A special preview of Ang Lee’s latest film, Lust, Caution, followed by a conversation with the director himself…
After six tragedies it would be nice to make a comedy again, admits Ang Lee. But then perhaps he should stop making such a good job of them?
The prestigious director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Ice Storm, Eat Drink Man Woman, Ride With the Devil and Brokeback Mountain, which rightfully won best director at the Oscars in 2006 (even if he did lose out on best picture to the contrived Crash) is at The Gate cinema, Notting Hill, London to discuss his latest movie, the superb and controversial Lust, Caution. (What is it with those commas, Mr. Lee?)
But first the audience are treated to a preview showing of the film itself. The film tells of a young student, Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) who has come to Hong Kong from China in 1938. Their bourgeois existence seems a world away from the Japanese occupied China she has left behind. Joining a drama society run by a fellow Chinese expatriate, Kuang (Wang Lee-hom) they put on a show to broadcast the fate of their fellows under Japanese rule.
Abandoned by her father, who has left her behind to escape to London, finds her true calling as an actress, able to move audiences by her performances. But Kuang wants the society to take a more active role in the Chinese resistance. He sets them on an ambitious plan to assassinate a top Japanese collaborator, Mr Yee (Tony Leung), with Wong as the hook to seduce him away from his bodyguards. She befriends his wife (Joan Chen) and soon becomes a trusted member of the family, with Yee becoming more attracted to her. Until disaster blows fatally their plan apart and Wong flees back to China.
Three years later, Hong Kong has fallen to the Japanese and Wong is in Shanghai. Kuang finds her again, now a member of the real resistance. Asking her to resume her role to ensnare Mr Yee and finish their plan to assassinate him. She must put on the performance of her life. But as Yee falls further for her, is she too falling for him, and if so what must come first - her love or country?
It’s a sumptuous recreation of 40s Hong Kong and China, painstakingly researched and quite believable, that adds substance to Ang Lee’s tale. There’s a deliberate nod to Hitchcock, particularly Notorious, where Cary Grant sets Ingrid Bergman on a course to uncover Nazi spy secrets at any cost, by showing first Ingrid in footage form Intermezzo, and then Cary in Penny Serenade. (He later admits that showing Notorious itself would have been too obvious.)
Tony Leung bringing humanity to a role that so easy could have been devoid of sympathy, with Tang Wei making a serious impression in her first major acting role. And then there are those scenes, the ones everyone has been talking about - the sex. Is it real? Well, it’s not as explicit as you might have thought, but it sure looks realistic.
Lust, Caution sees Ang Lee making a welcome return to his Chinese roots once again to create his most personal, and what could be one of his finest moments. It looks set to be one of the movie highlights for 2008 (it’s released in the UK in January).
(Warning, the following contains spoilers - see the film first!)
As with Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee has once again taken a short story as his source material and ‘filled it out’, as he puts it. Eileen Chang’s work was originally just 28 pages, but the process of bringing it to the screen became almost like a detective novel, taking a combination of what she wrote, and what she may have originally intended.
She’d become successful very young, with the majority of her most famous work published before she turned 25. Yet this story caused her no end of problems, she worked and reworked it, publishing it many years later. In conversation after the film, An Lee revealed at first he was quite shocked. The tone is unlike any of her other books, resembling more soft pornography. But it wasn’t just that, it’s the choice her lead makes: a diamond above patriotism? Love even? Not in China, he teases.
He suspects that she her whole career writing about what she knew, and that this story is actually about her self. He found it terrifying as nowhere before or since had he ever read in Chinese literature what women get from sex. (He still doesn’t know, he jokingly adds). Not only is she writing it about that, but pitting it against patriotism, and worse the Japanese war, perhaps the most sensitive in China’s history. How dare she?
In many senses he feels she was having the same problem with the story as him. Indeed, the parallels in this story with her life are plain to see. Her relationship with her quite abusive father, her first marriage to a man who was not only already married, but was also labelled a collaborator with the Japanese, and her a traitor because of her age. He feels she became a very bitter person in the process. That was her motive for making the lead an actress, so that it would not be her.
