Ang Lee Trivia
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50 free Ang Lee trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Ang Lee trivia quiz covers the director who went from six years as a stay-at-home father in New York to two Best Director Oscars. The easy questions are the ones any film fan knows: where he was born, which Jane Austen adaptation was his first English-language film, which wuxia epic won Best Foreign Language Film, which two cowboys he put on Brokeback Mountain and what the tiger in Life of Pi is called. From there it moves into the Father Knows Best trilogy with Sihung Lung, the Golden Bears in Berlin and Golden Lions in Venice, and the Oscar night when Crash beat Brokeback. The hard end covers the details: the screenplay competition that launched him, the flight attendant he cast in The Wedding Banquet, the master chef who doubled for Sihung Lung's hands, the NC-17 rating and the Taiwan disqualification for Lust, Caution, the wave tank at a disused Taichung airport, Rhythm & Hues, the 120-frames-per-second experiments and the two flops that followed. There are also questions on The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil, Hulk and Taking Woodstock. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Ang Lee and his films, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Taiwanese city did Ang Lee grow up from the age of two, while his father ran its teachers' college?
Hualien
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.
Q 02Which director made The Virgin Spring, the 1960 film Ang Lee has called a formative experience?
Ingmar Bergman
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.
Q 03Ang Lee earned his theatre degree in 1980 at which American university?
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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.
Q 04At NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Ang Lee worked on the thesis film of which classmate?
Spike Lee
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.
Q 05How did Ang Lee spend the six years between film school and his first feature?
Raising his sons at home
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.
Q 06Two Ang Lee screenplays finished first and second in a 1990 competition run by which body?
Taiwan's Government Information Office
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.
Q 07Ang Lee's 1991 feature debut, Pushing Hands, is about a Chinese master of which discipline living in New York?
Tai chi
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.
Q 08Which Taiwanese actor plays the father in all three films of Ang Lee's Father Knows Best trilogy?
Sihung Lung
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.
Q 09Which prize did The Wedding Banquet win at the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival?
The Golden Bear
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.
Q 10Which Wedding Banquet lead had spent years as an airline flight attendant and never acted before Ang Lee cast him?
Winston Chao
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.
Q 11The Wedding Banquet cost about $1m, and its 1993 rate of return beat even which film, the year's top grosser?
Jurassic Park
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.
Q 12Eat Drink Man Woman opens with a widowed chef cooking a feast for his three daughters on which day?
Sunday
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.
Q 13Eat Drink Man Woman inspired which 2001 Mexican-American remake?
Tortilla Soup
Q 21Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon belongs to which genre of Chinese fiction about wandering martial-arts heroes?
Wuxia
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.
Q 22Which composer won an Oscar for the Crouching Tiger score?
Tan Dun
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.
Q 23Although its two biggest stars grew up speaking other languages, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was shot in which language?
Mandarin
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.
Q 14Ang Lee's first English-language film, Sense and Sensibility (1995), was written by and starred which actress?
Emma Thompson
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.
Q 15Who earned her first Oscar nomination for Sense and Sensibility?
Kate Winslet
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.
Q 16The star and screenwriter of Sense and Sensibility said Ang Lee was taken aback when actors did what?
Asked questions or made suggestions
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".
Q 17The Ice Storm (1997) is set over which holiday weekend in 1973?
Thanksgiving
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.
Q 18Which longtime Ang Lee collaborator won Best Screenplay at Cannes for adapting The Ice Storm?
James Schamus
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.
Q 19Ride with the Devil (1999), Ang Lee's Civil War western, follows pro-Confederate guerrillas known as what?
Bushwhackers
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.
Q 20Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon revolves around the theft of which fabled 400-year-old sword?
The Green Destiny
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.
Mandarin: Chow Yun-fat, a native Cantonese speaker, said he needed 28 takes on the first day because of the language.
Q 24Who played the warrior Yu Shu Lien in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?
Michelle Yeoh
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.
Q 25Who played Bruce Banner in Ang Lee's 2003 film Hulk?
Eric Bana
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.
Q 26Brokeback Mountain was adapted from a 1997 short story by which author?
Annie Proulx
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.
Q 27Which two actors played Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain?
Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal
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.
Q 28Brokeback Mountain is set in Wyoming but was filmed mostly in which Canadian province?
Alberta
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.
Q 29Brokeback Mountain lost Best Picture at the 2006 Oscars to which film, in a famous upset?
Crash
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.
Q 30Who composed the Oscar-winning score for Brokeback Mountain, writing it before filming began?
Gustavo Santaolalla
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.