From an interview of Ang Lee by Stella Papamichael,
BBC:
Q: "Is the western setting vital to the nature of this love story, or could you have set it somewhere else?"
A: "You could but it wouldn't be as poignant and poetic and elegiac in the way it was inherent in the literature provided by Annie Proulx. I just don't see any other way.... I think that particular time she set it in really helped the privacy of their feelings and the uniqueness and therefore [it was] a pure way of telling a love story. It's almost like the oldest love story, but you have the newest texture -- a
newfound texture, so to speak -- and so I treasured that."