Ang lee

Ang Lee became the acclaimed maker of films like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Brokeback Mountain," he was an 18-year-old kid falling in love with the art of acting. And those first tentative moments, on a student stage in Taiwan, are what directly led to his newest film: "Lust, Caution," set in 1940s occupied Shanghai.

the movie in recent conversations at the Toronto International Film Festival and in Seattle, where he was honored at a Seattle International Film Festival tribute on Sunday. Based on a short story by Eileen Chang, "Lust, Caution" is the tale of a young woman whose life is transformed, dangerously and thrillingly, by performance. A student actor, she joins a group of radical students bent on assassinating a powerful political figure and changes her identity to infiltrate his world. Early in the film, we see her after her first stage performance, outside on a rainy night; she's breathless and dazzled by the new art she's mastering.

Lee quickly learned, as a young adult, that he'd rather direct movies than act on stage (after moving to the U.S. in his 20s, he studied film production at New York University), his love for acting echoes through his work — Heath Ledger's previously unseen, powerful subtlety in "Brokeback Mountain"; Kate Winslet's exuberance bursting from the screen in "Sense and Sensibility." "I'm still zealous about performing art, except that I don't do it with my own body," he said. "I have to tear actors apart so they do it for me."

For "Lust, Caution," his two leading actors came with very different backgrounds and required different kinds of direction. To play Mr. Yee, the subject of the planned assassination, Lee chose Tony Leung Chiu-wai, a veteran of Asian cinema perhaps best known to Western audiences for his love-struck work in "In the Mood for Love." Accustomed to playing the hero, he took on a much darker role.

In the role of the young actress turned spy, Tang Wei makes her feature-film debut. Lee's casting team looked at "over 10,000" young actresses before choosing he

The winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, "Lust, Caution" recently had its Asian premiere in Taiwan, with Lee in attendance. "It was a very, very special experience in my life," he said. "I was so nervous that day. I'm something of a golden boy there, so emotionally I'm all attached, especially for something like this, a very personal film."

The Taiwanese film-maker will remove sex scenes from the thriller ahead of its release there, says Screen Daily.

The movie has already been given a restrictive NC-17 rating in the US, where it hits cinemas later this month.

In "Brokeback Mountain," the 2005 critical hit and cultural flashpoint that won Ang Lee an Academy Award for best director, love is a haunting, elusive ideal briefly attained but forever out of reach. Lee's new movie, "Lust, Caution,"

Brokeback' is about a lost paradise, an Eden," Lee said this month, taking a break from a final sound-mixing session in New York. "But this one — it's down in the cave, a scary place. It's more like hell."Based on a short story by the popular Chinese writer Eileen Chang, "Lust, Caution" is set in the early 1940s during the Sino-Japanese war, mostly in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

Like Lee, 52, who was born in Taiwan but has lived and worked in the United States since the '80s, Chang had a foot in two worlds. Her celebrated early stories and novellas, written in the '40s, evoked the heady, glamorous fusion of East and West, old and new, that characterized Shanghai before the Communist takeover.

the 1949 revolution she fled to Hong Kong and then to America, where she continued to write and translate but became ever more reclusive, even as her fame grew throughout the Chinese diaspora. She died in Los Angeles in 1995. Her work has been adapted for the screen by the Hong Kong directors Stanley Kwan ("Red Rose, White Rose") and Ann Hui ("Love in a Fallen City").

A grand production on a modest budget of under $15 million, "Lust, Caution" was shot over four months in Hong Kong, Malaysia (standing in for old Hong Kong) and Shanghai.

But especially for Ang this was a much more difficult film. It took him to a place that was really emotional and extreme."

• Best Director, National Board of Review of Motion Pictures for Sense and Sensibility (1995)
• Best Director, New York Film Critics Circle Awards for Sense and Sensibility (1995)
• Best Director, Independent Spirit Awards for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2001)
• Best Director/Motion Picture, Golden Globes for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2001)
• Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, Directors Guild of America for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon(2001)
• The David Lean Award for Achievement in Directing, BAFTA Awards for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2001)
• Best Director, Boston Society of Film Critics for Brokeback Mountain (2005)
• Best Director, Broadcast Film Critics Association for Brokeback Mountain (2005)
• Best Director, Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association for Brokeback Mountain (2005)
• Best Director, Independent Spirit Awards for Brokeback Mountain (2005)
• Best Director, Los Angeles Film Critics Association for Brokeback Mountain (2005)
• Best Director, New York Film Critics Circle Awards for Brokeback Mountain (2005)
• Best Director, San Francisco Film Critics Circle Awards for Brokeback Mountain (2005)
• Best Director, Vancouver Film Critics Circle for Brokeback Mountain (2005)
• Best Director/Motion Picture, Golden Globes for Brokeback Mountain (2005)
• Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, Directors Guild of America for Brokeback Mountain(2005)
• The David Lean Award for Achievement in Directing, BAFTA Awards for Brokeback Mountain (2005)
• Best Achievement in Directing, 78th Academy Awards for Brokeback Mountain (2005)
• One of 100 individuals included in Time Magazine's TIME 100: The People Who Shape Our World (2006)

