about the Oscar debacle and Annie Proulx's reaction. Of course, the article is mostly about LUST, CAUTION, so I've bolded the parts about BBM. It's a lengthy article and the part about BBM is near the end of the article.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article3005047.eceFrom The Sunday TimesDecember 9, 2007
How Ang Lee got in the mood for Lust, Caution
He seems like the shyest man in Hollywood. So how did Ang Lee cope with directing the sexually explicit Lust, Caution?
Ryan Gilbey
Click here to watch the Lust, Caution trailer
Is Ang Lee the shyest man in Hollywood? The 53-year-old Oscar-winning film-maker, born in Taiwan but resident in the USA since studying at NYU film school in the early 1980s, is humble and deferential; even his most innocuous remarks are followed by an embarrassed chuckle, designed to defuse any potential offence. He is dressed in a nondescript grey shirt and black trousers, and weighs every question carefully before he answers. “When I talk about my movies, I lose my shyness,” he says, in a voice so hushed, it is almost drowned out by the sound of dust settling. “I feel even more shy now that people expect more of me: ‘Oh, if he can make movies, he must know so much and be so interesting.’ But I don’t, and I’m not. I just start retreating into the corner.”
The paradox is that Lee – the sort of unassuming fellow who will always be found in the kitchen at parties, even swanky Alist parties – is responsible for one of the most sexually explicit films ever made. His previous picture, Brokeback Mountain, known everywhere as “the gay cowboy movie”, starred Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two young chaps in chaps who found something else to do around the camp-fire of an evening other than chew tobacco. That movie looks like Heartbeat next to Lee’s latest. Lust, Caution is a long, slow-burning but gripping second world war melodrama about a mission by antiJapanese patriots to bring down the collaborationist Chinese government. The main target for assassination is the head of the secret service, Mr Yee, played by Tony Leung, the dashing star of In the Mood for Love. The rebels, whose theatre group provides both a cover for their more incendiary activities and an outlet for their political views, propose that their newest member (the real-life newcomer Tang Wei) should seduce Yee. This she does with a vengeance, which is where the Lust part of the title comes in – and where viewers of a prudish disposition will go out.
It isn’t that these scenes push cinema into uncharted waters. Nobody who witnessed Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance justifying the title of Intimacy, or watched the uninhibited young stars of 9 Songs going far beyond the call of duty, will have cause to drop their popcorn. But context is all. Those films were specialist releases aimed at art-house audiences. Lee, on the other hand, won last year’s best-director Oscar for Brokeback Mountain, which means he has a complete set of book ends, as his martial-arts adventure Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon scooped the Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 2001. As well as nabbing three more Oscars, it took $130m in the USA, making it the highest-grossing foreign-language movie of all time.
In other words, Lee is nobody’s idea of an outsider. Indeed, there’s a case to be made for him as the Howard Hawks or George Cukor of modern cinema, adept at flitting gracefully between genres and settings without any loss of confidence. He handled the Taiwanese etiquette of Eat Drink Man Woman, the 1970s suburban imbroglios of The Ice Storm and the US civil-war hostilities of Ride with the Devil with equal and democratic aplomb. A key line from the new movie sums up his sensitive, inquisitive approach to film-making, and to human nature: “If you pay attention, nothing is trivial.” His broad appeal should translate into success for Lust, Caution, despite its subtitles and length. Like Brokeback Mountain, it won the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice film festival, though the US release met a fearsome obstacle in the shape of the infamous NC-17 rating, which usually spells commercial doom. (Admission is denied to anyone under 17; the next category down, R, allows a preschooler to see the likes of Saw or Hostel, as long as they are accompanied by an adult.)
“I was expecting the NC-17,” Lee says. “I couldn’t be sure, because there are no guidelines. Is it four pelvic thrusts that earns you that rating, or three? I know the ratings board hates thrusts.”
It must have been lobbing rotten tomatoes at the screen during the seven minutes in which Leung and Wei are seen making the beast with two backs. While the inflammatory material has been removed by Lee for the Chinese release (in turn sparking a roaring trade in illegal uncensored copies), he refused to seek a more lenient rating in America. You can see why. In the film’s first, chaste 90 minutes, Lee sets up a tense but relatively subdued atmosphere. There is intrigue and innuendo, but it’s all hush-hush; the locations and costumes are rendered handsomely in a muted palette. Once those locations are forsaken in favour of a claustrophobic bedroom, and those fancy costumes clawed by the actors from one another’s bodies, the departure from the earlier sobriety is as shocking in itself as what we actually see.
