Word: lee
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lee isn't being provocative merely for the sake of it. If the lovemaking in the director's Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain represented a kind of prelapsarian idyll - a state of innocence that can never be recaptured - here the physical act takes his characters to a darker and more frightening place. "I think sexuality is worth exploring because it's the ultimate performance," says Lee, who is hanging out in a luxury hotel suite a few hours before the film's red-carpet Hong Kong premiere on Sept. 22. "The chemistry can be quite complicated. Sex is very much...
...Soft-spoken and pacific, Lee is as well known in Hollywood for his modesty as he is for his protean talent. It's hard to square volcanic passions, after all, with a man who once told an interviewer that one of his favorite restaurants was KFC. Lee's movies, too, often revolve around the repression of overwhelming emotion. In his wuxia epic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, swords and fists became stand-ins for everything the martial characters couldn't say. Brokeback Mountain's cowboys suffered for love they could not acknowledge. Even Lee's Hulk was an exploration of suppressed...
...With Lust, Caution Lee is charting new territory, trading Brokeback's Ansel Adams vistas for oppressive World War II Shanghai. But Lust, Caution shares with that film a mournful, elegiac tone. "It's this idea of repressed or impossible love," Lee says. "I find that yearning attractive. Somehow, it's my observation of the grand illusion of love: you can never acquire it, or attain it, or describe it. So the more difficult or elusive it is - or in this case, the more twisted - that becomes very attractive to me in making a movie...
...ingenue into a ruby-lipped Mata Hari. She's initially playing a role. But her performance shades into real feeling, and their affair begins to blur the difference between seducer and seduced, becoming a mirror of the war outside: the bedroom is their battleground. "Love is the ultimate occupation," Lee says. "It's basically what the movie is about: she has to do this performance to withstand his scrutiny as an interrogator. Through which they have a taste of love, and it's very scary to them...
...Lee, that theme - the possibility of dramatic transformation through artifice - struck a personal chord. At 18, he entered the Art Academy of Taiwan as an acting student, and found himself changed from a shy, uncertain teen into a star. Only after moving to the U.S. in 1978 did he switch to directing. His English, he realized, wasn't good enough for him to succeed in America as an actor...