In 1995, Lee directed Columbia TriStar's British classical Sense and Sensibility.The switching from Taiwanese to British films did not stop Lee from claiming awards in the film festivals. Sense and Sensibility made Lee a second time director of the Golden Bear film in the Berlin Film Festival, and it was nominated in 7 Academy Awards and won the Best Adapted Screenplay by Emma Thompson. It also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama. After these successes, Lee directed another two Hollywood movies: The Ice Storm (1997), a family-oriented satire set in 1970s suburban America, and Ride with the Devil, an American Civil War drama (1999).

Although the critics still highly favored these works, the box office was not impressive, which paused Lee’s uninterrupted popularity from the general audience and art schools since his first full-length movie. However, in the late 1990s and 2000s, The Ice Storm has had high VHS and DVD sales and rentals and repeated screenings on Cable television, which has increased the film's popularity among audiences.

Lee's NYU thesis drew attention from the William Morris Agency, the famous talent and literary agency that later represented Lee. At first, though, WMA found Lee few opportunities, and Lee remained unemployed for six years. During this time, he was a full-time househusband, while his wife Jane Lin (Chinese: 林惠嘉; pinyin: Lín Huìjiā), a molecular biologist, was the sole breadwinner for the family of four. This arrangement, an embarrassment in Chinese culture, put enormous pressure on the couple, but with Lin’s support and understanding, Lee did not abandon his career in films but continued to generate new ideas from movies and performances. He also wrote several screenplays during this time. ^[5]

In 1990, Lee submitted two screenplays, Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet, to a competition sponsored by Taiwan’s Government Information Office, and they came in first and second respectively. The winning screenplays brought Lee to the attention of Li-Kong Hsu (Chinese: 徐立功; pinyin: Xú Lìgōng), a recently promoted senior manager in a major studio who had strong interests in Lee’s unique style and freshness. Hsu, a first-time producer, invited Lee to direct Pushing Hands, a full-length feature that debuted in 1991.

Born in 1954 in Pingtung, Taiwan, Ang Lee has become one of today's greatest contemporary filmmakers. Ang graduated from the National Taiwan College of Arts in 1975 and then came to the U.S. to receive a B.F.A. Degree in Theatre/Theater Direction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Masters Degree in Film Production at New York University.

At NYU, he served as Assistant Director on Spike Lee's student film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983). 

Lee wrote a couple of screenplays, he eventually appeared on the film scene with Tui shou (1992) (aka Pushing Hands), a dramatic-comedy reflecting on generational conflicts and cultural adaptation, centering on the metaphor of the grandfather's Tai-Chi technique of "Pushing Hands".

Hsi yen (1993) (aka The Wedding Banquet) was Lee's next film, an exploration of cultural and generational conflicts through a homosexual Chinese man who feigns a marriage in order to satisfy the traditional demands of his Taiwanese parents. It garnered Golden Globe and Oscar nominations, and won a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

The third movie in his trilogy of Taiwanese-Culture/Generation films, all of them featuring his patriarch figure Sihung Lung, was Yin shi nan nu (1994) (aka Eat Drink Man Woman), which received a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination.

(1995), his first Hollywood-mainstream movie. It acquired a Best Picture Oscar nomination, and won Best Adapted Screenplay, for the film's screenwriter and lead actress, Emma Thompson. Lee was also voted the year's Best Director by the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle. Lee and frequent collaborator James Schamus next filmed The Ice Storm (1997), an adaptation of Rick Moody's novel involving 1970s New England suburbia. 

Director at the Golden Globes, and became the highest grossing foreign-language film ever released in America. Lee then filmed the comic-book adaptation, Hulk (2003) - an elegantly and skillfully film with nice action scenes. 

ee has also shot a short film - Chosen (2001) (aka Hire, The Chosen) - and most recently won the 2005 Best Director Academy Award for Brokeback Mountain 

The Oscar-winning director says that despite his celebrity, he's extremely shy and struggles with social interaction.

"Making a movie, I have plans in my head. Somehow one way or another I manage to roll the camera and get something in the can. But off the set, at the dining table ... it's still awkward for me," said Lee, a native of Taiwan.

He feels comfortable "momentarily" if the conversation turns to movies, the 52-year-old filmmaker 

Lee won an Oscar for "Brokeback Mountain." His Chinese-language spy thriller "Lust, Caution" won the top Golden Lion prize at this year's Venice Film Festival. His films also include "Hulk," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Sense and Sensibility."

He said being one of the most famous Chinese-speaking directors in the world is a tremendous burden.