Lee emigrated from Taiwan to attend college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then film school at New York University. The 58-year-old still lives in the New York area, the Westchester suburbs, with his wife and two sons.
His first three films, all in Mandarin and revolving around Chinese families, were followed by a distinct break with “Sense and Sensibility,” his Hollywood arrival. But it was 1997’s “The Ice Storm,” an adaptation of Rick Moody’s novel about a Connecticut family’s disaster in the swinging `70s, that Lee says changed his perception of filmmaking and set him on a new path.
“A movie is really provocation,” says Lee. “It’s not a message, it’s not a statement. Before I thought: I have a story to tell, not even thinking of myself as an auteur. But that is a precious lesson to me, to take a step back _ a respectful step back.”
“Something about cinema, how it works in wonders, you just have to respect it,” he adds. “You should never believe fully like you know.”
“Life of Pi” was certainly full of its own lessons and trials. Lee spent a year making a 70-minute pre-visual animation of the middle chunk of the film set at sea. He had a giant water tank built in an abandoned airport in his native Taiwan, (“Taiwan will do anything for me,” he joked at the NYFF). Still, because of the considerable technical challenges, he says he only got an eighth of his planned shot list.
He was led to 3-D not by James Cameron’s “Avatar,” which was released after planning on “Life of Pi” began, but by searching for “another dimension” to tell such a story. The results, achieved with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, are perhaps the best 3-D work since “Avatar,” including a memorable flying fish scene and the glorious visuals of a whale surfacing in moonlight.
For the film’s young star, the gentle, humble, self-deprecating Lee was a mentor.
“He makes you so calm that you just let him mold you into whatever he wants to mold you into,” Sharma says. “He really showed me that I could do a lot more than I ever thought I was capable of doing.”
Lee may be “a Zen master” like Sharma claims, but his tranquility won’t abide one thing: Anyone who doesn’t cherish the precious chance to make a movie. “If you don’t give 100 percent, I get mad,” he says.
It’s enough of an all-consuming process that Lee doesn’t contemplate his next film until he has seen through the present one.
He says: “I’m still surviving this one.”
___
Follow Jake Coyle on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jake_coyle
By Andrew P. Napolitano
The president's men trash the Constitution to pursue antagonists
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
First over-the-counter column approved for fast and effective relief from even your worst media-induced headache.
Opinion, analysis, and musings on politics, pop culture, reinvention, and the resultant flotsam and jetsam floating around the right-of-center quadrant of the Left Coast.
Consummate traveler Todd DeFeo explores the unique stories that make destinations worth going to.
We welcome you to the intimate and personal thoughts on the news and events we, as editors, watch, read, and discuss with our writers every day.
Benghazi: The anatomy of a scandal
13 Photos
Vietnam Memorial adds four names
18 Photos
Cinco de Mayo on the Mall
11 Photos
NRA kicks off annual convention
8 Photos
