Ang Lee is a part of awards show history like no one else–but on different ends of the DGA Award/Oscar continuum. The DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film has traditionally been one of the industry’s most accurate barometers for who will win the Best Director Oscar; only seven times since the DGA Awards began in 1948 has the Feature Film winner not gone on to win the corresponding Academy Award. And only one director has been involved more than once when the two award competitions didn’t jibe with one another.
This year Lee won the Oscar for Life of Pi while the DGA honor went to Ben Affleck for Argo. Back in 2000 it was Lee who won the DGA Award for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon while Steven Soderbergh won the Academy Award for Traffic.
Life of Pi garnered Lee his second Best Director Oscar, the first coming for Brokeback Mountain, which was also nominated for Best Picture in 2006. His Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film and was nominated for overall Best Picture. As for the DGA Award, Lee has two wins, the other being for Brokeback Mountain–a more typical awards show year when the DGA and Best Director Oscar winner was the same person. Lee was a DGA nominee for the first time back in 1996 for Sense and Sensibility.
In his latest navigating of the awards show circuit, Lee crossed paths with SHOOT on several occasions, each lending insight into his involvement of Life of Pi, his take on 3D and visual effects, and the collaborative nature of filmmaking.
Lee said he wanted the experience of Life of Pi “to be as unique as Yann Martel’s book and that meant creating the film in another dimension. 3D is a new cinematic language and in Life of Pi it’s just as much about immersing audiences in the characters’ emotional space as it is about the epic scale and adventure.”
Regarding lessons learned from his experience in that “language,” Lee told SHOOT, “The master shot works a lot more significantly in 3D. Seeing all the elements with a new dimension, viewers have more to soak in. I stayed on shots longer to give the viewer that chance.”
Lee said he also learned “to adjust performers. 3D picks up a lot more than 2D. I’d have a 2D monitor nearby but when I’d go back to the control room and watch in 3D, it was different. I’d tell the actors often to reduce, to pull back their performances a bit.”
He recalled going into Life of Pi “not quite trusting 3D. It’s more elusive when you haven’t done it before. But you get to be part of a new frontier. If something is already established and sophisticated, there’s little room to create something new. You have that room with something [3D] that you can help develop while traveling on a longer learning curve. Because 3D is new, it’s changing rapidly. Three years from now, they’ll look at what we did [on Life of Pi] and probably chuckle, ‘Why did they do it that way.’ It’s that new, with more changes to come.”
VFX, collaboration Fittingly on a night when Lee received the Visual Effects Society’s Visionary Award, his Life of Pi was the big winner at the VES Awards competition last month, topping four categories, including the marquee honor for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Feature Motion Picture.
In accepting the Visionary Award, Lee affirmed that VES members are not a community of visual effects but rather “visual art.” He added, “You guys are not technicians, you guys are artists.”
The director went on to thank the artists who helped bring Life of Pi to fruition, including the film’s visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer of Rhythm & Hues. “You’re a great filmmaker,” said Lee to Westenhofer who was seated in the audience. “We made this movie together.”
Lee also acknowledged another Rhythm & Hues artisan, Erick De Boer, leader of the studio’s character animation team, for his contributions to Life of Pi. “I am so glad your Tiger got the award today,” said Lee, referring to the Bengal tiger character named Richard Parker which earned the VES Award for Outstanding Animated Character in a Live-Action Feature.
Additionally Lee recognized VFX studio MPC for its work on the storm at sea sequences in Life of Pi; the Storm of God Scenes won the VES Award for Outstanding Compositing.
And of course, Life of Pi won this year’s Visual Effects Oscar. Overall Life of Pi topped the Academy Awards tally with four.
In SHOOT’s The Road To Oscar series of features, Westenhofer recollected when Lee first addressed the crew at Rhythm & Hues. “He didn’t issue any kind of technical challenge,” said Westenhofer. He simply told us, ‘I want to make art with you–to make art with visual effects.’ That approach helped to make this film easily the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done professionally. The challenges were very heavy technically but every step along the way we were contributing to the art of the picture.”
Culturally enriching Backstage after winning the Oscar in the Direction category, Lee was asked to reflect on his career and the obstacles he encountered and had overcome. He cited cultural barriers. “This is my adapted culture even though I grew up watching American movies…And just in terms of moviemaking, nobody’s as sophisticated as here. I’m not even talking about art, but craft and the cinematic language, the grammar is very much established here.”
Lee noted, “I spoke broken English when I did Sense and Sensibility. After that, I thought it could be done. You just have to work harder. It’s sight and sound. You can do a lot. You can overcome cultural barriers…You have to be more diligent. I think sometimes a disadvantage can be an advantage.”
Lee observed that he comes from a culture that has enriched and made him special. He added to this his adapting to the English language, the way of thinking and culture, adapting to major league production. Collectively this translates, said Lee, into a significant benefit. “You know, it’s like one culture in my left side of the brain, the other is the right. You can use both sides of your head. It’s an advantage. So I encourage a lot more Asian filmmakers to give it a try. And also you reach the world culture. It really starts out here in Hollywood.”
