On Ang Lee

When I got the call, in 1995, that alerted me to the possibility of a cinematic adaptation of my novel, The Ice Storm, I knew very little about the director who was expressing this interest. I'd heard about Ang Lee's film The Wedding Banquet, knew of its reputation, but I hadn't seen it, nor its predecessor, Pushing Hands. In an attempt to catch up, I went out right away and saw Eat Drink Man Woman, which was playing in the arthouses around town. For those who have not been lucky enough to see it, Eat Drink Man Woman is a wise and tender character-driven drama/comedy which gets much of its power from an obsession with food. Sort of a Taiwanese Babette's Feast. I loved it immediately. By reason of gentleness and good humor and its sympathy for its personages.

Those early "Father Knows Best" films, the Ang Lee films that have more to do with his childhood in Asia, are noteworthy for their single-minded thematic obsession–how a sense of lineage and morality is passed on by faulty patriarchs. Still, in them you don't yet see the literary instincts that emerged in Ang's next film.

The grand preliminary screening of Sense and Sensibility to which I was invited took place on a cruise liner, moored just off 42^nd Street. As a superfluous attendee, I was sitting anonymously at a crowded table at the reception after the marvelous screening when I heard one excessively tanned exec say to another: "What's he doing next?" To which the first replied: "I don't know, some book no one's ever heard of." Perhaps this was a recognition of just how effectively the Taiwanese director had inhabited the British costume drama we'd just seen. Suddenly, it was obvious. Ang Lee could find the meaningful center in any story. With Sense and Sensibility, he gave notice that he was not a regional director or a director of one particular approach to narrative. I was beginning to understood how lucky I was going to be with The Ice Storm.

Still, why not ask the film executive's question in this context? Why make a film of a nearly overlooked contemporary novel? My novel? For that matter, why Ride With the Devil, or Brokeback Mountain, the other literary films that followed Sense and Sensibility? He did make a couple of action pictures, it's true, but one of these has a half-hour romantic flashback in the middle that would seem designed to challenge viewers who came only for the martial arts sequences. My sense is that Ang is more at home not only with the reasonable scale of character-driven films, but that his points of origin are landscape and history. These are not always features of the plot-heavy Hollywood film. Place (the West), is essential in Brokeback Mountain; place is essential to the Civil War setting of Ride With the Devil, and place is what makes The Ice Storm work so well–that stifling, Northeastern suburbia that so gracefully made the transition from the book to the screen.