Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee added a prestigious honor Tuesday to his already exceedingly decorated career in the arts. The three-time Oscar winner was presented with the Praemium Imperiale at a black-tie ceremony in Tokyo. Often described as Asia‘s version of the Nobel Prize, the award is handed out annually to artists working in various fields. A mark of the prize’s prestige, past honorees in the film and theater category have included true icons of film history, such as Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese and Catherine Deneuve.
“I’d like to think that my career is a never-ending school where I learn about cinema and about myself and about the world. There is no end to that learning,” Lee said during a news conference in Tokyo ahead of the awards ceremony. “As the first person from Taiwan to receive this award, I’m proud and deeply grateful.”
Lee’s singular career is undoubtedly deserving of the high commendation. His body of work is characterized as much by a questing artistic curiosity as it is expressive mastery. As critics have been noting for years, few to no directors of his generation have generated a filmography of such high quality and relentless diversity. After earning two Oscar nominations from his early trilogy of Taiwanese family dramas — Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) — Lee ventured far from his comfort zone to direct his critically acclaimed adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1995).
That success encouraged him down a path of continual reinvention. To follow: the aching New England family drama of The Ice Storm (1997), the wuxia martial arts masterpiece Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), heartbreaking gay Western Brokeback Mountain (2005), the boundary-pushing erotic espionage thriller Lust, Caution (2007), and the technically innovative heartwarming saga Life of Pi (2012). Long before it became a movie journalist cliche to ask distinctive auteurs whether they would ever consider directing a superhero film, Lee had already done that too, helming the early Marvel hit Hulk back in 2003. Along the way, he has received nine Oscar nominations and won three (best foreign language film for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, best director for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi).
Lee took possession of the Praemium Imperiale this week during an unmistakable inflection point in his long career. It’s been six years since he was on a film set — during the production of the Will Smith-starring sci-fi action film Gemini Man (2019), which impressed some critics with its technical ambition but flopped at the box office to become a commercial low-point in Lee’s career.
During a Zoom interview ahead of Tuesday’s award ceremony, Lee spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the existential restlessness that has suffused his artistic life and why he currently feels “quite confused” — but still holds an undimmed faith in cinema’s future.
How have you come to think about this honor and what does receiving it mean to you at this stage in your career?
Well, the Japanese consider it their Nobel equivalent, so it’s pretty highbrow and a great privilege. I understand I’m the first person from Taiwan to get it, so I have to hold some pride about that, too. But, you know, I like to think I’m still going with my career, so maybe I’m getting it a little early — I hope.
Martin Scorsese received the same honor almost 10 years ago, and he’s made three films since, so I don’t think you have to worry.
Not so much for Kurosawa though. [Akira Kurosawa received the Praemium Imperiale in 1992, the year before his final film, Madadayo.]
Well, sure, but at a moment like this, it’s natural to look back at your career so far. I’d like to start by asking the question you must have been asked many times before. When you survey your incredibly wide-ranging film output, what qualities do you see uniting the work — whether thematically, as a matter of craft, or something else? Where do you see your imprint?
I have indeed been asked that question a lot over the years — probably since my fourth or fifth movie. People always want to know, what is Jane Austin to you? Why New England in 1973? Why the inner life of gay cowboys? And the more they ask, the further away from my experience I have wanted to go in my work. You know, then, why not India? I think subconsciously, we all have something driving us. It’s the part of ourselves we don’t want to talk about or we can’t articulate. But over the years, I’ve nonetheless tried to answer that question — and every two to five years, I probably give a different answer. I know now that as I grow, I continually see it differently.
Maybe the most honest answer I can give you is that I was afraid that if I stayed in the same place, that if I did something I already knew, I would lose my artistic virginity and make something that’s simply not very good — and that’s my biggest fear. Or 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.