Similarly in the process of filmmaking, Ang Lee himself assumes the identities of others, and that distance actually allows you to get a lot closer to the truth. He believes she spent an afternoon writing that 28 pages, and 25 years trying to come to terms with it and cover it up. But the way in which she did so he found interesting. In adapting it he found himself trying to trace it back to the truth, really trying to figure out what she had wanted to write, and not be fooled by the brilliant manner in which so.
When adapting the story into a full-length feature, he realised he was making two movies. The first is a melodrama, the melodrama he grew up with in his culture, built around patriotism. There’s a certain innocence, that you’re supposed to sacrifice yourself for your cause. The acting is melodramatic too, all youthful exuberance and innocence, exaggerated. As are the colours, which reflect those used throughout Hong Kong and southern China, lots of red, green and white, and plaster, in that English colonial fashion. It’s a south east Asia sort of tropical look. Lots of sweat.
The second half is more of an old-fashioned film noir like that of the 40s, dark, romantic mysterious, but with very little colour. He realised he needed something between them to make that transition, and that’s when the stabbing scene became necessary.
Lee tells us that the idea first came from James Schamus, who has written or rewritten all of his films to date and also produces his work. We would never do something like that to Eileen Chang’s work, he jokes, it takes an American to do that. Lee refers to it as a ‘bar mitzvah’ scene, a coming of age for the students involved. The character of Wong has just lost her virginity, and now the male characters must become men, so for Ang this became a sort of ritual. And that became reflected in how he filmed it.
The performances from the actors are about much more than what is said. Ang Lee likes to imply the subtext, the real meaning to what the characters are saying, which could be completely contradictory. From Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on, he realised there was much more to a scene than simply getting coaching an actress to cry. There has to be thought behind it to make it moving.
Actors can do vain things, make big gestures that mean nothing, but he wants it to actually mean something. So he tells them what they should be thinking, and changes it to help keep it fresh. For instance, people keep asking him what is Tang Wei thinking when she takes the pill out, he explains. He doesn’t remember. He knows it was take 13, but not what he said. That’s been his process for his last few movies. Fortunately for him, he admits, most of the actors he works with are top notch.
On to the Lust part of the movie, Ang revealed how he kept the crew to a minimum to shoot the sex scenes. There were only four members of the crew and the actors themselves. He acted as continuity, recording, hair, make-up, chores, everything, as well as directing, then it was just the cameraman, assistant cameraman and boom operator. Everyone else was sent out, not just off the set, but out of the shooting stage. In all, those three scenes took 12 days to shoot.
The most difficult to shoot? The Mahjong scenes around the table. The continuity had to be spot on, and the women had to practise and practise for weeks to get it right. It was important to Ang that the actresses showed much more about what was going on than simply the game, hew wanted them to be telling us something about the war outside.
That was in a sense what attracted him most, that the story sees the war from a women’s point of view. You get a lot of information form their chatting, he tries to hint at how much Mrs Yee knows about her husband and his relationship. In some ways, he’s treating it like a war scene itself.
The casting of the Wong Chia Chi role was particularly difficult. Shortly after deciding to proceed with the project he realised no actress could play this part, so held an open call in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. In total he interviewed more than 10,000 actresses to get to Tang Wei. But when she walked in, that was it. He admitted he usually decides on a leading cast member in seconds.
Tang was perfect for the role. She belongs to the story, you could believe it happened to her. A lot of people were talented, good looking, even famous, but you just couldn’t believe that this crazy story happened to them. Tang had the same disposition of his parents, classy, rare and very difficult to find in modern China and Hong Kong.
Most of all, she reminded him of himself. He identifies with the character, wants to be the one that goes through the story, and he felt like when she walked in she was the female side of him. Usually the male leads are personifications of their directors, but on this occasion it is female role of Tang Wei that Lee connects with. He admits to being a little confused.
Lust, Caution is easily his most personal film to date. Well, it doesn’t get much more personal than lust. For Ang Lee, his goals are to keep making movies as good as he can. He acknowledges the freedom the success of Brokeback Mountain has given him (and the fact that his friend James is now the head of Focus) but awards aren’t really his ambition. He’d just like to make a comedy again. It was how he started, four very successful comedies in a row. He has two aims, ones which could be combined. One to make a comedy, the other, to make a film that doesn’t mean anything - that would be a very pure form of art for him.
Lust, Caution is released in cinemas around the UK on 4 January 2008
