Lust, Caution

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

Starring: Tang Wei, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Wang Lee Hom, Joan Chen, Chih-ying Chu 

Directed by: Ang Lee

Premise: An espionage thriller set in WWII-era Shanghai, centering around Mr. Yee, a powerful political figure and Wang Jiazhi, the young woman who gets swept up in a dangerous game of emotional intrigue with him.

[Pubrick]

well anyway, i like this trailer and i think it accurately reflects the film. not silly or unrewatchable like hidden dragon, probably underrated like HULK with the atmosphere of brokeback. i mean, naked chinese women? outrageous!

can anyone tell me where the music in the trailer is from? douche bags at imdb claim that "Movies from Focus almost ALWAYS use music from the movies for their trailers," citing some examples. if it's original then that's another oscar for whoever did that.

[72teeth]

My girlfriend's dad is an auto enthusiast and was hired to help out with some audio problems they had with some of the car noises...so someone came down from post production and mic'ed up his old 64' Plymouth and he had to drive it around for 13 hours (it's literally for a two minute scene). since it's so late in post production (i guess the original audio was from the wrong kind of car and Ang Lee wanted it to be authentic) they ended up paying him upwards of $7000...










K'bye.

[MacGuffin]

Ang Lee's latest nabs NC-17 rating
Focus Features fine with MPAA decision
Source: Variety

The MPAA has given Ang Lee's Toronto-bound "Lust, Caution" an NC-17 rating, and Focus Features has accepted it.

The erotic espionage thriller, co-written by Focus CEO James Schamus and Wang Hui Ling, will bow in Gotham on Sept. 28, as skedded, and expand to additional markets on Oct. 5.

Based on Eileen Chang's short story about a shy Chinese drama student drawn into an assassination plot against a Japanese collaborator during WWII, the Mandarin-language pic is one of the label's big hopes for the upcoming kudos season. Tony Leung and newcomer Tang Wei star.

Focus screened the final cut for the MPAA late Wednesday afternoon and accepted the rating the same day.

"As with so many of his previous films, Oscar-winning director Ang Lee has crafted a masterpiece about and for grown-ups," Schamus said.

It is rare for a studio, or even a studio's niche division, to release an NC-17, and doubly so on an awards hopeful like "Lust, Caution."

However, the rating likely did not come as a surprise to Focus. In the pic's production notes, Schamus likened the lead femme character to Maria Schneider's role in the sexually explicit pic "Last Tango in Paris," which received an X rating for its 1973 release and was subsequently rated NC-17 for a homevideo reissue.

The MPAA created the NC-17 rating in 1990 in an attempt to remove the stigma surrounding the X rating.

Studios often fight the designation, which is considered bad for business, due to the fact that certain newspapers restrict advertising of NC-17, among other factors.

In many cases, studios cut films to avoid the rating. Films as varied as "Eyes Wide Shut," "American Pie," "Happiness" and "Saw" all were re-edited after the MPAA threatened an NC-17.

It's rare for NC-17 films to get awards attention, mostly because those rare films to carry that rating are either gorefests or so sexual that they're not traditional kudos fare. But the 1990 "Henry & June" and the 2000 "Requiem for a Dream" were two NC-17s that got Oscar noms.

Steamy Euro fare like "The Dreamers" has also been released under the NC-17 designation Stateside.

Among the recent notable battles over NC-17: "Team America: World Police" originally received an NC-17 designation for depictions of puppet sex, but Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Scott Rudin resubmitted it several times and eventually received an R. And Wayne Kramer won an R rating on "The Cooler" after he trimmed 1½ minutes from the Lionsgate pic.

However, Atom Egoyan trimmed an orgy scene from "Where the Truth Lies" in an attempt get an R rating but the MPAA didn't budge, much to ThinkFilm's dismay.

EDI has tracked a mere 25 NC-17 pics at the box office. Among them, "Showgirls" ranks at the top with $20.3 million, followed by "Henry & June" at $11.6 million.

In this case, however, the label's topper is intimately involved in the production with his frequent collaborator. Lee's last pic earned him the director Oscar and afforded him plenty of good will for his follow-up effort.

As a Mandarin-language entry, "Lust, Caution" already faced a potential barrier to overcome at the B.O., though Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" earned $128 million at the domestic B.O. and $209 million worldwide.

[MacGuffin]

Love as an Illusion: Beautiful to See, Impossible to Hold
Source: New York Times

IN "Brokeback Mountain," the 2005 critical hit and cultural flashpoint that won Ang Lee an Academy Award for best director, love is a haunting, elusive ideal briefly attained but forever out of reach. Mr. Lee's new movie, "Lust, Caution," which will have its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival this week, is also a tragic melodrama, one in which the lovers are up against forces beyond their control, but it takes a harsher view of romance. This time love is a performance, a trap or, cruelest of all, an illusion.

" 'Brokeback' is about a lost paradise, an Eden," Mr. Lee said this month, taking a break from a final sound-mixing session in Manhattan. "But this one — it's down in the cave, a scary place. It's more like hell."

Based on a short story by the popular Chinese writer Eileen Chang, "Lust, Caution" is set in the early 1940s during the Sino-Japanese war, mostly in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. The heroine, Chia Chi (Tang Wei), belongs to a university drama troupe plotting to assassinate a collaborator named Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). Assigned to seduce the target, an official in the puppet government, she falls into a desperately physical affair, driven (as the title suggests) by both passion and suspicion. The cast also includes Joan Chen as the grasping, gossipy Mrs. Yee, and Wang Lee-hom, the American-born Asian pop star, as the student ringleader. (The film, which will also be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival next month, is set for release on Sept. 28 by Focus Features.)