All my life, I guess I’ve also had identity issues. The culture that rooted me seems to have been shattered over and over. My parents came to Taiwan from China and always felt somewhat like outsiders. And then I came to the States as a drifter. So I don’t really know what my roots are. My roots are like a dream. In a way, I sort of escaped into the movies. That fantasy was always something I could trust. And as I create, I like to keep creating differently. It’s like sightseeing. Why do we go to the same place over and over, right? With marriage, you have to stick to one person. But in moviemaking? Why go back to the same place? But that’s just one reason.
There are many more reasons. On a deeper level, I think I’ve always been afraid of security. I don’t know how to explain the feeling, but when I feel secure, it gives me a deep fear — I gotta get out of there.
I’m also just an avid filmmaker. I’m greedy to learn how different things are done. People like to say that important filmmakers, or auteurs, each have one big thing — their thing to say. That’s true for many great directors, but it’s not universal. Some of us just like the touch of movies. It’s a way to learn about life. When you get your hands on it, and you get different people together to collaborate, you get to explore what an aspect of life is like — whether you’re constructing or deconstructing. There’s an adrenaline to it, and it’s an adventure. I think we contradict ourselves as filmmakers or artists. We want people to know the true us and we’re afraid for people to know the true us. We want to explore, and we want to feel safe at the same time.
So, there’s no good answer to your question, ultimately. Except that it’s all about curiosity. Maybe I’m more like an actor than a director — I just want to wear different suits, be different people. I initially wanted to be an actor, but I retreated into directing. When I came to the States, I couldn’t speak English well enough to perform in English, so I had to become a director. When I went to film school, I found my medium — sight and sound — and it all felt like the easiest thing for me. Nothing had ever felt easy for me the way directing did. I didn’t discover the truly adventurous part of it until I did Sense and Sensibility though. I had done four movies, and I knew that if I didn’t do something radically different, I would be driven crazy. Making Sense and Sensibility gave me the courage. I spoke broken English, and I was doing Jane Austen. The conversations I had with the cast and crew were ridiculously funny. It was brutal for them, and I was very embarrassed — but 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. I don’t know why it works. It’s the unknown. As long as you truly collaborate with your team and believe in it hard enough, something will happen — and it will work. It’s not linguistic. I think that’s encouraging. Cinema bypasses all cultural barriers. In the dark theater, the audience members have a private, truthful moment — but they do it together. When we directors take interviews, we have to try to explain ourselves. But in the end, I believe our real motivations and the nature of cinema itself — they remain totally unknown and beyond explanation.
That was a truly amazing answer to my very obvious, basic question. I think we’re done here.
[Laughs.] I haven’t scratched the surface.
I was compelled by what you said about your parents coming to Taiwan and feeling like outsiders, and you then moving to the U.S. and continuing to feel adrift. I guess you’re saying that your cinematic adventurism through cultures, periods and stories is in some sense a continuation of that drifter’s journey?
Yeah, I guess that’s one of the 12 possible answers. Ultimately, I think many people are like me. We’re yearning for belonging, and we never really find it. Our roots are given to us by education and our parents. There’s nothing you can do. It’s just planted on you. It comes to you before you’re aware of it and then you fixate into it — and you cannot escape it. Those are your roots. And not everybody’s roots blossom and grow strongly and healthily. A lot of us get messed up. [Laughs.] Movies, like all the other arts, give us expression. We want to be heard, but at the same time, we have to fake it so we won’t be understood. Because maybe we’re ashamed to be understood. That’s why we need craft — to hide and to express it at the same time. For some reason, as human animals, we seem to enjoy that — both creating and receiving it.
While I was preparing for this call, I read a lot of different things online about your early days, and I came across one account that said after you graduated from film school you went through a pretty long stretch of struggle and even considered giving up filmmaking to pursue computer science.
That’s not true at all. [Laughs.] Because I’m really dumb. I would have had more success flipping burgers than anything with computers.
OK, but if filmmaking hadn’t worked out for whatever reason, could you imagine having a totally different life?
