from: The Book Standard


Talking to 'Brokeback' Director Ang Lee: "Annie Proulx's 30 Pages Kept Haunting Me"
February 08, 2006
By Martin A. Grove



In handicapping the best directing Oscar race, two things you typically look at closely are: who's just won the Directors Guild of America award and what are the nominees' track records with Academy members?

Answering those questions suggests that March 5 could be a big night for Focus Features' Brokeback Mountain and Ang Lee, this year's DGA winner. After winning the DGA award in 2001 for his critically acclaimed martial arts action drama Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lee was this close to a best-picture and -director double win. Instead, Ridley Scott's Gladiator captured best picture and Steven Soderbergh took home the best directing Oscar for Traffic. This year could be payback time for Academy members, who have an opportunity to celebrate Lee's achievement with his critically cclaimed Brokeback while also making up for shortchanging him five years ago.

Complicating this year's race is the fact that for the first time since 1981, all five best-picture nominees are also up for consideration in the directing race. For the past quarter century, there have typically been differences between the two sets of nominees, so that films up for best picture but without best directing nods were orphans and at a disadvantage. This year's double nominations across the board work to create a level playing field.

On the other hand, the directing nominees' track records with the Academy make for a less level playing field. It's the first Oscar nod for directing for three of them (Bennett Miller for Capote, Paul Haggis for Crash and George Clooney for Good Night, and Good Luck). On the other hand, for Steven Spielberg, Munich is his seventh directing nomination.

With Brokeback having already passed $60 million, it's a solid hit at the box office as well as on the awards front. The picture should have a cume of at least $80 million by Oscar Night. If it performs as well March 5 as many Hollywood handicappers anticipate, it will have an excellent shot at doing $100 million or more domestically.

Talking recently to Lee about the making of Brokeback, he told me that it was after he finished making Crouching Tiger that he first discovered the Annie Proulx short story that Brokeback is based on. "About 4 1/2 years ago, in between Crouching Tiger and The Hulk, I was introduced to a short story, and then the script, by James Schamus," he recalled. "He had acquired the rights to the script. He said it was very small, kind of strange, but very interesting. So I read it . . . and it got me choked up at the end where he takes the shirt out. [I thought] this is a brilliant piece of writing [but] gay ranch hands in Wyoming were very far away for me.

"And, by the way, a lot of people feel the same way. They don't know that world, but they're very moved by [it for] some unknown reasons. I had that feeling. And then I had the script by Larry [McMurtry] and Diana [Ossana]. Larry, of course, is a legend. It was brilliantly laid out and you could see a movie right there. But I just had the feeling that it won't be made and probably very few people will care to see it. Anyway, I was on my way to do The Hulk so I went ahead doing [that] and the whole two years those 30 pages [of Annie Proulx's story ] kept haunting me. I just couldn't forget it. It refused to leave my mind."

After finishing The Hulk, Lee said, he was exhausted, but "one day I asked James, who had already sold Good Machine to Universal and formed Focus, what happened with that piece and how did he come out. He said nobody had made it yet and I got itchy and said I want to do it. By that time he had already lost the rights. They re-acquired it and we made it. I was so tired from [making Crouching Tiger and The Hulk back to back] that I just wanted to make it because if I didn't somebody else would and I'd be very jealous. It was too good a story to let go."

The screenplay, however, was "not written like a shoestring budget movie and it was somewhat epic," he pointed out. "The story covered 20 years. And it had to shoot in many locations with many, many scenes. I [thought] a shoestring budget was not possible. But when James and I [considered it] now he was on the other side of the table and he green lit the picture. Somehow we came up with the proper money to make it."

Frequently, filmmakers are faced with the challenges of turning a 700-page novel into a 120-page screenplay, but what Lee had to do with Brokeback was expand a short story into a two-hour movie. "That was largely done by Larry and Diana," he said. In the second act of the film, for instance, "anything they had [that was] like a line in the short story, they expanded to a scene. They added . . . mainly the Texas part. That's the biggest expansion. And when I got in I saw it not as a western at all, but as a love story. So I needed to strengthen certain parts. So I went home to rewrite with Larry and Diana and finally we came up with a script that was ready to shoot."

Asked about shooting the film, Lee told me, he "barely had enough budget [about $14 million] to do it. So I had to shoot quickly and for economic reasons we had to go to Canada instead of Wyoming. So to stage Wyoming and Texas in Canada and not only were there a lot of sheep that we had to move around a lot, but also we traveled around a four-hour driving perimeter from Calgary to find those little towns and locations to make up Wyoming and [had] to dress them up. So [there was] a lot of traveling. We only had like nine weeks of shooting. Basically, it required simple shooting to finish it on budget. And, also, I think the writing required a very simple style. I think the hardest thing was to keep (the main characters) aging properly.

"There were lots of details, so each time you get into their lives, they're two or three years from the last time you saw them. Somehow the accumulation of [such] slice-of-life added up to an epic feeling. I think that's the hardest part cinematically. Then, of course, everything is to secure acting. So I did a lot of rehearsing with the actors and talked about the content, the style, the details and dramatic needs and the arc, the development of the characters. There were lots of rehearsals and lots of location scouting and lots of study of the realistic West, which Larry was very helpful on.

