Ang Lee from the Filmmaker Archives

By Nick Dawson | August 28, 2009 @ 01:54 pm

To mark the release today of Ang Lee's latest film, Taking Woodstock, we have delved into the archives of Filmmaker magazine to run two interviews with Ang from years past.

 

 

 

 

First up, we have Peter Bowen's 2005 interview with him about Brokeback Mountain:

This is the second film — The Wedding Banquet being the first — which focuses on gay men. What is it about them that interests you?

Ang Lee: I grew up believing in the Chinese idea in Taiwan, believing in education, the nationalist party, my parents and all that. When I found a lot of that was phony, it sort of turned me upside down. I think that experience when I was 23 and I first came to the States, no longer believing in the place I came from, but also not being an American, made me realize that I have and will all my life be a foreigner, an outsider. That makes it very easy for me to see the world, the straight world, from a different angle. In my films, I always identify with the outsider, like the characters of Tobey [Maguire] and Jeffrey [Wright] in Ride With the Devil. Also, I understand things not being as we were told they were. That America, the civil war, the ’70s are not as we were told. So if I see material that looks very real to me and has a different angle and it is not what we see in public or in the media, then I find that very interesting.

Taking Woodstock, of course, has a gay man as its central character, and also deals majorly with the subject of familial conflict, which Godfrey Cheshire talked to Ang and his writer-producer partner James Schamus in 1997 when they discussed The Ice Storm:

There’s a great deal of anger in the film’s depiction of family relations.

Schamus: The film carries with it a certain clarity that is adolescent or pre-adolescent in terms of its reality — ideas of justice, retribution, morality, what’s fair. I hope the film says that we’re not endorsing [that adolescent view] but that we understand those feelings. There is an acceptance of anger without the film being a product of that anger. Not that that anger should be coopted or muted, but it should exist alongside other feelings and ideas. And that’s a more adult point of view.