Ang Lee Interview Lust Caution

MoviesOnline sat down recently with Ang Lee, the Academy Award-winning director of "Brokeback Mountain" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" to talk about his new film, "Lust Caution,” a startlingly erotic espionage thriller about the fate of an ordinary woman's heart. The film is based on the short story by revered Chinese author Eileen Chang, and stars Asian cinema icon Tony Leung opposite screen newcomer Tang Wei.

"Lust, Caution” is set in Shanghai, 1942 against the backdrop of the World War II Japanese occupation of this Chinese city. Mrs. Mak, a woman of sophistication and means, walks into a café, places a call, and then sits and waits. She remembers how her story began several years earlier, in 1938 China. She is not in fact Mrs. Mak, but shy Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei). With WWII underway, Wong has been left behind by her father, who has escaped to England.

As a freshman at the university in Hong Kong, she meets fellow student Kuang Yu Min (Wang Leehom) who has started a drama society to shore up patriotism. As the theater troupe's new leading lady, Wong realizes that she has found her calling with her ability to move and inspire audiences. Kuang convenes a core group of students to carry out a radical and ambitious plan to assassinate a top Japanese collaborator, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). Each student has a part to play. Wong will be Mrs. Mak, who will gain Yee's trust by befriending his wife (Joan Chen) and then draw the man into an affair.

Wong transforms herself utterly inside and out, and the scenario proceeds as scripted – until an unexpectedly fatal twist spurs her to flee. With no end in sight for the occupation, Wong – having emigrated from Hong Kong to Shanghai – goes through the motions of her existence. Much to her surprise, Kuang re-enters her life. Now part of the organized resistance, he enlists her to again become Mrs. Mak in a revival of the plot to kill Yee, who as head of the collaborationist secret service has become even more a key part of the puppet government. As Wong reprises her earlier role, and is drawn ever closer to her dangerous prey, she finds her very identity being pushed to the limit.

Ang Lee explains, "To me, no story of Eileen Chang’s is as beautiful or as cruel as ‘Lust, Caution.’ She revised the story for years and years – for decades – returning to it as a criminal might return to the scene of a crime, or as a victim might re-enact a trauma, reaching for pleasure only by varying and re-imagining the pain. Making ‘Lust, Caution,’ we didn’t really ‘adapt’ Chan’s work, we re-enacted it, just as her characters act and re-enact their parts.

Chan describes the feeling Wong Chia Chi had after performing on stage as a young woman; the rush she felt afterwards, that she could barely calm down, even after a late-night meal with her friends from the theater and a ride on the upper deck of a tram. When I read that, my mind raced back to my own first experience on the stage, back in 1973 at the Academy of Art in Taipei. The same rush of energy at the end of the play I had acted in; the same late-night camaraderie; the same wandering. I realized how that experience was central to Chan’s work, and how it could be transformed into film.

She understood play-acting and mimicry as something by nature brutal: animals, like her characters, using camouflage to evade their enemies and to lure their prey. But mimicry and performance are also ways we open ourselves, as human beings, to greater experience, to indefinable connections to others, to higher meanings, to art, and to the truth.”Here’s more of what Ang Lee had to tell us at the Los Angeles press day for his new film, "Lust, Caution”:

Q: When you decided on this project, did you know from the outset that you would be exploring some dangerous territory.

A: Of course.

Q: Why did you do this with all the controversy you knew would be coming?

Q: Can you comment on the explicit sex scenes which seem to reveal much about who these characters really are?

ANG LEE: To me. that’s the movie and precisely why I wanted to do those sex scenes. To me, it’s the ultimate performance. It has to be so real. Saying that, I mean actors have to be so real to earn the trust of an interrogator to survive, just as I, as a filmmaker, must earn the trust that I can do this from the audience. So that’s a good question. To be or not to be, that’s a big question. Why do we make a movie and why do we want to see a movie and what is lust? Lust, in Chinese, also means color. It’s everything you see. It’s the texture of life. It’s nothing but the reflection or a projection of your own self. And you should be cautious [in order] not to be fooled. So, to me, the movie is very important. Even stripped naked, they are still performing. As long as there is a relationship, you are performing. Even the relationship in my mind to yourself, you are performing to yourself. It’s very hard to define which part is your true self and which is not a performance. It’s a good question. I don’t have an answer.

Q: How did you decide how you would shoot these scenes?