"There are some shots I fashioned in my head while I was location scouting or when I read [books with] still photography of the West. Other than that, it was pretty straightforward shooting. But we had to shoot quickly and work around weather. It was very agile kind of shooting. I'm very flexible and change plans according to weather conditions. If I saw a cloud coming, I'd turn the camera, move people around and rush, rush before rain came."

Not every director can do that, of course. How did Lee get good at working that way? "Well, I came from independent filmmaking and student films," he replied. "So I'm used to that. Plus, I shot a big movie in China. The Hong Kong–style martial-arts movies are to me the pinnacle of guerilla filmmaking. And, also, I got used to shooting Hollywood productions like The Hulk. I think I am a very hirable director because I have all kinds of range."

When he rehearses, Lee doesn't have lots of actors sitting around a table reading lines: "I never really do that. I don't do a master reading with the whole cast because I want to interpret it, not the actors. Usually that doesn't tell me much. So I don't do the roundtable unless they really want to do it. But I talk to them individually and spend a lot of time with them going over the characters. And then I pair them up and read scenes and get into details over how the person walks and talks and maybe single out one or two lines and keep on doing it until we feel the person. And then we pair them up and just go through the scenes. But I don't [rehearse] excessively because I want to save the best for the shooting days.

"One important part [about rehearsing] is I share my research with actors and sometimes take them to the real locations that we're preparing [to shoot at] so they can sense it and share my thoughts. I even would take them to the mountains and set up camps and have them [experience all that]. I think that really helped them. I took them along with my technical scout. Actually, you're creating a world for them to function in, so I usually invite them into that world that I'm in the process of creating. Sometimes they give me very good feedback, too."

In casting the film, Lee explained, "I wanted to cast younger [actors] and have them play older instead of the other way around or split the difference. I think young innocence goes a long way for this movie. They're among the best actors in their age group. I liked Heath [Ledger] to anchor the Western scenes in a conservative, tough, tight-lipped, non-verbal, melancholy sort of mood. And then Jake [Gyllenhaal] for his romantic lead. I think he carried a romantic theme . . . positive, romantic, can-do, smiles a lot, is very bright, is willing to try something for his life, make a change. I think their positions are very different and I think that makes them a good couple. They complement each other."

Shooting the love scenes between Ledger and Gyllenhaal had to have been very sensitive to do. Asked how he got them to do the scenes so believably, Lee replied, "We went through the scenes verbally. On the shooting day, I wasn't much of a help. I believe in freshness, and they had to carry the scene. I blocked the scene. I think the blocking shows how you want to externalize internal feelings. So by the time I blocked it and set up the camera and did the rehearsals, I think they knew the scene very well. I never really rehearsed it. And they just rolled the camera. I told them, 'If you don't believe, nobody will,' and they just delivered. And once they delivered I [did some] nit-picking on little things. The first take was the hardest. The tent scene was [done in] 13 takes. The kissing [scene took] six, seven, eight [takes from] every angle."

In post-production, Lee noted, "I work very closely with the editors. I work the same time they work. I sit next to them and just go through the scenes. Usually, it takes me a few weeks to forget about what I was thinking while shooting and just take what I have as the new material and get used to it. The editor will put an assembly together before I get to the editing room. This is [done] while we're shooting. He put the rough-cut footage together.
And how you pace it is rather important, of course.

"Usually after your first cut is started, you call in your composer and after your second cut, then you start to work on music. But with this one, the composer in order to get his job, after I talked to him, sent me seven scenes of music. This was like weeks before I started shooting [and these] ended up in the movie. I was hearing it as I was preparing the movie and it was very helpful. And the actors and the crew were hearing them, too. So that was a help. I already knew the mood of the movie so that was something special."

Editing is the part of the filmmaking process Lee says he enjoys most. "Shooting is the most exciting," he noted. "Exciting can be both ways—good exciting or panic! You don't have that in the editing room. Everything is in control. Usually, I enjoy that much better."

Looking back on getting Brokeback made, Lee told me, "I was exhausted from the previous movies and I wanted to take a very long break. I just didn't want anybody else to make this movie except myself. That's why I did it. I just barely had the strength to put it together and finish shooting. There's something about me being relaxed on the movie that gives the movie a very good vibe, I think, a very natural kind of approach. I think that when I was making the movie I saw it as a little previous working experiment. So I was thinking maybe, if we were lucky, we can make our money back in art houses. That's what I expected. I didn't expect to win awards, either. It was shot very simply and not particularly artistically. I did it in a very relaxed fashion and wanted to be in love with everybody on the set. I wanted to make it a very pleasant experience. The material was quite challenging, but when I thought that not too many people would see it I was actually very relaxed. And little did I know that it [would turn out so big]. I didn't know it was going to play that well. I was very surprised."


*****


Martin A. Grove writes for The Hollywood Reporter.

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