Mr. Lee said that when he first read Chang's story, which she started writing in the '50s then obsessively revised and eventually published in 1979, it struck him in much the same way as the Annie Proulx story that was the basis for "Brokeback Mountain." "At first I thought there's no way I can make it a movie," he said. But he couldn't stop thinking about it. "There's a point where I feel this is my story. It becomes a mission."

Like Mr. Lee, 52, who was born in Taiwan but has lived and worked in the United States since the '80s, Chang had a foot in two worlds. Her celebrated early stories and novellas, written in the '40s, evoked the heady, glamorous fusion of East and West, old and new, that characterized Shanghai before the Communist takeover.

After the 1949 revolution she fled to Hong Kong and then to America, where she continued to write and translate but became ever more reclusive, even as her fame grew throughout the Chinese diaspora. She died in Los Angeles in 1995. Her work has been adapted for the screen by the Hong Kong directors Stanley Kwan ("Red Rose, White Rose") and Ann Hui ("Love in a Fallen City").

For Mr. Lee, an astute observer of the warping power of sexual desire and repression (not just in "Brokeback Mountain," but also in films as disparate as "The Ice Storm," "The Wedding Banquet" and "Sense and Sensibility"), the allure of "Lust, Caution" lies in the irreducible mystery of its love story, which culminates in a seemingly rash and irrational act. "It's complex and hard to pin down," he said. "Maybe it can't be pinned down."

To expand Chang's slender story to a feature-length script (the film, which is in Mandarin, runs two and a half hours), Mr. Lee worked first with Wang Hui-Ling, a co-writer on some of his Chinese-language films, including "Eat Drink Man Woman" (1994) and the martial-arts fantasy "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2000). He then turned to James Schamus, CEO of Focus Features as well as the producer of all of Mr. Lee's films and the writer or co-writer on most of them. Mr. Schamus's lack of familiarity with Chang's work was an advantage.

"I didn't have the innate reverence that I think Chinese readers do," he said. "I didn't have to worry too much about suggesting significant changes."

A grand production on a modest budget of under $15 million, "Lust, Caution" was shot over four months in Hong Kong, Malaysia (standing in for old Hong Kong) and Shanghai. The most ambitious undertaking was a full-scale re-creation, built in only three months on a Shanghai soundstage, of a section of Nanking Road, the city's commercial thoroughfare, complete with more than 100 storefronts. But above all it was the raw intensity of the intimate scenes that made for a grueling shoot. "We didn't have to stick our stars 60 feet in the air above a bamboo forest," Mr. Schamus said, referring to the wire-work ballet of "Crouching Tiger," "so in that sense it was easier. But especially for Ang this was a much more difficult film. It took him to a place that was really emotional and extreme."

Mr. Lee's "Lust, Caution" makes overt the first part of its title, which Chang only hinted at in her lush, stylized prose. "It was very brave of her to fit this story of a woman's sexual pleasure into a story of war, something so patriarchal and macho," Mr. Lee said. "How she put that subject matter in this huge canvas — it's a little drop but the ripple is tremendous." He said he felt no obligation to retain the relative discretion of the writing: "In Chinese literature the art is the hiding. But movies are another animal. It's a graphic tool."

Accordingly, his film features a few notably revealing and acrobatic sex scenes. (A less explicit cut is being prepared for a possible Chinese release.) These were shot over 11 days on a closed set, with only the main camera and sound personnel present. Leaving room to improvise, Mr. Lee talked through the physical and emotional content of each scene with Mr. Leung (the Hong Kong star best known here for his roles in Wong Kar-wai's films) and Ms. Tang (who had never before acted in a film). "Ang's a unique director because he trained to be an actor," Mr. Leung said by e-mail from China, where he is shooting a film with John Woo. "He's very quick and intuitive and is always offering his actors something new to work off of."

The process was harrowing. "We could only shoot for half the day because we'd be exhausted," Mr. Lee said. "I almost went insane." But he was convinced of the necessity of the sex scenes. "They're like the fight sequences in 'Crouching Tiger,' " he said. "It's life and death. It's where they really show their character." He added, "And it's part of the plot, since it's all about acting, levels of acting. You're performing when you have sex." (At press time "Lust, Caution" had not yet received a rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, but both Mr. Lee and Mr. Schamus said they were expecting an NC-17.)

"Lust, Caution" conjures not just '40s Shanghai but '40s Hollywood, summoning the ghosts of film noirs and wartime romantic melodramas. The shadow of Alfred Hitchcock looms large. A poster of "Suspicion" — which Mr. Lee noted was "the biggest hit of 1942 in Shanghai" — is glimpsed at one point. "Notorious," with its intricate entangling of perverse love and espionage business, is the obvious influence (possibly even for Chang, an occasional film critic who wrote screenplays for Hong Kong's Cathay Studios in the '50s and '60s). Mr. Lee cites another touchstone: Josef von Sternberg's 1931 "Dishonored," starring Marlene Dietrich as an Austrian secret agent spying on the Russians.

