I think I must have first read about the movie in Entertainment Weekly magazine, probably in their Fall or Winter Preview issue for 2005. Those are always the ones I look forward to the most, because that's the time of year when all the highest-quality films come out over here to be in contention for Academy Awards. I hadn't read much about it - just the synopsis they provided in their blurb about it. It interested me at that time mostly because it was an Ang Lee film, and I so loved The Wedding Banquet and Sense and Sensibility that I knew he'd do a wonderful job with the subject matter. I guess I usually look at the filmmaker first and then the actors. If I'm interested in all (or most) of their work and the story sounds interesting, I'm in. I knew of all the actors' work in this one and respected all of it, but I wasn't overly enamored with any of them at the time. I think now that that was a very good thing - it made me much more free to enjoy the characterizations. I went into it with little to no expectations except that it definitely wouldn't suck because it was Ang Lee. That was good, too, because the story just immediately grabbed me and pulled me in. And it hasn't let me go yet.