ANG LEE: I didn’t decide when I shot it. I just shot possibilities. I actually shot 3 or 4 or 5 times more than what you see in every direction. I have a basic structure, but I don’t know how it’s going to end, which take, which moment I’m going to use. So it’s on the editing table. It’s a common effort between me and my editor. It’s a long process to come to where it ends. In the middle, I didn’t want to do a preview or test screening. [I only showed it] among family and friends, a small group of 5 or 6, each time we did a cut, maybe 3 or 4 times, to see how they would react. And in the end, I believe this is what I needed to do. There is no guidance. People are varied. What is more than enough for someone may not be enough for somebody else. This is what I think I needed. So that’s the decision I made. I didn’t consult with society or anything. I didn’t do a preview.

Q: What about the story resonated so emotionally for you?

ANG LEE: I don’t know. It’s so huge and so sad and so profound. I don’t know what hit me. Joan met me in the scene right after I shot all three sex scenes. I was wrecked, and emotionally, my nerves, I was on the brink of breaking down. And we got the lab report that those scenes were fine so we were ready to strike the set. That’s when she came in to do that scene. It’s the last scene of the movie. I’m just one third into shooting, but I’m already shooting the last scene and I have the whole picture in my head already. Without one shot, and without the girl, and it’s an empty room. So all of a sudden I just couldn’t take it. For some reason I felt vulnerable. Usually I’m pretty cool on set. She caught something that has never happened to me on set. [laughs] To show emotion, I just lost it, I don’t know what hit me. It took me nearly two months to get out of that phase. It’s a very strange, very intense movie, I think.

Q: Did you do any special research or interview people that lived through that period in Shanghai?

ANG LEE: I grew up knowing something about it. It’s a prohibited period. The regime of the Wang Jingwei government, both the communist government in China and the Taiwanese Nationalist Party, they see it as an embarrassment. So it was not allowed to be filmed and I never really saw it on screen. I only vaguely heard about it from my parent’s generation, and the patriotism is something I grew up with. We hear a lot about the Glorious War against the Japanese and the fighting by the resistance, but the occupation is a void of knowledge. So I did a lot of research, from reading material to talking to older people.

The age gap is not so much as, for example, in Sense and Sensibility, where Kate Winslet who is 19 years old and Emma, who is super sophisticated at the age of 36, play sisters. It’s not that hard. Because they both have the Chinese work ethic, they come to you as the director and say, What do you want? So even though Tony is very experienced, the working relationship with him is very much about stripping off what he already knows to play the opposite. He’s such a great actor. So you fill him with information and inspire him and rehearse. And Tang Wei, I think she’s a very talented actress and I don’t feel [she’s] particularly hard [to direct]. She’s unpredictable from take to take. It’s not like Tony, who is always good from Take One to Take Eleven and just gets better on the same track. Tang Wei could be here and there and her concentration could be off. It just takes patience. Thank god, Tony is like a director’s dream. For example, that singing scene in the tavern, Tony might shed a few tears so I shot his side first and he has to restrain himself. And then came her singing part with the reverse angle. And he cries his eyes out to encourage her to sing. I said, you don’t have to do this. That’s overacting anyway. He said, Oh no, I’ve been holding back these tears so I might as well. It’s 13 takes and he cries harder and harder and he’s that kind of actor, so he’s very helpful.

Q: Was there a lot of pressure on her? Didn’t she faint at one point?

ANG LEE: Yeah, after the car scene when they struggle in the back seat. It was the emotions. There was constant pressure. For somebody like her to carry the movie in a role like this, I needed to make her advance to a new stage almost every week or so. I had to give her pressure and criticism in such a way that she had to make another breakthrough. It was that kind of shooting schedule for her. So yeah, it’s a lot. I don’t know how she stood the whole thing.

Q: Are you willing to cut your film so that it can be shown in China?

ANG LEE: I think showing the movie in China is a huge step forward. And the way they allowed the movie to be made totally on my free will with such content is a miracle. I’m kind of a guest, a welcome guest. Other Chinese directors who saw the movie said to me there is no way they could make it, only you could make it. For an insider like them, there is no way yet. But I think it’s a huge step forward because the movie can be seen everywhere. The Chinese people can fly to Hong Kong to see this movie. They come to LA to see the movie. There are other channels to see the full version, but I think being able to show it in China is a giant step forward, regardless. And actually it’s only the sex and stabbing scenes that have to be trimmed down because they explained to me there is no ratings system. It’s just a situation.

"Lust, Caution” opens in theaters on October 2.