For Mr. Lee, whose parents were exiles from mainland China, "Lust, Caution" resonates on a political level. "It's about occupying and being occupied," he said. "The peril here is falling in love with your occupier." But he was also drawn to the poignant notion that the story, though inspired by an actual assassination plot in the 1930s, incorporated elements of Chang's own life: a university education in Hong Kong interrupted by war, and a doomed romance with an older man publicly known as a traitor. Chang's first husband, the writer Hu Lancheng, briefly served in the puppet government and was an inveterate philanderer.

"It was hard for me to live in Eileen Chang's world," Mr. Lee said. "There are days I hated her for it. It's so sad, so tragic. But you realize there's a shortage of love in her life: romantic love, family love." He added, "This is the story of what killed love for her."

[Pubrick]

Lust, Awesome.

am i alone in thinking this will be one of the top 3 movies of the year (so far)? i'm feeling like a goddamn silias over here.

[hedwig]

haha, next you'll be drooling on yourself from anticipation, crying yourself to sleep, and buying shitty dvds by the truckload to ease your sorrow.

[Pubrick]

don't forget ruling over North Korea..

[MacGuffin]

No shame in 'NC-17,' says Lee

His new spy thriller, "Lust, Caution," has received the most restrictive "NC-17" rating, but Oscar-winning director Ang Lee says he hopes the movie will change the public perception that the category is reserved for pornography.

"In the past, NC-17 movies were equated with pornographic movies. Most movie theaters don't show them," Lee said after arriving to attend the Venice Film Festival, where "Lust, Caution" is competing for the top Golden Lion prize.

"We hope to send the message in the U.S. that NC-17 is a respectable category and that it's not pornography. It's just unsuitable for children," Lee said. The NC-17 rating bans viewers under 17.

"Lust, Caution" is about a group of students who plot to assassinate the intelligence chief in the Japanese-backed Chinese government during the World War II era.

[grand theft sparrow]

Good for the MPAA!  Because you know how the kids love their WWII dramas and their Mandarin with English subtitles.

[MacGuffin]

Ang Lee cuts 'Lust' for China
Venice winner to lose 30 minutes
Source: Variety

BEIJING -- Venice Golden Lion winner "Lust, Caution" will see 30 of its steamiest and most violent minutes trimmed for Chinese auds, sparking renewed calls for the introduction of a film classification system in the country.

The original runs 156 minutes, but up to half an hour will be cut to make the film "relatively clean" for Chinese auds, helmer Ang Lee told Chinese media.

The spy actioner features explicit sex scenes between Tang Wei and Hong Kong star Tony Leung Chiu-wai. U.S. censors have slapped an NC-17 label on the movie.

"Lust" is also likely to be sliced in Hong Kong, a Chinese special administrative region where Edko Films is releasing the pic wide on 50 prints on Sept. 26.

"We are still waiting for the advice of the ratings board," said an Edko source. "But it seems pretty clear that we are heading for cuts to qualify for a III rating."

Of Hong Kong's four ratings, the III classification is the territory's only one with mandatory stipulations. It gives theater box offices the power to check IDs, requires that promotional materials be screened by censors and mandates that videos be sold in sealed plastic wrapping.

No such rating option exists on the Chinese mainland, where either everyone gets to see a movie, from toddler to senior citizen, or no one does. Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" was banned in mainland China for its homosexual content.

The lack of a film classification system means the only tools at the censor's disposal are cutting entire scenes or simply banning a movie, both drastic steps considering that script approval must be granted before a movie goes into production.

Among the advocates of a film rating system is thesp Gong Li, who proposed a system in her capacity as a member of the advisory body to China's annual parliament, the National People's Congress.

"Lust, Caution" was due to open Sept. 23, but is more likely to bow Oct. 26 after a blackout period, known as Outstanding Golden Domestic Film Exhibition Month, to allow for a Communist Party congress.

[MacGuffin]

Cinematical's interview with Ang Lee:

[MacGuffin]

Ang Lee's 'Lust,' built on trust
The director pushes his actors to the limit in 'Lust, Caution,' a tale of sexual roles, violence and deception. On the set, they believe in him.
Source: Los Angeles Times

NEW YORK — THE first image in Ang Lee's new movie, "Lust, Caution," is of an animal, a watchdog, a German Shepherd. Only after that do we see a human, a man, also standing guard.

When Lee cast Chinese-TV actress Tang Wei to play the lead, in her first movie, he warned her that there would be sex scenes, though he didn't know how explicit they'd be. The novice film actress told him, "I'm leaving myself to you," having no idea how wrenching the experience would be -- that she'd pass out, for instance, when they finished one shoot.
 
Lee's male lead, Tony Leung, had a different acting profile, a quarter-century of making films that established him as one of Asia's top stars. So Lee felt comfortable loading up the Hong Kong-based Leung with materials to prepare him for his role -- from a Humphrey Bogart film noir to one of Henri Rousseau's moody jungle paintings, "with the predator and prey," Leung noted.

Leung found the painting helpful indeed for understanding his character in "Lust, Caution," who would be both the hunter and hunted. But it also prepared him for working with the exacting Taiwanese American, who was directing his first film since winning the Academy Award for "Brokeback Mountain."

"I think he's the predator," Leung said with a laugh, "I'm the prey."

Setting the trap

"LUST, CAUTION," a Focus Features release that opens Oct. 5 in Los Angeles, is set in Shanghai during World War II, when much of China was occupied by the Japanese. Leung plays the local secret service head who is collaborating with them and whose main job is ferreting out -- and killing -- his fellow Chinese who are resisting the invaders. Tang Wei plays a naive student actress recruited by the resistance to seduce him and set him up for execution.

