Ang Lee featured on DGA Quarterly cover
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Chinese-American film director Ang Lee is the latest cinematic superstar to appear on the cover of the prestigious "DGA Quarterly" magazine, the official publication of the Directors Guild of America, Mtime.com reports.
"DGA Quarterly" has boasted many great names within its pages, such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and James Cameron.
The magazine applauds Lee for breaking new ground with universally appealing stories like "Brokeback Mountain" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". His repertoire is so diverse it seems the only thing Ang Lee won't do is repeat himself.
Asked about how he feels talking to the magazine, Lee said, "It's great to have gotten to a place where I can share advice and experience with my fellows in this way."
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Poster of Ann Lee's work.[Xinhua] |
Lee talked about the reasons behind wanting to shoot his next film "Life of Pi", based on the book by Yann Martel. He said that he was intrigued by the story when he read it in 2001 but didn't think it could be made into a movie. Then while he was starting his 2009 movie "Taking Woodstock", Fox 2000 approached him and said the project had become available again.
"Life of Pi" tells the story of a boy stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a tiger. Despite recognizing technical difficulties in putting the film together, Lee saw potential for making a new kind of film. But this would involve previsualisation, one of Lee's least favorite aspects of filmmaking.
Before filmmakers shoot expensive scenes, they have to meticulously plan them out. Lee believed there was no other way to make this film. "It's exciting. It's moviemaking. There are no rules," he said.
Lee also talked about how he discovered his passion for directing, "I grew up in an agricultural culture, which tries to emphasize peace and balance with society and nature, and so attempts to diffuse as much conflict as it can. But in Western culture, particularly theatrical culture, it's all about conflict, asserting personal free will and how that can create a conflict within the family, or in the larger society. And I found I was talented at communicating those kinds of situations. Eventually, after all my exposure to film, seeing five to seven movies every weekend, I wanted to do films. I did my graduate work at NYU, three years in the film program. It's a very pragmatic program; you just go out and make movies."
After a few years, Lee developed his own principles towards the art of filmmaking, "This is the important thing: people watch a movie, and a movie's average length is something like an hour and forty minutes to two hours. And I believe that people really focus on the film as an image for maybe about ten, fifteen minutes. The drama is what is really important in the kinds of films I make. It's got to be about human beings. Nothing holds your attention longer than human faces, something the audience can identify with. Storytelling, drama and human faces - all those comprise the center of what I want to do. I spent movie after movie trying to break away from it, to be more visual, because I like differences. But you can only do so much. It all has to relate to the characters."
Lee also talked about the stories behind the movies he's made, many of which relate to his friendship and partnership with screenwriter James Schamus, his view on technology used in film and particularly, his passion for culture.
"I was directing both in English and Chinese and bouncing in between the two; it became a balancing act for me. In American films, because it was an adopted culture, the skill and artistic endeavor became clearer. And actually in some ways, psychologically it's easier. I see the subtext better. As a foreigner, accuracy is the first thing you'll see, but getting the cultural habits is more difficult. Then once I had directed in English and went back and started 'Crouching Tiger', I found my thinking had been Westernized, globalized a lot. So I had to find my way back into the Chinese culture, which was my first culture."
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