50 Fun Facts About Ang Lee

In which Taiwanese city did Ang Lee grow up from the age of two, while his father ran its teachers' college?

Hualien: Lee went to two primary schools in the east-coast city before the family moved on to Tainan, where his father became principal of the high school he attended.

Which director made The Virgin Spring, the 1960 film Ang Lee has called a formative experience?

Ingmar Bergman's medieval revenge tale won the Oscar for foreign-language film. The same story was later reworked by Wes Craven as his first horror film, The Last House on the Left.

Ang Lee earned his theatre degree in 1980 at which American university?

Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Lee arrived from Taiwan hoping to act, but his struggles with spoken English pushed him towards directing, and he went on to film school in New York.

At NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Ang Lee worked on the thesis film of which classmate?

Spike Lee won a Student Academy Award for it and had his first feature out three years later. Ang Lee, the classmate on his crew, had to wait until the 1990s to direct one of his own.

How did Ang Lee spend the six years between film school and his first feature?

Raising his sons at home: his wife, the microbiologist Jane Lin, was the family's breadwinner while he looked after the children and wrote the screenplays that finally launched his career.

Two Ang Lee screenplays finished first and second in a 1990 competition run by which body?

Taiwan's Government Information Office ran the contest, and Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet took the top two places. The win brought Lee the backing to direct both scripts himself.

Ang Lee's 1991 feature debut, Pushing Hands, is about a Chinese master of which discipline living in New York?

Tai chi: the title names a two-person drill from its training. Lee carried the discipline onto later sets, using tai chi exercises with the British cast of Sense and Sensibility.

Which Taiwanese actor plays the father in all three films of Ang Lee's Father Knows Best trilogy?

Sihung Lung played three fathers at odds with their modern children, then returned for Lee one last time as Sir Te, the nobleman who is given the sword in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Which prize did The Wedding Banquet win at the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival?

The Golden Bear, the festival's highest award, brought Lee the notice that led to his first English-language job, Sense and Sensibility, which won him the same prize three years later.

Which Wedding Banquet lead had spent years as an airline flight attendant and never acted before Ang Lee cast him?

Winston Chao went from airline cabin crew to leading man in a single role, as a gay Taiwanese New Yorker who stages a sham wedding. Lee cast him again a year later in Eat Drink Man Woman.

The Wedding Banquet cost about $1m, and its 1993 rate of return beat even which film, the year's top grosser?

Jurassic Park earned roughly 14 times its budget. Lee's comedy took in more than 20 times its own, having saved money by shooting around New York in locations it could use for free.

Eat Drink Man Woman opens with a widowed chef cooking a feast for his three daughters on which day?

Sunday: the weekly feast is the one ritual holding the family together, and each one brings an announcement that upends it. The last and biggest shock comes from the father himself.

Eat Drink Man Woman inspired which 2001 Mexican-American remake?

Tortilla Soup moved the story to a Mexican-American family in Los Angeles, with Héctor Elizondo as the widowed chef who still cooks vast family meals although he has lost his sense of taste.

Ang Lee's first English-language film, Sense and Sensibility (1995), was written by and starred which actress?

Emma Thompson spent five years drafting and redrafting the script between other films, kept revising it during the shoot, and won the Academy Award for adapted screenplay.

Who earned her first Oscar nomination for Sense and Sensibility?

Kate Winslet had been asked to read for a smaller part and came away with Marianne Dashwood. The film drew seven Oscar nominations in all, though none for its director.

The star and screenwriter of Sense and Sensibility said Ang Lee was taken aback when actors did what?

Asked questions or made suggestions: on the sets Lee knew, a director's word was not debated, and he was hurt at first. Once the cast came to trust him, his star recalled, his notes were "so brutal and funny".

The Ice Storm (1997) is set over which holiday weekend in 1973?

Thanksgiving: over the long weekend two Connecticut families come apart, and at a neighbours' 'key party' the couples swap partners by drawing car keys from a bowl as the storm sets in.