Based on a short story by Shanghai-born Eileen Chang, who lived out the end of her life as a recluse in Los Angeles, the Mandarin-language "Lust, Caution," would seem to have little in common with "Brokeback Mountain," with one key exception -- the central role of sex and how it is potentially deadly for the protagonists in each. Even then, the joining of the gay cowboys in "Brokeback" is brief, and mostly clothed, while "Lust, Caution" has earned an NC-17 rating by using its main characters' sexual positioning to depict the evolution of their relationship, one that ends with their limbs, and more, elaborately entwined.

Lee compares that to how the fight scenes set the tone in his 2000 Oscar winner "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," whose writers, Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus, were teamed once again here. In "Lust, Caution," we know that Leung's character, Mr. Yee, is a torturer and killer but never see him on the job, only in the civilized company of his wife and her mahjongg-playing friends, or with the woman from that group who becomes his mistress, with her own deadly mission. Their sex scenes thus become our wordless window into that other side of him, as when he takes Tang Wei's character violently from behind in their first liaison and beats her about the back.

It would be torture, or rape, were she not there to entice him to lower his guard -- so who's to say that she's not the predator? And while the sex act at first reflects their grim political environment -- an occupier and an occupied -- the body language keeps evolving until their final encounter, when they are contorted in each other's limbs, she curled up like a fetus, suggesting that the polar-opposite predators may have experienced more than they counted on, and "that's frightening to them," Lee says.

"Many purposes in the body language," the director adds.

Both "Brokeback" and this movie are based on stories by women in which "sex, making love, is one intimate way to make connections," Lee notes. "But what makes the difference to me is the theme of the movie . . . and therefore the mood of shooting those scenes are . . . drastically different. . . . 'Brokeback Mountain' is like paradise, the whole movie is like the loss of Eden . . . Something pure and unclear happened on Brokeback and they spend the next 20 years trying to go back [and] finally the tragedy comes."

In "Lust, Caution," by contrast, "the sex scenes here remind me of hell, [going] deeper and deeper toward hell," Lee says. "This is a more realistic approach. Truthful. It's not an illusion like 'Brokeback Mountain' . . . It's like hell, it's sinking . . . The shooting feels like hell to me."

Of course, for all his "caution," to borrow from the movie's title, his female lead did not fathom that fate when she won out in what Lee says was a search that spanned "thousands" of actresses.

In New York before the American rollout of the film, Tang Wei, 27, recalls that she did not know what she was vying for when the five-step audition process began in Beijing. She had gotten her start in theater, once entered a beauty pageant as a lark and was appearing in a TV serial, but not in a glamour part, "just a supporting role, just a friend, a material girl," she says. Speaking at times through a translator and at times in her own still-awkward English, she recalls having her picture taken and being asked to read from some "fake script" before she was called for a second audition -- and met the famous Ang Lee.

She had not seen any of his films, however, and when asked who her favorite director was, she didn't have the guile to butter him up -- she named Ingmar Bergman, mentioning his "Wild Strawberries" and "Through a Glass Darkly." Asked what playwrights she liked, she named another Swede, August Strindberg, whose "Miss Julie" she once performed. Lee posed such questions as, "When you see a beautiful girl, what do you like to know about her?" she says. "He looked at me in the eyes. . . My mother is a Chinese opera singer, so when Ang noticed, he asked me to sing a little song and I sing. Very interesting."

Lee says he sensed that in real life "she might be a fish out of water," which was good. She also shared with him -- and the character -- exhilarating early experiences on stage. In the movie, shy Wong Chia Chi first feels a sense of power when she performs a defiant patriotic play with a student company, at the end of which the audience chants with them, "China will not fall!" When she is recruited to play a life-and-death role -- of seducing the traitorous collaborator -- we sense that she agrees not so much out of love of country but love of the ruse, and the challenge of pulling it off and being part of a cell that, like the acting troupe, is a substitute family.

Lee says he thought back to his first time on stage, as a teenager, when he looked out at the audience "with the glaring eyes through the spotlight [and] could sense their breathing, they're so quiet. And this for sure is not illusion . . . the give and take, what they took from me and what they give back to me, something in the air."

Tang Wei similarly had found stage work intoxicating, and Lee took a risk on casting her without even seeing her in the buff, as she'd eventually have to appear on screen. But before the last auditions they did ask her to show up in a traditional Chinese silk dress. "They call me up the day before and say, 'You better come dressed in qipao.' I don't have any qipao and then I went to a store [and] saw a lot . . . So I bought one. . . . Light blue and then some flower patches . . . It's really tight too."

She had the part, with one catch: She'd have to go through a three-month acting boot camp with Lee and three instructors putting her through such exercises as imagining herself as E.T., an alien discovering everything on Earth for the first time, like what a tea cup is, or water, or how it spills and how gravity works -- discovering all that with a sense of wonder. "At first I didn't understand the meaning," she says. "But later on I understand -- he wants me to forget everything," starting with the acting she'd done before, particularly the broad style that's a staple of television.

And once she was on board, "I didn't watch TV, no newspaper. I had no contact with any of my friends, even my parents. After a while, people asked me, 'Where do you live in Beijing?' And I have to think for a while. I can't really remember Beijing. I used this method to help me to get into this character [and] lived her life for eight months."

All she had to do in her first film was go from playing a wide-eyed student to pretending to be a sophisticated married seductress who must keep her restraint while waiting to see when -- and if -- her comrades will kill her first real lover or if he will find her out first.

