film director. Lee has directed a diverse set of films such as Eat Drink Man Woman
(1994), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
(2000, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
), Hulk
(2003), and Brokeback Mountain
(2005), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director.
Ang Lee was born in the town of Chaochou in Pingtung
, a southern agricultural county
in Taiwan. He grew up in a household that put heavy emphasis on education and the Chinese classics.
It's the first movie I feel really proud of. But I know it's not a movie for everyone. Some people will embrace it, but some people will hate it, and I'm not really sure how to deal with that. In the past I've made movies that were pretty universally liked. You can't really hate them. You can discard them, but you can't really hate them.
Gradually I got tuned into the world — that happens on every movie. I did a women's movie, and I'm not a woman. I did a gay movie, and I'm not gay. I learned as I went along.
The stern dad stuff doesn't work anymore. You have to be level with the kids, you have to be a nice guy... The authority thing just doesn't work anymore. It's like directing a Chinese film vs. directing an American film. On a Chinese film you just give orders, no one questions you. Here, you have to convince people, you have to tell them why you want to do it a certain way, and they argue with you. Democracy.