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Ang Lee Quotes

Ang Lee OBS is a Taiwanese film director and screenwriter. Lee's work is known for its emotional charge, which critics believe is responsible for his success in offsetting cultural barriers and achieving international recognition.Lee's earlier films, such as The Wedding Banquet, Pushing Hands, and Eat Drink Man Woman explored the relationships and conflicts between tradition and modernity, Eastern and Western. Soon after, Lee arrived in Hollywood with his first film Sense and Sensibility. Lee's films also deal heavily with repressed, hidden emotions in many of his films, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Ice Storm, Hulk, Sense and Sensibility, Life of Pi, and Brokeback Mountain. Lee won two Academy Awards for Best Director, for his work on Brokeback Mountain, and Life of Pi, becoming the first non-white person to win the award. He also won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, receiving nominations for Best Picture and Best Director as well.

✵ 23. October 1954
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Ang Lee: 4   quotes 0   likes

Famous Ang Lee Quotes

“It's the first movie I feel really proud of. But I know it's not a movie for everyone.”

Ang Lee

On The Ice Storm (1997) Salon (17 October 1997).
Context: 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.

“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.”

Ang Lee

On parenting, Salon (17 October 1997).
Context: 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.

“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.”

Ang Lee

On developing a sensitivity for authentic details in the making of movies, Salon (17 October 1997).

“Mainstream films have occupied Hollywood but you can get bored very easily. It can be very repetitive and I think now we want something fresh and something inspiring and different, daring. The mainstream film is very expensive to make and it scares people. It's made for the worldwide audience, you have to please so many people, and the business men start running the movies rather than artists. This is back to the oldest way of Hollywood filmmaking, creating a fantasy, but it has been lost. It seems to take a foreign language film to recoup that ultimate movie viewing experience.”

Ang Lee

On Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon http://www.imdb.com/news/wenn/2001-03-12#celeb4, quoted at IMDb Movie/TV News (12 March 2001).

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