"You think I have him in a trap? Between my legs, maybe? You think he can't smell the spy in me?" she asks her resistance handlers in the scene where the tensions finally burst out. "He not only gets inside me, but he worms his way into my heart. I take him in like a slave. I play my part loyally, so I too can get inside him . . . and I will keep going until I can't go anymore. . . . Every time when he finally collapses on me, I think, maybe this is it, maybe this is the moment you'll come, and shoot him, right in the back of the head, and his blood and brains will cover me."

In Lee they trust

IN one of his signature roles, Tony Leung -- full name Tony Leung Chiu Wai -- also played a mole who puts his life on the line. He was the cop who infiltrates the mob in "Infernal Affairs," the 2003 Hong Kong thriller copied in Martin Scorsese's English-language "The Departed," with Leonardo DiCaprio playing his role. But in his career, the 45-year-old Leung had never been asked to play a character older -- or uglier -- than he appears in real life.

"Never before," he says. "I think, yeah, it's quite interesting, why not?"

He also had never worked with Ang Lee but quickly learned the ground rules: The script is to be followed as written, not a word improvised. No watching at rushes, either, or checking the monitor to see how you look.

"He wants you to be spontaneous," Leung says. "It's quite difficult for me. I have to change everything, including my expressions, your gesture, your body language, the way I walk. Even my voice. So I have to trust him. I have no choice."

In addition to giving him an old Bogart film ("In a Lonely Place"), Lee had him watch Brando (in "Last Tango in Paris") and Richard Burton (in "Equus"). "I think he wants me to be more masculine," says Leung, whose million-dollar asset is the most engaging of smiles. "I'm used to being very fragile, good-looking. . . . "

As for the walk, that's a staple of Lee's theory of acting -- you "walk into the character." Authoritarian men in '40s China carried themselves differently than men today, and Lee had a model for one of the former, Leung says. "He shows me how his father walks."

Leung says he assumed he was doing well ("If not, he'd say something"), but it took a while for him to relax on the set with Lee. "He always asked, 'How come you're so tense?' 'Because you give me a lot of pressure . . . a lot of things to study. Books, movies, music, paintings.' " The music was Roy Webb's score for the 1942 horror film "Cat People."

Lee explains, "I think good acting, especially an actor at his level, should show complexities and possibilities and ambiguities, many layers. So I like to inspire him some other ways other than giving him very specific directions, but rather giving him possibilities . . . show him the mood . . . Sometimes you'll tell them literally what to do, what it means, sometimes you just confuse them and see what comes out of it. But I won't confuse them with irrelevant things.

"I don't enjoy torturing actors, although sometimes I have to . . . to get good results."

While the veteran Leung quickly settled into the demands of the months of shooting in China and Malaysia, Lee never stopped worrying about his young leading lady. Though "Crouching Tiger" also spotlighted a newcomer, Ziyi Zhang, she wasn't counted on to carry that film. With Tang Wei, "Every day she's in my mind, how to get the best for her, out of her, and not to ruin her, keep her healthy," Lee says, "get her out of it with sanity."

Wei says there were nights she slept only an hour until she got so tired "it's a little bit easier." The time she fainted was after a scene in which she and Leung are in a car and he grabs her head under his arm. Sometimes they shot her scenes time and again until she got just what Lee wanted, whether by design or pure luck.

Leung didn't lose sleep -- just his appetite. "Especially when I did some emotional scenes like when I was holding her in the car and when I do love scenes," he says, "and we walk out like ghosts."

But now they're through it, and through their first red carpet march with Lee too, at the Venice Film Festival, where "Lust, Caution" took the top prize, the Golden Lion. And the two stars are in sync on one point -- they'd like nothing more than to work with him again.

Lee has been saying for a decade, since "The Ice Storm," that he needs to do something easier, less wrenching, not so heavy. Why not now?

He insists he has no firm project but would love to have a happy ending again, as in 1995's "Sense and Sensibility," as long as it could be done full-heartedly, without cynicism. Here's his gut instinct, then, for what he'll do next: "a romantic comedy."

[MacGuffin]

indieWIRE INTERVIEW | "Lust, Caution" Director Ang Lee

There's no lack of buzz around "Lust, Caution," the latest provocation from Ang Lee. Though tepidly received by some Stateside reviewers, who found more caution than lust, it collected the Golden Lion in Venice (Lee's second in three years following "Brokeback Mountain"). "Lust" marks not only Lee's return to a Chinese-based milieu--with his trademark agility, he once again tackles a new genre, this time an erotic espionage thriller, with graphic sex scenes that won the film an NC-17 rating. No question, the film's steamy grappling might be hard to distinguish from pornography. But it could be argued those scenes play a crucial dramatic role--Ang Lee calls them "the crux of the movie"--and expand the boundaries of what cinema is capable of capturing.

Adapted from a story by revered Chinese novelist Eileen Chang, "Lust" unfolds against the dangerous glamour of Japanese-occupied Shanghai during WWII. Reticent young Wang Jiazhi (first-timer Tang Wei) finds her calling a s an actress when she joins a university theater troupe. Spearheaded by patriotic Kuang (Asian pop star Wang Leehom), the troupe hatches a naive plot to assassinate Mr. Yee (Hong Kong legend Tony Leung), an intelligence chief working for the Japanese. Wang, their star performer, will set him up for the kill by seducing him. Disguised as a wealthy merchant's wife, she infiltrates Mr. Yee's household, playing mahjong with his wife (Joan Chen, in a wicked cameo) and her idle friends, and eventually becomes his mistress. Wang is no match, though, for the feral, dapper Mr. Yee, whose daily routine includes torturing suspects. In a deadly game, Wang finds she can no longer distinguish between patriotic fervor and lust for an antagonist who, as she puts it, has wormed his way into her heart.

