The setting might be contemporary New York or civil war-era Missouri, 18th century England or a magical realist stretch of the Pacific Ocean, but for Ang Lee the approach remains constant: “Wherever I shoot my film, it is a Taiwanese film.”
Lee, born and raised in Taiwan but based since the 1970s in the US – where he’s made most of his films, beginning with his debut more than three decades ago – mostly makes Hollywood films that are atypical for mid- to big-budget American cinema, the pace unhurried, the drama quietly observational.
That essential patient humanism has remained apparent through all Lee’s work, even as his ambition as a filmmaker has grown. Having spent the first half of his career making gently unfolding dramas, Lee has from the 2000s on branched out with some surprising projects: a wuxia film, a superhero movie, an action thriller. Lee has spent more recent years, meanwhile, experimenting with the latest filmmaking technologies, his cinema becoming more immersive and more reliant on special effects as he searches for new horizons in the cinematic experience…