Which longtime Ang Lee collaborator won Best Screenplay at Cannes for adapting The Ice Storm?

James Schamus, who also teaches film at Columbia University, wrote or produced most of Lee's films for two decades, and shared an Oscar nomination for the lyrics of Crouching Tiger's closing song.

Ride with the Devil (1999), Ang Lee's Civil War western, follows pro-Confederate guerrillas known as what?

Bushwhackers were Missouri irregulars who fought the Unionist Jayhawkers of Kansas, and the film follows them to their 1863 raid on Lawrence. It took under $1m in cinemas against a budget of $38m.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon revolves around the theft of which fabled 400-year-old sword?

The Green Destiny is handed over by a swordsman who wants to retire, and is stolen that same night by a governor's young daughter who has secretly trained as a fighter.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon belongs to which genre of Chinese fiction about wandering martial-arts heroes?

Wuxia: the film adapts the fourth of five linked novels that Wang Dulu serialised in the early 1940s. Lee had loved such stories as a boy and called making one a childhood dream.

Which composer won an Oscar for the Crouching Tiger score?

Tan Dun produced the music for the whole film in two weeks. His score brought one of its four Academy Awards, from ten nominations that included Best Picture.

Although its two biggest stars grew up speaking other languages, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was shot in which language?

Mandarin: Chow Yun-fat, a native Cantonese speaker, said he needed 28 takes on the first day because of the language.

Who played the warrior Yu Shu Lien in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?

Michelle Yeoh grew up in Malaysia speaking English and Malay, so she learned her lines by sound. More than two decades later she won the Best Actress Oscar.

Who played Bruce Banner in Ang Lee's 2003 film Hulk?

Eric Bana played Banner, but the green giant's movements came from the director: Lee performed the Hulk himself in motion capture for the animators.

Brokeback Mountain was adapted from a 1997 short story by which author?

Annie Proulx's story was spotted by the screenwriter Diana Ossana within days of its publication. She and Larry McMurtry adapted it, but several attempts to film it fell through before Lee signed on in 2001.

Which two actors played Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain?

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal played the two ranch hands. Ledger met Michelle Williams, who played his wife, on the set, and the couple had a daughter the year the film came out.

Brokeback Mountain is set in Wyoming but was filmed mostly in which Canadian province?

Alberta's Rockies stood in for Wyoming: the mountain on screen is a composite of three peaks in Kananaskis Country, and the town scenes were shot in Fort Macleod and Calgary.

Brokeback Mountain lost Best Picture at the 2006 Oscars to which film, in a famous upset?

Crash, an ensemble drama about race in Los Angeles, won although Brokeback Mountain led the field with eight nominations and had already taken the best-film prizes at the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs.

Who composed the Oscar-winning score for Brokeback Mountain, writing it before filming began?

Gustavo Santaolalla wrote the spare guitar themes from the story and a single conversation with Lee, before a frame was shot. He won the same Oscar again the following year for Babel.

Brokeback Mountain won the top prize at which film festival?

Venice gave the film its world premiere three months before it opened in the US. Its Golden Lion there began an awards run that ended with Lee's Oscar for best director.

Which newcomer, chosen from 3,000 hopefuls with no acting experience, played the teenage Pi in Life of Pi?

Suraj Sharma, a 17-year-old student, went to the audition with his brother and came through several rounds to win the part, then spent most of the shoot acting opposite a tiger that was added digitally.

Lust, Caution (2007) was adapted from a novella by which author?

Eileen Chang drafted the spy story in the 1950s but did not publish it until the late 1970s. It is said to draw on a real wartime plot to assassinate a collaborator in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

Lust, Caution received which restrictive US rating for its explicit sex scenes?

NC-17 bars anyone under 18, and many US cinema chains will not show such films. Lee and the studio chose not to appeal, though he trimmed several minutes himself for release in mainland China.