The premise of a resistance fighter falling for the enemy reprises a plot point of Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book." "Lust" is also drenched in genre elements and Western noir. But through its fluid structure coupled with human revelations, it transcends genre to explore Ang Lee's abiding theme of desire versus duty, the pull of the heart's reasons against society's demands. "Brokeback Mountain"'s take on forbidden love was elegaiac in tone. In contrast, "Lust" evokes a hellish world of deception and decadence, masks and mirrors, in which impersonation tips into reality, undermining the very notion of identity.

Indiewire caught the always obliging Ang Lee on the fly between presenting his film at the Toronto International Film Festival--his favorite, he claims--and accepting the Golden Lion in Venice. Lee continued the interview by phone from L.A., before winging off to Asia for the Hong Kong and Taiwan premieres. Focus Features opens the film in limited release in the U.S. Friday, September 28.

IndieWIRE: What impelled you to make a film from Eileen Chang's story?

Ang Lee: Two main things. Chinese society is taken up with patriotism, which is reflected in Chinese literature. I never knew what women got from sex. So the story kept haunting me. It's the other side of the patriotic story. It was scary--but I decided to be honest and confront it. The whole thing generated lots of adrenalin. Also, Eileen Chang's story paralleled my own life. When she [Wang] goes on stage it changed her life. She went out with her friends on a high. Exactly the same thing happened to me when I was 18. After acting in a play, I went out with friends in the drizzling rain, just like in her story.

In the book tied to "Lust, Caution" ["The Story, The Screenply, and The Making of the Film"] you make this intriguing remark: "Making our film we didn't really 'adapt' the work, we simply kept returning to her theater of cruelty and love until we had enough to make a movie ot it." Could you elaborate on that?

I'm not a translator of Eileen Chang. What I took from the novella were some emotions or fears, some unpalatable truths. She was damaged by love. And she put that energy into that story.

Why did the cruelty attract you?

Because of its honesty. It had something fresh and strong to us. It's the other side of yourself, something hiding in the dark that you don't want exposed. It takes boldness to expose it. We had filmmakers and actors who would go along with it, actors willing to strip naked and go for the ultimate performance and see if you can come out alive. That's the thrill. We had to elevate a hellish experience to an artistic level that will speak to people. And [laughs] people think you're honest instead of crazy. Tang Wei in a scene from Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution." Photo by Chan Kam Chuen, courtesy of Focus Features.

You're noted for your ability to switch genres and move from comedy of manners, to martial arts movie, to revisionist Western. Are there common threads that run through the diversity?

Relationships and love. I like drama. Even in "The Hulk" I do psychodrama. Also the theme of the social mask versus the true self. Sense and sensibility. Lust and caution. In all the genres I explore the conflict between what you're supposed to do, and something that's inside you that you try to repress.

What about the theme of the outsider?

All my life I feel like outsider.

Still, even with all your success?

Yes, still. That's my destiny. Culturally I feel like an outsider, anywhere I go, even where I come from. My real cultural roots in classic China and what I was taught now feel like a dream. I feel more of an insider in movies than real life. Very much like the girl in this movie. By pretending, actually you connect with the true self. My characters are all trying to find the truth about themselves through pretending. To me pretending is filmmaking, acting. That's what I do best. What is the nature of the connection between Wang and Mr. Yee? In the film you suggest that physical intimacy is a world apart from questions of morality or love.

The physical intimacy between them acts as a catalyst toward love--which is a mystery. If we knew what love is we'd have finished telling love stories 3,000 years ago. [Laughs]. It's not that simple. It can be scary in this movie. Even though [Wang and Mr. Yee] try to deny it, it only gets stronger. They do totally what they're not supposed to do. He's a policeman, an interrogator.

Is Mr. Yee on to her game?

It's a mystery whether he knows or not. I think you can view the movie both ways. She knows she's playing a part. Yet by playing a part she reached the truth. Both of them have a true self under the shell of the dutiful self.

So beneath the mask, the game, is there genuine emotion between them?

I think what they feel is very real, even though they have doubts. Through ultimate performance on both their parts, they have a taste of true love. Each time they have sex they get closer to the truth.

Mr. Yee is pretty rough in that first sex scene. What fuels his anger?

He doesn't trust anyone. As [Wang] says in her monologue, only through inflicting pain he knows it's real. To me--putting aside questions of patriotism, politics, morality--it's quite poignant that he's a man yearning for love. The violence is partly a release of rage at being occupied by the Japanese and the pressure he's under...

When I worked with Tony [Leung] to block this first scene, his first reaction was to grab her hair and bang her head against the wall. And I said, Why are you so angry? He said, I just thought of the scene we did of dinner together in "Repulse Bay," it was so sweet, the only happy time his character had. The rest was twists and torment... In the end, you wonder who's in control, who's manipulating whom. To me it's a very interesting dramatic scene, a scary place they reach.

You really push the envelope in the way you shot the sex scenes. I've never seen anything quite like them.

