Cruel Intentions: Ang Lee

The latest film by Ang Lee - Lust, Caution - encases its tale of a society in which nothing is as it seems in a glittering carapace of athletic eroticism and the glamour of Hong Kong and Shanghai in the late 1930s. Nick James talks to the director about how the film answered to his midlife crisis.

Ang Lee is talking pleasantries and holding the palm of his right hand flat against his cheek. I'm concerned he may be in pain (dental? hangover?), but with interview time ticking by I say nothing. It's a milky-grey Monday morning at the Soho Hotel in London. The first weekend of the Times BFI 51st London Film Festival has perhaps taken its toll. Ang Lee's superb new film Lust, Caution (Se, jie) has just had its gala ­premiere to much acclaim - and some surprise at the realistic erotic scenes between the leads Tony Leung and Tang Wei.

These slightly exhausted interview circumstances could not be further from the mood of Lust, Caution, which captures the bright, energised surfaces of a life lived in fakery, in the superficially glamorous but highly dangerous cities of Hong Kong and Shanghai from 1938 to 1942. Newcomer Tang Wei plays Wong Chia Chi, a Shanghai-born student turned actress in Hong Kong. She's the featured lead in propaganda plays aimed at rousing Chinese patriotism against the Japanese invaders of the mainland. When elements of the collaborationist party led by Wang Jingwei, beholden and sympathetic to the Japanese, arrive in the city, the theatre troupe's leader Kuang Yu Min (Wang Leehom - a popstar in Asia) recruits Wong Chia Chi to his nascent guerrilla group. Kuang wants the group to assassinate Mr Yee (Tony Leung), one of Wang Jingwei's ministers. Wong Chia Chi must use her acting skills to lure Mr Yee to his death by pretending to be a disillusioned married woman and becoming his lover. For the ruse to work, she must first lose her virginity to the only boy among the group with experience, a boorish fellow who visits prostitutes.

We learn all this and much more in flashback from the film's opening moment in 1942 Shanghai, when a sophisticated and worldly Wong Chia Chi, now transformed into Mrs Mak, is about to betray Mr Yee at last. Before the film's finale, which returns to that opening moment, we will see Mrs Mak sit at Mrs Yee's Mahjong table and engage in social chitchat that barely masks a vicious politesse born of unequal social standing; we will see the original attempt to entrap Mr Yee end in bloody chaos; and we will see Wong Chia Chi engage in passionate, anatomically realistic and varied acts of sexual congress with her seemingly cruel lover.

The film is based on a short story by Eileen Chang, and like its predecessor in Ang Lee's canon, Brokeback Mountain (2005), its subtle and heartbreaking pleasures are to be found in the way cinema has expanded a piece of literature rather than the usual pattern of contraction that novel adaptations entail. Both films are arguably about what we hide about ourselves and how that contorts our lives, yet the new movie seems more interested in the maintenance of coldness against the pressure of passion, whereas Brokeback focused on finding relief from the requirements to be unfeeling. If Lust, Caution seems a little emotionally cooler than Brokeback, that's an endemic aspect of the espionage genre, and in this case only adds to the quietly devastating effect of the melodrama.

When the interview that follows is over, I ask Ang Lee about his jaw. He says there's nothing wrong: it's just a gesture he picked up while making Lust, Caution. I hope he's not pretending.

Nick James: Was the Oscar hullabaloo around 'Brokeback Mountain' one of the reasons why you chose a Chinese subject and production for your next project?

Ang Lee: That's not totally why I wanted to do Lust, Caution - in fact, I was working on the script during the Brokeback campaign. Thinking back, the two films are almost like sister works. At the age of 45, I started to have a midlife crisis because of the way I was living out my childhood fantasy. So I got into subject matter I'd never paid attention to before, namely romance. Both films are based on stories that are not much more than 30 pages long, both tales of impossible romance written by gutsy women. So while it's true that I didn't feel like doing another American film after Brokeback, that was not the main reason.

NJ: What does Eileen Chang's work mean to your Chinese audience?

AL: She's probably the most beloved author in modern Chinese literature and most people have read a lot of her work. Her most famous stories were written in the early 1940s, before she was 25. She was banned in China for many years but much of her writing has been available for the last decade or so.