Why was Lust, Caution disqualified from the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race?

Too few Taiwanese nationals worked on it, the Academy ruled, citing a rule that a country's own people must hold artistic control. Seven years earlier Lee's Crouching Tiger had won that very Oscar for Taiwan.

Which actress was propelled to stardom by Lust, Caution but then banned for two years by the Chinese government?

Tang Wei was picked from more than 10,000 actresses. After the state regulator ordered her off Chinese screens over the film's sex scenes, she took Hong Kong residency and returned in a 2010 romantic comedy.

Taking Woodstock (2009) is based on the memoir of which man, whose parents ran a rundown motel in Bethel, New York?

Elliot Tiber, by his own account, held a permit for a small music festival at the motel and phoned the Woodstock organisers when they lost their site; how much he did after that is disputed.

In Life of Pi, what is the name of the Bengal tiger stranded with Pi on the lifeboat?

Richard Parker got a man's name through a clerical mix-up: the hunter who caught him was called Richard Parker and named the cub Thirsty, and the shipping paperwork swapped the two.

Life of Pi's giant wave tank was built on an abandoned airport in which Taiwanese city?

Taichung's old city airport had closed to passenger flights in 2004, and the film crew built the tank on the site. Lee brought the Hollywood production home to Taiwan, where most of the film was shot.

Which visual effects house created the tiger for Life of Pi?

Rhythm & Hues spent a year developing the digital tiger, then filed for bankruptcy protection less than two weeks before its work on the film won the Oscar for visual effects.

Life of Pi lost Best Picture in 2013 to which film?

Argo took Best Picture although its director, Ben Affleck, had not even been nominated, the first such win since Driving Miss Daisy. Life of Pi's four Oscars were still the most of any film that night.

Who wrote the novel Life of Pi, once considered impossible to film?

Yann Martel's novel was turned down by at least five London publishers before a Canadian house took it in 2001. A year later it won the Booker Prize.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016) was the first feature shot at what extra-high frame rate?

120 frames per second is five times the cinema standard of 24, and Lee shot in 3D at 4K resolution as well. He used the same format again for his next film.

Gemini Man (2019) starred which actor in a dual role opposite a de-aged clone of himself?

Will Smith was one of many actors attached over the years: the script was first sold in 1997 and spent nearly two decades in development before Lee filmed it.

In 2001 Ang Lee directed 'Chosen', one of a series of online short films made to advertise which carmaker?

BMW's series The Hire cast Clive Owen as a driver for hire. In Lee's episode he protects a holy child, played by the director's son Mason, whose parting gift is a Hulk plaster, a wink at Lee's next film.

Which honour did Ang Lee receive from the British Academy in 2021?

The BAFTA Fellowship is the Academy's highest honour. When it was announced, Lee said England had been particularly good to him, and that Sense and Sensibility had been like a second film school.

In November 2022 Ang Lee announced a biopic of which martial-arts icon, to star his son Mason?

Bruce Lee was to be played by Mason Lee, best known outside Asia for The Hangover Part II. The biopic had still not been filmed when his father began shooting a different picture in 2026.

Ang Lee sat on the 2013 Cannes jury under which president, a fellow Oscar-winning director?

Steven Spielberg's jury gave the Palme d'Or to Blue Is the Warmest Colour and, in an unprecedented step, named its two lead actresses as winners alongside the director.

Which singer-songwriter made her film acting debut in Ang Lee's Civil War drama Ride with the Devil?

Jewel played the young war widow Sue Lee Shelley opposite Tobey Maguire, and also sang on the soundtrack: her song What's Simple Is True plays in the film.

Ang Lee's 1984 NYU thesis film, which won the Wasserman Award for direction and was broadcast on PBS, was called what?

Fine Line won the film school's prizes for best film and best director and drew interest from a top talent agency, yet six years passed before anyone let Lee direct a feature.