Me neither. It was new for me. To me it's the ultimate acting challenge. In a way, that's what the movie is about. So I shot those scenes in a row over 12 days, earlier than in the shooting schedule.

Why shoot those scenes first?

I needed to see how it landed, because it's not scripted. After that I had an idea of the rest of the movie. All three scenes are at different levels and she has to withstand his scrutiny as an interrogator, without him learning the truth.

How did you film them?

First I did the blocking, and then once I decided that, I called in the actors, and everyone goes out of the studio except me, the camera man, and the boom operator.

Wasn't it mortifying and embarrassing to work on those scenes?

Of course. None of us enjoy it. By nature it's very uncomfortable and draining and painful. I call it ultimate acting. But we used the pain. We enjoyed the pain.

Roseann Ng [First A.D.] remarked that even Tony Leung, the seasoned actor who has been through it all, was close to collapse when he finished shooting the sex scenes.

My actors and I don't make a pornographic film every day. I had to expose my desires, talk to the actors about it, talk them through it. We're just common people. It felt pretty harsh.

Was the love-making simulated?

I leave that to you to decide. See the movie. Wang Leehom in a scene from Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution." Photo by Chan Kam Chuen, courtesy of Focus Features.

I have seen the movie [twice]. Why are you coy about answering that question?

We got something great in the performance. Let's leave the actors some room. We gave it our best shot for the ultimate performance. It was a challenge cinematically, partly because they had to deny this chemistry... We decided we had to go all the way in performing. But I won't kill somebody for real. Someone has to draw the line.

You've said you picked newcomer Tang Wei to play Wang out of 2,000 candidates. What about her clinched it?

Actually, we looked at 10,000 candidates for the heroine. I didn't want the regular or popular, like in a TV series--oval face, big-eyed Barbie. I also auditioned well known actresses in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Tang Wei wasn't even in acting. At drama school she was only allowed to go for directing.

Was she aware of the challenges of the role?

She said, I'm in your hands. It's not a problem, don't worry, she was so thrilled to be considered...

James Schamus [who produced and co-wrote the script] has said there's not a single superfluous scene in the film. What's left, then, after you cut it for China? [The film has now cleared the Chinese censors].

First of all, we didn't cut 30 minutes. At the press conference in Venice, someone asked, 'Are you going to cut 30 mniutes out?' That's how the rumor got started. Showing this kind of film in China is unprecedented. Taiwan is more progressive than in the U.S. They don't touch it, and all the theaters can show it. It's important to show it in China. But will people go to see it without the sex scenes? I don't know... They won't get the weight of the movie. China has to catch up with the world and get a ratings system.

Why is China so puritannical?

It's been a very enclosed environment and it hasn't changed that much. It's a country harder to manage than Taiwan. It will take time. The film bureau there is being very helpful in showing the movie. In the future the Chinese want to be exposed to the best in culture.

In her novella, Eileen Chang can illumine Mr. Yee's inner life. She writes, for instance, "Now he possessed her utterly...as a tiger his kill. Alive, her body belonged to him; dead, she was his ghost." How do you translate these snapshots of his pysche to a film?

Cinematically we show the ghostly feelings of the man. Through cinematography, lights, music you can get something roughly equivalent.

Which other movies inspired this one?

"Notorious," a German film called "Dishonor." "Casablanca." I looked at old American films from the '40s, early Bette Davis. "Laura" and film noir. Plus Chinese films of that period.

You go way out on a limb with "Lust, Caution." The long section tracking the students' scheme, followed by the love-making scenes, seem almost two separate movies. Do you fear criticism?

I don't fear that sort of criticism. It would be fair to say that I know how to make regular movies. And now I want to enjoy some freedom and do something different and see what happens. To me it's very gratifying to make such a movie. Some viewers will appreciate the effort and feel the excitement; some will criticize or be disturbed. That's the nature of the movie. I just feel fortunate to have been able to make a movie with distributors who are also very excited. How many times do you get that? It's a privilege.

What genre would you like to tackle next?

I don't have a checklist of genres. But I'd choose one I can borrow and then twist.

[MacGuffin]

Director Ang Lee Takes Lust, Caution
Source: ComingSoon

Ang Lee's directorial career is notable as much for its eclecticism as for its great craft. Lee has explored Victorian manners (Sense and Sensibility), familial strife in '70s America (The Ice Storm), the Civil War (Ride with the Devil), martial arts (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), and even superheroes (The Hulk). Since landing the first Academy Award for Best Director to an Asian with Brokeback Mountain), which became a mainstream hit despite it's controversial depiction of homosexuality in the American west, Lee chose to try his hand at the espionage thriller with Lust, Caution.

Set over the course of several years during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai during World War II, Lust, Caution follows a young student named Wong Chia Chi (newcomer Tang Wei) as she puts her natural acting gifts to the ultimate test. Recruited by members of the Chinese resistance, she uses her easy charisma to infiltrate the home of an instrumental Japanese collaborator Yee (Tony Leung) in order to set him up for eventual assassination. Over the course of luring him in with her charms, she begins a torrid affair with the man, and the line between the emotions she's acting out and her real feelings for him become blurred.

Ang Lee recently sat down with us in New York to discuss this new film and how it fits into the framework of his distinguished oeuvre.