'Lust, Caution' is a story hardly anybody had read, including myself. I discovered it maybe three years ago and it made me wonder, is this really Eileen Chang? She usually writes big, revered works as if from an oracle, but this short story has none of that feeling. It's written very concisely and sparely, almost like an old film noir, very strange and so cruel it's almost unbearable.

This is the only one of her stories that's about herself, about what killed love for her. She fell for and married a collaborator of the Japanese invaders, a high official in Wang Jingwei's puppet government, who dumped her after two years. That's what she's writing about: she's comparing female sexuality with the war against the Japanese. She spent years covering it up, rewriting and rewriting, and the story wasn't published until 25 years after she first drafted it. I was attracted to it not because I wanted to adapt Eileen Chang but because 'Lust, Caution' is so different from her other work. Her more typical books have been made into movies many times - though none of them, in my opinion, is successful because they all revere the writing too much.

NJ: So did you change a lot?

AL: In spirit, no. I just expanded it, tried to figure out the gaps. The two obvious changes were suggested by my co-writer/producer James Schamus - no Chinese person would have initiated either of them. One is the moment when Wong Chia Chi's group is exposed in Hong Kong just after Mr Yee has eluded them, and the boys have to kill the traitor. This not only introduces action to the mid-point of the movie and separates the two halves, which I treat as two different films, but it also acts like a rite of passage for the boys, their equivalent of Wong Chia Chi having to lose her virginity in order to play the unfaithful wife of a businessman. James' other idea was to go to the jewellery shop where the film's climax occurs twice, to set it up. And of course there's an extension of the sex scenes: Eileen Chang suggested them but she didn't go into the details.

NJ: We've never seen anything as explicit from you before. Does that also come out of your midlife crisis?

AL: It's more a post-midlife crisis. My real crisis was during the five years of making Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and The Hulk (2003). Throughout The Hulk I was sort of collapsed: I finally had to admit I'm not that young anymore, and lust was one of the things I had to face up to by not being too repressed or shy to deal with it.

After a midlife crisis you have to choose what's most important. And facing it was like hell. It went against my superficial nature to deal with deeper, subconscious desires, though I think it was very valuable, very eastern in a way. The psychology of sex comes from a western approach, but 'lust' in Chinese means not just lust for sex but lust for life and also colour. It's a projection of your own desire, of your own point of view, your motivation. But you have to be careful, because any passion - sex, or a lust for being good, such as patriotism - will make fools of us. Caution, however, is rational. So the title Lust, Caution is in the same realm as Sense and Sensibility - and Se, jie is also the symbol of the ring, the diamond ring, the boundaries of love.

NJ: There's a beautiful little book by Donald Richie that explains Japanese aesthetics. I wish there was an equivalent for the Chinese.

AL: There's a huge difference between people who use phonetics for language transcription and those who use characters, as in China. The Chinese system is more like movies, like montage, like drawing with sight and sound. The shape itself means something, so when you see the word it resonates in your head. When the Chinese see Lust, Caution in characters with the comma in between it has a shocking vibe.

NJ: The film seems to depict a surface that barely conceals what's going on, so the texture has to be simultaneously superficial and deep.

AL: Cinema has certain forms you have to borrow from, and one of these is genre. I looked at film noir but instead of a lot of shadow I used depth of focus and colour, trying to find a new way to do it. The other genre I drew on was the patriotic melodramas I grew up with. The old-fashioned, romantic films noirs in which you are lost in the mystery - films like Laura (1944) or Notorious (1946) - have elements of both. And the characters in Lust, Caution emulate that: whether in staging a patriotic play that gets people really worked up or when Wong Chia Chi goes to see Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman to pick up their attitude and copy them. I prefer the romantic, over-the-top noirs to the films of the later 1940s, after Hitchcock, which get meaner and meaner and lose that lavish emotion.

NJ: There are also aspects of the espionage movie.

AL: There's a mix. There's a level of playing, which is lust - including sex - and then there's psychology underneath. And the Mahjong scenes are like a war movie played out on a Mahjong table. But when people say it's an espionage thriller it makes me nervous. The plot isn't as tight as it should be for pure espionage and all the psychology means everything is prolonged. So if you tell a British audience Lust, Caution belongs to the espionage genre you might arouse expectations that the film doesn't fulfil.