You know, I cannot. I was terrible at every other job I ever had. The only thing I can do is direct. I could never really put my mind to anything else. I’m really clumsy. But for some reason, as soon as I entered film school, even though I could barely speak English, everything became easy and people just listened to me. But there were six years after film school before I had any success getting going. In that sixth year, I did start thinking that maybe I should just go back to Taiwan and try to find a job as an assistant director or something. But just then, I won a script award and started my career. So there must be a movie god. I believe there are people who are purely brilliant when they’re young, but I wasn’t like that. I think that sixth year was required for my development. If I had started making movies right after film school, I think I might have done poorly.
But right now, I’ve experienced another six years without making a film. I don’t really believe that things are predestined, but it seems like there’s something like that involved. I’m shy and not a naturally courageous person, but my career has put me in situations where there’s a lot of pressure — like when you’re making a big movie and you decide to deliver something that wasn’t what was expected, or if you decide to go on an adventure and do something totally different from your last success. I never really develop my projects, they just sort of come to me. It’s more like my movies direct me — almost like a seance. One movie has always led to the next. But now it’s been six years again, and I don’t know what to do. I’m very confused. But that’s OK. That’s just how I live my life, and I’m OK with it.
Well, it sounds like you’ve come to find comfort in uncertainty, which maybe would have tormented you when you were younger. But can you share what’s confusing you? Naturally, continuing my obvious line of questioning, I was planning to ask “What are you working on next?” There’s been some reporting about a long-gestating Bruce Lee project, for example.
It’s very hard to say. I’m struggling, and I’ve been struggling with that for a long time. I think, in principle, it’s no different than when I got out of school because you want to do something that’s bigger than you are. The whole movie business ecosystem, including the audience, requires you to do that. I’m not the kind of person who can just impose himself onto the world through sheer will. I need to be nurtured. I need to be required. I have to fit in. And right now, the environment is something I don’t quite understand. If I were to insist on where I think cinema should be going, I don’t know how to solve it right now. I feel quite vulnerable in that way. I think the movies need a drastic change. It’s getting tired. That’s how I feel. But the next new thing, we don’t know what it is yet. But I’m trying, and it’s going to take as long as it takes.
I just know that if we keep following the same road as an industry, it’s probably going to be a dead end. You cannot ask young people to put down their smartphones; you have to create something they’re eager to enter into. The same old formula that the studios require, I don’t think it’s attractive anymore. But I also don’t think people can be truly satisfied by watching streaming shows or short-form clips on their smartphones or all on their own. This might sound a little philosophical, but people need a temple, and for a long time, our movie theaters were our congregation, where we could go to be collectively transported by storytelling. I think that’s a basic human need.
I’m always trying to go back to paradise — to the excitement I had in the cinema as a kid with the movies that changed me. When I made Crouching Tiger, the idea was to use the martial arts film — which most of the U.S. audience wasn’t familiar with — as a way to bring back that experience of pure fun. When you watch a musical from the 1950s, there’s this feeling that anyone can burst into song and dance whenever they feel like it. I wanted that same expressive spirit, but I wasn’t going to do it with actors singing and dancing in English. So I did it with Crouching Tiger, a martial arts movie where the characters can fly. That’s what that is. You can take people to the same place, but you have to find new ways to do it. So we need to find a new way to go back to that innocence — we owe it as moviemakers for the audience to be in awe again.
It sounds like you’ve freighted yourself with an almost unfairly weighty challenge — not just to figure out what your next film will be, but to do so by answering the existential questions the whole movie business is facing.
Well, maybe not. I still need to just make something. [Laughs.] If thinking about these challenges results in me being unable to undertake another project, maybe I have to wonder. Because I do miss making movies. There’s an organic, physical need to that. The process always hurts me, but it also feels very healthy in a deeper way. When I’m not making a movie, like right now, I’m just bored. I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m yearning for it, and I’m addicted to that excitement for sure. So it’s hard to know where I’ll go from here. I’m just saying, honestly, that I’m confused and a little lost. But I think people need to be confused — because the challenges we’re grappling with are very profound. It’s a very hard time we’re going through as an art form. It’s very painful but very interesting. I hope movies will come up with some kind of answer.
English (US) ·