Larchmont's Ang Lee will sacrifice audience for art

[summertime]

Larchmont's Ang Lee will sacrifice audience for art

By KEVIN CANFIELD | THE JOURNAL NEWS

(Original Publication: September 23, 2007)

Ang Lee, Larchmont's Oscar-winning director, may never have had a more challenging day on the job. That's the sense you get when you hear him talk about shooting the sex scenes that earned his new film, the beautiful period piece "Lust, Caution," an NC-17 rating.

"It was very heavy," Lee says, recalling the atmosphere on the set, as he and his film's stars, Tony Leung and Tang Wei, navigated the erotically charged terrain. "Those were a very difficult two weeks for us."

For his trouble, Lee was hit with a rating that will make his movie off-limits to anyone under 18. His follow up to "Brokeback Mountain" won't be breaking box-office records.

Lee, of course, has never pandered to fickle audiences or to his film studio's bean-counters. From 1997's "The Ice Storm," the movie that served as his breakout with American moviegoers, to the hugely admired "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," to the blockbuster "Hulk" and 2005's "Brokeback," Lee has cut his own unique professional path.

"Lust, Caution" represents another chapter in his unpredictable career. The film is set in China in the early 1940s, as the nation is occupied by Japanese troops. Wong Chia Chi (Tang) is a member of a student theater group that puts on plays about Chinese nationalism. Encouraged by the militant leader of the group, Wong befriends - and eventually couples with - Mr. Yee (Leung), a power player in the Japanese puppet government.

The relationship is a fraud. Wong's job is to lure Yee into a vulnerable setting, where he'll be assassinated. But against her judgment, Wong begins to develop feelings for Yee, a situation that plunges all involved into tumult and doubt.

The movie is based on a story by the well-known Chinese author Eileen Chang. Lee says he's moved by the tale's inventiveness, as it employs erotic themes to get at bigger ideas.

"Patriotism is something we never challenge, for the Chinese," he says. "But for a writer to use female sex psychology to examine it is really daring."

The sex is often graphic but entirely necessary to the story. Wong is tender, Yee is coarse. Their unlikely love affair reveals more about the couple than they could reveal through hours of conversation.

"I think people can see that it's a pivotal part of the drama," Lee says. The sex scenes are "relatively late in the movie. I think the audience is prepared to go along with it."

The scenes weren't easy to shoot. Lee says he made no effort to keep the mood light as his actors revealed themselves in front of the camera.

"If I do that, I don't think I can go through it. I don't know about them; I can't," he says. "On the contrary, it's very heavy, it's like hell.

"I have to believe in what we do ... so I kept pelting them with what it means, what they go through dramatically, so they're so into the character that they forget about themselves. That's what we went through, what I led them through, which eventually is like a second self. It gets so real it hurts."

Leung is an experienced actor who's appeared in internationally successful movies like "Infernal Affairs" and "2046." By contrast, Tang has never worked on a production of this size.

Lee was meticulous in casting for the role that she eventually won, bringing Tang in for at least five auditions.

The director, she says, "asked me a lot of questions: How I grew up, what my parents do for jobs, which kinds of books and movies I like and why, where is my college, what kind of theater I like - all these kinds of things."

"We screened through over 10,000 actresses to get to her," Lee says.

Dealing with performers of such disparate levels of experience was a challenge.

"Tony you just have to treat with respect. You just assume he knows much, which he does," he says. "She's more of a student. But they had to be in the same movie. I think I had to upgrade her acting skills. It took a lot of effort, not only from me but from the team.

"On the other hand, what I want from them is freshness. Actually that's harder on Tony than it was on her."

Since the mid-'90s, the 42-year old Lee has jumped back and forth between Chinese films and American movies. He likes it that way, he says, because it keeps him sharp.

"I think one benefits the other," he says.

"Doing an American film is more restful. It's easier with the support of a bigger film industry. There's a smaller, more independent kind of filmmaking in China. When I want to do something to this scale [in China], the production is very difficult.

"And also the texture - I draw from my own personal memories; it's just more personal. Therefore I'm more demanding. The pressure's on my shoulders. So psychologically it feels heavier, and physically I have to work three times as hard compared to an American film. I don't think I could do Chinese films back-to-back."

Lee says he believes the NC-17 rating for this film is fair, and he didn't consider cutting the film in order to get an R rating. Given its rating, its length - the movie runs more than two and a half hours - and its subtitles, "Lust, Caution" isn't the easiest sell of Lee's career.

"I expect mixed reactions," he says. "It's harder than 'Crouching Tiger.' It's a drama and it's a political backdrop.

"I think when you see it on the screen, it's quite fascinating. But I doubt it will get as much [of an audience here] as the Chinese audience. You have to work harder."


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