Lee Shall Overcome

When art house audiences fell for Taiwanese cinema during the Taiwanese New Wave of the nineteen nineties, one name emerged to rule them all. Hou Hsiao-hsien may have condensed the turbulent WW2 years into City of Sadness, a stately 157 minute epic. Edward Yang may have possessed the ability to make anything look dreamy. But it was Ang Lee, a kid from the Taiwanese sticks, who immediately garnered mainstream attention with such crowd pleasing indie comedies as The Wedding Banquet and Pushing Hands. The director, who graduated from NYU alongside his near namesake, Spike Lee, is cheered by the recollection.
“It wasn’t one of those New Waves that is written about later but that you don’t really notice at the time,” recalls Mr. Lee. “And it didn’t matter that I was based in America. We were all in touch. We all knew there was something happening. We all had ideas about Taiwanese identity and Chinese identity.”
It is, perhaps, one of the few times in his career that Ang Lee has not been an outsider. His friendly, easy manner has made him Hollywood’s most sought after actor’s director, having ushered Emma Thompson and Heath Ledger to Oscar victory. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director; he took the statue home in 2006 for Brokeback Mountain. But he has always stayed slightly adjacent to the movie establishment, returning to Asia for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Lust, Caution and alternating between $100 million dollar budgets and angular dramas. Ride With The Devil looks at slaves who fought for the south during the American Civil War; The Ice Storm takes on seventies suburban swingers; the cowboys in Brokeback Mountain are gay.
“I like to think I’m un-categorical,” he laughs. “But I guess I’ve always been kind of an outsider. So I’m always on the lookout for other outsiders to make movies about.”
The filmmaker met his latest leftfield hero while he was doing a promotional tour for Lust, Caution. He ran into Elliot Tiber, the man who brought the festival to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel (not Woodstock) on a TV talk show and was immediately taken with his story. Lee and long-time screenwriter-producer partner James Schamus have since adapted the material into Taking Woodstock, a pretty mosaic of the fabled shindig.
“It’s a story not a concert film,” says Mr. Lee. “It has been a barrier trying to get that message out there. This is a story about wanting to go to Woodstock like I did when I saw the images on the news as a 14 year-old. There is a value in that naïve spirit, something worth looking at and cherishing.”
After the death of Heath Ledger and the heavy emotional weather of Lust, Caution, Taking Woodstock, says the director, offered a chance for light relief. A frothy comedy inspired by the small Catskills community that played an unlikely host to history’s most celebrated music festival, the film is a feel-good, unseasonably summery affair.
“It’s a romantic view of American history,” says Mr. Lee. “I had to reflect reality, what I know about that time. But I wanted to downplay the negative. Because I feel like it. At this point in my life. This is Woodstock sunny-side-up. This is the romance of hippie culture, of everything being groovy. As I got into researching the movie, I came across the business side and things that weren’t so obvious to me. Music wise, it was a mixed bag. Some of the performances were terrible, so you never see the stage in my film. The music never really happened on the day, if we’re truthful. The real Woodstock is the utopia, the counterculture. People are high and loving each other.”
The director was further inspired by his romantic boyhood notions about America; “It’s that baby boomer thing”, he says. “This was warm and nostalgic for me. As a child I had an uncomplicated view of America. They were the leaders of the free world and at that time, during the Cold War, in a place like Taiwan, that meant we saw them as big brother protectors. My hometown was the Air Force base for the US during the Vietnam War. So I see all those aircraft, very low off the ground, flying ‘whoosh’ over my head every day, up and down. When you are young that makes quite an impression. Now I’ve lived in America for 20 years, I know a little bit more than I did back then.”
In order the recreate the freewheeling spirit of the times, the set took on a festival vibe. Sadly, it was not enough to persuade the director to tune in and drop out.
“Even my children were telling me to try some pot or psychedelics,” says Mr. Lee. “I thought about it but in the end, I’m just a conservative Chinese guy. I don’t have the right moves.”