Taiwan-born filmmaker Ang Lee, who works primarily in the United States, has gained worldwide fame by creating films that combine artistic portrayals of people facing the currents of the times with entertainment value that attracts a wide audience.
While attending high school, where his father was the principal, Lee became obsessed with movies and subsequently failed his university entrance exams. He then attended the National Taiwan University of the Arts, where he realized, “theater was where I belonged.” After graduation, he moved to the U.S. to study theater at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He went on to earn an M.F.A. in film production from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His thesis film, Fine Line, won the NYU’s Wasserman Award for Outstanding Direction.
While living in New York, he made his feature film debut with the Taiwan-U.S. co-production Pushing Hands (1991). He won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival twice, for The Wedding Banquet (1993) and the U.S.-British co-production Sense and Sensibility (1995). Sense and Sensibility, which he says “made me a professional,” was nominated for seven Academy Awards and catapulted him into the Hollywood spotlight.
He won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), an adaptation of a Chinese martial arts novel. He received his first Academy Award for Best Director for Brokeback Mountain (2005), a film about the love between two gay men. He won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival twice, for Brokeback Mountain and for Lust, Caution (2007), a spy film set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.
He won his second Academy Award for Best Director for Life of Pi (2012), a 3D film about a boy stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger. “When I first read the novel, I didn't think it could be done,” he says. He filmed most of the movie in Taiwan and was able to overcome the technical challenges.
From his early films about the conflict between a father from Taiwan and his son living in the U.S., he has worked in genres as diverse as the Civil War, Watergate, comic book superheroes, the Iraq War, and sci-fi action.
He cites Japanese directors like Yasujiro Ozu as influences, and he has also known Hirokazu Kore-eda for a long time, as Kore-eda's father was born in Taiwan.
As the first artist from Taiwan to receive the Praemium Imperiale, he said, “This is indeed a great honor and I take it to heart. I am very proud that Taiwan can be recognized in this way.”