“We spent two weeks on the sex scenes,” Lee recalls. “Tony was a bit nervous. You just have to give him a push, twist his arm a little. Tang Wei just gave herself to the part. When we first met, I warned her, ‘I don’t know how far I’m going to go with the Lust part.’ She said, ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m in your hands.’ I had a few positions I’d thought about for the actors, but mostly we were experimenting. I’d go through each position with them: ‘Here, you’re yearning for this; here, you’re understanding that.’ We’d usually try two or three positions a day, and each one would require three or four shots, and that would be it. You couldn’t do much, because it got exhausting.” That admission leads me, inevitably, to broach the subject of whether Leung and Wei went the whole 9 Songs in their scenes together. I admit to Lee, in between clearing my throat and exhibiting all the other clichéd signs of English reserve, that this thought was on my mind while watching Lust, Caution. When I ask him if he’s worried that such salacious conjecture will detract from the viewing experience, he gives it some serious consideration before deciding not. “The doubt adds weight to the reality of the scene,” he says firmly. Go on, I say, you can tell me whether they were really having sex. “No, I can’t,” he giggles, cheerfully closing the book on the matter.
Irrespective of the “did they or didn’t they?” question, the actors in Lust, Caution are really put through their paces. When I mention to Lee that he once said “Sometimes you have to give people a hard time to accomplish something on screen”, he smiles blankly back, as if to say, isn’t that obvious? “It’s the oldest rule,” he explains. “I don’t believe acting should be comfortable. If it is, most likely the movie is boring. Discomfort brings freshness, spontaneity.” He looks pretty uncomfortable himself when I press him on how he creates this situation for his actors: “I have to work on it, because I’m a nice guy.” Not everyone holds the same view – I remind him that Hugh Grant, whom he directed in Sense and Sensibility, nicknamed him “the brute”. A smile lights up Lee’s face. “He also called me ‘Fang Lee’,” he says.
By Lee’s own account, Sense and Sensibility was a slog; he makes it sound like some kind of Jane Austen training camp. It was his first English-language production, after the huge international success, in the early 1990s, of his Taiwanese Father Knows Best trilogy, comprising Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman. He had originally trained as a stage actor, enjoying much success in productions at Taiwan’s Academy of Art. When he went to America in the 1980s, however, the language barrier proved too much for him to overcome in his chosen career. He switched to directing, gradually building up his English vocabulary until he felt confident enough to refuse the services of an interpreter when the call came to direct Emma Thompson’s Austen adaptation.
That was 12 years ago, but there is still a visible shudder when he recalls the first direction he gave to Thompson. “After I called ‘Cut’, I told her, ‘That was a dull look you gave.’” The actress didn’t say anything, but, a few weeks later, Lee heard that Thompson had half jokingly told her then husband, Kenneth Branagh, that she felt like slitting her wrists. “But it was a dull look,” Lee insists. “I said that, and then she came out with something ... not so dull.” He also rubbed Alan Rickman up the wrong way. “I kept saying, ‘Reduce, reduce, do more.’ So he said, ‘Well, which do you want, reduce or do more?’ It was all down to language problems. Also, I couldn’t get used to the English dryness and sarcasm. We have no equivalent for that in my culture. And I didn’t have the oratory skills to talk around what I wanted to say. I would just blurt out what I meant, even if it was blunt.” He gives me a brief once-over.
"So, I might say to you: 'Your hair is nerdy.'" There is an awkward silence as I fight the urge to flounce from the room and into the nearest salon, but I do at least get a taste of how Thompson felt."
If word has spread of Lee’s desire to put actors through the wringer, nobody who has seen the end results could be put off working with him. Possibly the only misstep in his career to date has been Hulk, which he took on when feeling invincible and superhero-like after the success of Crouching Tiger. He maintains that he is proud of this tough and turgid film, and blames the ambivalence with which it was greeted on the studio’s decision to market it as the big summer blockbuster of 2003. Surely he saw that coming? “Not at all,” he claims. “I was on a winning streak with Crouching Tiger, and I thought I could control the way Hulk was sold. But the marketing hurt the film, and it hurt me.” Lee got a hint of the direction in which things were heading when Donald Rumsfeld got in touch with the studio, asking to arrange a special screening of Hulk in Iraq. “He hadn’t seen the film, but he thought it would be a big morale-booster. I said no. He wouldn’t have liked it.” Half to himself, he mumbles the catch phrase from the old Incredible Hulk television series: “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”
His hairstyle tips aside, Lee couldn’t be anything other than charming, it seems to me. He’s even magnanimous about the only other noticeable blip in his blessed Hollywood career –
the failure of the otherwise award-laden Brokeback Mountain to win the Academy Award for best picture in 2006. Even the seemingly unshockable Jack Nicholson looked stunned when he opened the envelope on Oscar night to reveal that Crash had pipped Lee’s picture to the post. Some commentators speculated that conservative-minded voters had turned against the gay subject matter, but Lee won’t throw his hat into the ring. “It was a mixed evening, because I was rewarded, but the film’s teamwork wasn’t. I don’t know what the message was. It could have been the story. Or maybe Crash spent more on their campaign. But the movie has a longer life than that. It doesn’t end with that night.” I ask if he saw the article written in a postOscar fury by Annie Proulx, the author of the short story on which Brokeback Mountain was based, in which she railed against the Academy’s decision and referred to Crash as “Trash”. Lee laughs, blushes and cringes simultaneously. “Yes, I read that. That’s a pretty typical response in this part of the world. I would never have said those things. After all these years, I’m still not western enough.” 
