The movie that embarrassed Ang Lee: “It was brutal for them”
Ang Lee has always been a filmmaker who refuses to be pigeonholed. He first came to prominence in his native Taiwan, making comedy dramas and romcoms, before plying his trade in America in a huge variety of genres. For instance, he has made a superhero blockbuster, a CGI-heavy survival adventure, a family drama, an erotic espionage thriller, a love story between two cowboys, a western, and a martial arts epic. However, Lee’s first film outside of Taiwan was a conflicting experience, given that it was both a huge success and something of an embarrassment.
In November 2024, Lee gave a fascinating interview to The Hollywood Reporter, addressing his ability to jump seamlessly between genres. He revealed that he has been asked why he makes so many different kinds of films many times throughout his career. However, every time he hears the question, he feels the compulsion to move even further away from his own experience.
You see, Lee has never felt compelled only to present the world he knows in his films. In fact, he has always been slightly afraid that he would stagnate as a director if he stopped taking risks. He explained, “Maybe I was afraid to stay in one place because life is not really like that. Life never lets us do that for long. So if I stayed in one vein, I think I felt that it wouldn’t be honest.”
The acclaimed director also believes his life as a Taiwanese man whose parents moved to that country from China always made him feel like an outsider. Then, when he came to America to make films, he felt even more like he was outside looking in. To Lee, movies have always been his escape, and being a director helped him use this outsider feeling to get glimpses into different cultures from all over the world. As he put it, “In moviemaking? Why go back to the same place?“
This relentless curiosity is likely why Lee made an unusual choice for his first English language film: the 1995 Jane Austen adaptation Sense and Sensibility. At the time, he admitted to only speaking broken English, yet he signed up to make a literary adaptation that would live and die on its arcane 19th-century dialogue. He admitted to Newsweek that he thought the producers were crazy for wanting to hire him, but when he got halfway through the script, it began to make sense to him.
He mused, “In my films, I’ve been trying to mix social satire and family drama. I realised that, all along, I had been trying to do Jane Austen without knowing it. Jane Austen was my destiny. I just had to overcome the cultural barrier.”
This was all well and good in theory, but in practice, Lee’s tenuous grasp of English threw up some obstacles during the shoot. He admitted, “The conversations I had with the cast and crew were ridiculously funny. It was brutal for them, and I was very embarrassed.”
Star Emma Thompson told Screen Daily in 2023 that Lee’s directorial notes were “so brutal and funny” because of the language barrier. He had to express himself very simply, sometimes leading to instructions that could come across as blunt. Thompson chuckled that he once told her, “Don’t look so old,” and when he asked Hugh Grant to do one take “like bad actor”, the quick-witted star replied, “That was the one I just did.” Luckily, though, after some teething problems, Lee and his cast were able to see the funny side of any lapses in understanding and find workarounds.
For the director, Sense and Sensibility was a wonderful example of the universality of movies. After all, he was able to make a hit movie set in a world he had no experience with, in a language he struggled to understand. He told THR, “Somehow, that movie speaks. So, there’s got to be something in cinema that’s beyond articulation, beyond reason. That’s the magic of cinema.”
Ultimately, even though he may have suffered some short-term embarrassment while working out how best to work with a cast in English, Lee realised, “It’s not linguistic. I think that’s encouraging. Cinema bypasses all cultural barriers.”
