On one hand, Ang Lee can’t believe it’s been 40 years since he graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. “Don’t remind me!” he responds with a laugh when this milestone is brought up. But at the same time, Lee says, little has changed since he received his MFA in film production. “Whether 40 years or 15 years or even two months, my career feels like a continuation of school. I like to think I’m always in film school, making different projects and exploring how to make movies. It’s just the world is now my school.”
Lee will head back to school — sort of — when he is honored at the 2024 Tisch Gala on Apr. 8 at Cipriani South Street, alongside actor Corey Stoll (class of 2003) and singer-songwriter Madison Love (class of 2017.) Lee’s award will be presented by Oscar- and Emmy- nominated producer and editor Jean Tsien, who worked in the sound department of Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” And though he returns a two-time Academy Award winner, for directing “Brokeback Mountain” and “Life of Pi,” Lee says making movies has not gotten easier. “If anything, it gets harder!” he says.
It was no great plan that brought the filmmaker to Tisch — Lee first graduated from the National Arts School (now known as National Taiwan University of Arts) in his native country and then the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lee originally studied theater, thinking he wanted to be a performer, before pivoting to filmmaking. At the time, he says, there were only four schools teaching film production and cinema study — Columbia, NYU, UCLA and USC. He applied to all of them and selected Tisch because, “They were the only one to accept me.” The first person he met was Spike Lee, whom he met in the school’s equipment room, and later worked on the crew of Lee’s thesis film “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads.”
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From the start, Lee had a talent for working with actors, perhaps because of his initial aspirations to perform. “I could understand how they feel and talk to them in the same kind of language,” he notes. “For me, working with actors was easy. It took me a long time to pick up the visual skills but directing actors came natural to me.” Lee has gone on to direct multiple actors like Kate Winslet and Heath Ledger to their first Oscar nominations in films such as “Sense and Sensibility” and “Brokeback Mountain.” He also has an eye for discovering new talent — his 1997 film “The Ice Storm” included among its young cast Tobey Maguire, Elijah Wood and Katie Holmes. Lee credits working with great casting directors — he credits Avy Kaufman for young discoveries in “The Ice Storm” and “The Life of Pi” in particular. But he also says he’s able to connect with actors on a set. “Sometimes, instead of giving them direction, I ask them questions. That inspires them to think and shape their character and they just shine.”
But Lee has certainly caught up on the visual and technical side, often pushing boundaries and forwarding new technology in his works. For “Life of Pi” he worked with visual effects artists to present realistic animals created by CGI and present the film in 3D. His 2016 drama “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” was the first film using the high frame rate of 120 frames per second — an achievement complicated by the fact only five cinemas in the world could screen it properly. Lee says he’s still interested in high frame rates, but not in the immediate future. Asked if audiences are ready for it now, he quips, “I learned the hard way they’re not.”
Despite loving the medium of theater and starting off in it, Lee says he has no ambitions to direct for stage. “Once I stepped behind the camera, that was where I wanted to be,” he says. He’s been asked about directing Broadway plays but wasn’t approached about doing that for the stage version of “Life of Pi” or the opera of “Brokeback Mountain.” Regardless, he doesn’t want to revisit previous material — as he points out, he’s never directed a sequel or a remake.
Up next, the filmmaker is hoping to finally get his long-gestating Bruce Lee film off the ground, a movie that the martial artist’s widow and his daughter brought to the filmmaker years ago. “It took me years to think of a way to crack it, to connect to it,” Lee notes, adding that he found similarities between himself and the other Lee. “Character-wise, I couldn’t be more different from Bruce Lee but there are aspects I relate to. He had identity issues; he was aways yearning to belong, to find his place. That really speaks to me.” The plan is for the filmmaker’s son, actor Mason Lee, to star as Bruce. “Neither of us are getting any younger,” he notes. “So I hope I get to make this movie soon.”
