far -- kicked off Mill Valley's 30th anniversary celebration on Thursday.

So his love of the area and of its festival, one of the key regional festivals in the country, was unmistakable, as was the emotional response to his work by a packed house.

Between film clips from his 10 feature films, Lee relived his cultural and cinematic education. He spent the first 23 years of his life in Taiwan, including college and military service.

"I was culturally rooted and I didn't speak English," he noted. "I didn't learn to speak English until after (1995's) 'Sense and Sensibility.' I felt sorry for the actors I had to direct."

His initial love affair was with the theater, not film. Standing on stage, facing an audience for the first time, an experience he re-creates in "Lust, Caution," thrilled him. There was also, he pointed out, no filmmaking tradition in Taiwan at the time.

Coming to New York and not knowing English well, he knew he could not act so he moved into directing. In delving into Western stage drama, he had to break with his own cultural biases.

"Eastern tradition in drama is the search for harmony," he explained. "Western tradition is the search for conflict, the total opposite of how I was brought up."

Ultimately, Lee found theater to be too focused on the actor, not the director, so he switched to studying film at New York University.

"As soon as I touched film, I knew I had found my thing," he said. "If you don't speak English and can direct 'Sense and Sensibility,' then anything is possible!"

It took six years before he made his first film, a period of his life he admits was "depressing." Two things changed this: He met James Schamus, who has worked as a writer or producer or even his "entourage" on every project since. Lee also won both first and second place in a screenwriting contest in Taiwan so he used the prize money to make "Pushing Hands."

His first three films, "Pushing Hands," "The Wedding Banquet" and "Eat Drink Man Woman," were all serio-comic family dramas set within the Chinese-American community in New York.

"Now I'm making all these tragedies," he joked. "I don't know what happened to me."