Ang Lee (Photo from AP)
Oscar Award-winning director Ang Lee doesn’t want to leave school – in his mind, at least. The life of a movie director, especially one as celebrated as Lee’s, is enviable, to say the least. However, as a true disciple of the medium, a lover of story and storytelling and a man of vision, Lee knows that life at the helm of some of the most brilliant pieces of cinema is an endless learning process.
Like most cinematic greats who simply follow a beacon no ordinary mortal seems to see, Lee admits to not having a plan or a checklist. “I would like my career to be forever a film school,” he would tell Cannes just last May in an interview the festival published on its official website.
Unlike those that try to hard and bandy about going to film school in New York like it would go out of fashion, Lee has had a long road to where he is now. His place in the pantheon among his contemporaries of great modern directors – winning an Academy Award for Best Director twice (“Brokeback Mountain” in 2005 and “Life of Pi” in 2012) and a Best Foreign Language Film for his 2000 masterpiece “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” – makes the fact that he had reportedly actually failed twice in the Joint College/University Entrance Examination, which would have let him get into a university in his homeland of Taiwan seem like a funny footnote in his biography thus far.
His father may not have found it funny then, but if there is one thing that Lee teaches us now, it’s the fact that there isn’t only one way to live a dream and make it real. In his pursuit of his vision, he has paved the way for other dreamers like him, particularly from this side of the world, Lee being the first person of Asian descent to win an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for Best Director. Not bad for a guy who started out with a theater degree, and remained unemployed for years despite working towards a Masters in Fine Arts in filmmaking in, yes, New York.
His more recent work transcend not just language and culture barriers but aim an arrow of inspiration to the hearts of his viewers. In delving into the complexities of human emotion and championing the human spirit, Lee makes films that speak more clearly than their intricately woven stories, glorious sceneries, its lavish colors and allow his audience to lose themselves into a dream they both share.
“I’m an avid filmmaker,” he declares in the Cannes interview. “I like to play different roles and I have a lot of curiosity, I would like to touch and learn all kinds of filmmaking. In different places, people teach me how to make movies. I write the movies myself. I just see what I’m curious about. I keel thinking about something. Sometimes when I put off a material, four or five years later, it keeps haunting me.”
Thus has been Lee’s journey so far, answering to a relentless push and pull in which art is the ultimate result – the life of Lee as we know it.
The life of Ang Lee
Source: Mb.com.ph (November 26, 2013 at 08:00AM)
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