ComingSoon.net: What's it like to take an icon like Tony Leung, who's considered the Cary Grant of Asia, and put him in this very harsh role of the Japanese collaborator?
Ang Lee: Speaking of Cary Grant, I think the movie is the reverse side of "Notorious." (laughs) It's challenging and very interesting. I'd wanted to work with Tony for so long, and at least I have a role that he's the right age range for, even if the role is the opposite of his heroic image. A great actor is a great actor. It's a great honor for me to change his direction at this part of his career.

CS: Was there any hesitation in casting him?
Lee: No. Great actor is a great actor. I've never seen anybody play a traitor so well in our Chinese film history. After awhile I said to him, "look, you're such a great actor, if I don't torture you I don't do you justice." He was like, "*SHRUG*, yeah." He's like a director's dream. In the movie he's something else from what he used to be. I only allow one shot where he does his old Tony style, when she lets him go, looks in his eyes.

CS: Was there any reticence during the filming of the sex scenes between Leung and Tang?
Lee: I think if I tell them "look, before you get onboard let's make it clear that I see it as a process on how deep we're involved in the playing of those characters, how much we're willing to do the ultimate performance," which in some ways is what the movie is about. It sort of came naturally, each day I push a little bit in both acting and drama, and in the relationship with them as a person, as actors and director, and there will be a point like "why don't we go all the way," and they're like "whatever you say." Still, the first couple of days was rough. It was torturous, in a weird way, more for me and Tony than for her. After awhile we were in a zone. It's like hell, but it's the ultimate state of acting, where we all feel privileged to make the movie.

CS: How and why did you come to select Ms. Tang, since this is her first role?
Lee: In our industry I don't see anyone that's known that fits the part, in my opinion. We got her over 10,000 actresses trying out. I didn't see all 10,000! There are assistant directors who do the casting, then the main assistant herself shoots more than 1000, then it gets down to me. Tang Wei strikes me as somebody who is right for the part. She gave the best reading, and she has a disposition that reminds me of our parent's generation. Most importantly, I identify with the main character, the woman in the story who by pretending and playing actually touches the true self. I myself am the part, and I see her as the female version of me, that's the feeling. It's abstract, but it's a feeling.

CS: Had you known the original short story by Eileen Chang for a long time?
Lee: I'd known the material for years. This comes from a writer who's very revered and loved, but this one is unlike her other stories. It's obscure, not many people read about it. She took female sexuality and used it to examine our most macho, holy war against the Japanese. That's very scary to me, it was like "whoa". (laughs) And then it just kept coming back. As I pointed out before I very much identify with the character myself, so it's haunting material for me, for years.

CS: How did the success of "Brokeback Mountain" affect the level of autonomy and control you had over "Lust, Caution"?
Lee: I always enjoy creative freedom, even on "The Hulk." (laughs) But to make the movie this way is quite miraculous. It helped in a sense that this was originally never allowed to be made into a movie, both by communist China and nationalist Taiwan. And this happened, and this challenged patriotism, and economically Shanghai still had great support. They built a street for me, I had to dress it but they built two blocks as I mapped out. A lot of manpower, devotion, top of the line. For example, my camera crew, other than Rodrigo Prieto the cinematographer, were all DPs themselves. His gaffer shot "Infernal Affairs." Tang Wei would do anything. (laughs) So I think that "Brokeback" has an affect, but of course that's an accumulation of my career that culminated in "Brokeback".

CS: Do you think you would have been able to release this film with the NC-17 rating without resistance from the studio if you hadn't had that success?
Lee: It's hard to say, because James Shamus and the studio always supported me. They were always my backbone because they helped sell and produce the movie, because the sales is why I can have my creative freedom. I've done two movies with this studio so it's like a family. Focus wouldn't fire James because of the NC-17, because he would dare them if they dared to say anything, but of course they are very supportive of the movie. So I think I am very fortunate.

CS: Why do you think you are drawn to stories that are challenging to pull off?
Lee: It's not making it into the movie that is a challenge to me. Of course it's difficult, but that never intimidated me. If it's difficult it's more interesting to me, like "The Ice Storm." There's no way to make that into a movie, that's why no one would pick it up. (laughs) But yeah, if I see something there I will find a way to make it into a movie. What frightens me is the subject matter, what are you really dealing with? We're professional filmmakers, we can develop stories and characters, that's kind of our craft, but what you're really dealing with is to touch the part of society and yourself... that you dare yourself to do it, that's the thrill.

CS: And how would you say the story is being received in China as compared to America?
Lee: Mostly China, I didn't care if the Americans like it or not. Because female sexuality... is never talked about in culture and history. We never know what women get from sex. Nothing, zero. From literature, (laughs) even from women themselves. This, to me... I'm Chinese and this is more frightful for me than portraying gay cowboys of America. The greater audience hasn't seen it, but from the press so far it's been tremendously positive. It hurts a lot to watch this movie from our history, that's the truth. It really hurts. I think they get a lot because of the political decisions, they don't have to read subtitles, the minority in the culture. They get a lot more. It's a drama, it's not "Crouching Tiger," we don't have a lot of action sequences.

CS: Your career has spanned a lot of genres. Is there any common strain throughout what you do?
Lee: Human relationships. In this one it's a man-woman relationship, the ultimate being occupied. It's hard to say who's to who, which direction it goes. (laughs) The nature of relationships, most obviously sexual but also in love and the political backdrop of China being occupied. So it's relationships, I think, human relationships. Something in a constant change. It's very hard to grab something you can believe in 'cause things will change. That's just life. Disillusion, again something you firmly believe, prejudice in this sense, behavior code, and when you face reality it's something more complicated than what you've been taught.