NJ: For the Chinese this period was a time of atrocity and destruction, but for the west it's imbued with exotic appeal. The film looks beautiful and seductive and you seem to play those two ideas against each other.

AL: For the west Shanghai was sin city, an eastern Casablanca. So I did have that sense. And inevitably when you put qipao [cheongsams] inside the film, the modern style of qipao - shorter, with short sleeves - and then you put a western hat on her and a trenchcoat over her, it's got to be exotic, even for the Chinese. With qipao you have to walk in small steps and in a trenchcoat you want to swagger, so how do you manage that combination? But I didn't play that up fully because I didn't want the style to take over.

NJ: I get the sense that your decision-making was affected by your nervousness about the drift of the film's direction.

AL: That's often been the case for me. If I'm doing a standard genre film, I always think there are people who know the form better - not least my producer and some of the audience. And then the film begins to seem like a work I have to deliver; it makes me feel like a craftsman. There's nothing wrong with that - you can produce great art from craftsmanship and I'm an avid film learner: I feel I want to be forever a film student, that people are paying me to learn how to make movies. But if I touch a certain genre then I have to exercise it further otherwise I feel uneasy - not only am I not doing my best, but I'm conforming somehow.

NJ: You are working again with your long-term producer-writer partner James Schamus on a Chinese subject. Is this a leap for him?

AL: Whenever we do a Chinese project there's a stage where I wish I could get away from him [laughs]. At some point he'll want to read the script because he'll be the producer and he's the best distributor for my film. And then through translation, or the loss in translation, he'll get a bite of it and he'll have his criticisms. Some I can overcome, some I can't. So he'll have his input. And the best way to give input is to write it into the script instead of 60 pages of notes.

There's something in Chinese film culture that accommodates what I want to do - and then James comes to help. Cinema, after all, is a culture established by westerners, mostly Americans, and they are just better at some things: structure and also certain mannerisms I borrow from genres and don't know enough about. That stuff comes not only from film language but from culture, from nuances of words and attitudes. When you translate some totally normal lines from Chinese they sound stupid - why would she ask this question, is she dumb or something?

So when you get down to it, James is usually right. I know I can't win that war and so I'm happy, though sometimes grudgingly, to yield. And through him I've come to understand my own culture a little better. Working with James I get the best of east and west as we bounce back and forth, painfully, sometimes five or six times. What we go through we've done since Eat Drink Man Woman in 1994 - and it works better with each film, by which I mean I take his idea and make it more authentically Chinese. But by doing this maybe it's also less universal.

NJ: One of the marks of your cinema is still how well it travels.

AL: You find more cultural differences as the working relationship improves. It's not a problem when I do films in English because then James and the crew know what sounds right and Asian audiences are used to reading subtitles, to looking to see if there's something interesting there. But it's harder the other way around, not so much in England as in America where if they don't get it immediately they just cast it aside.

NJ: Did you always have Tony Leung in mind for the role of Mr Yee?

AL: About a year before I started pre-production I invited him to dinner while he was promoting 2046 in New York. As I talked to him I started to see him as Mr Yee, even though in reality he's quite the opposite, more like an older character he's played before.

NJ: The film plays off his persona beautifully.

AL: I encouraged him to show his normal self to Wong Chia Chi before she lets him go. I would like to think there's a traitor or villain deep inside him just like any other person, so everything he does is to cover up what he's longing for. If I had him do menace and poker face, just a villain look, that wouldn't have been any good.

NJ: There's sympathy for him - sympathy for the devil, if you like.

AL: In the introduction to the collection that includes 'Lust, Caution', Eileen Chang wrote that we're probably better off not understanding villains because understanding is the beginning of forgiveness. But you have to bear in mind that as a Chinese writer she often has to put the opposite to what she really wants to say. You can't say, 'Oh, she didn't write that sex scene like that so we can't do it' because half of the art of Chinese literature lies in concealment, in not saying what you really mean. I think she loved this guy, so she had to write a very cruel novel and then say that we should not understand him. That's my interpretation, at least.

NJ: Where did you find Tang Wei, the actress who plays Wong Chia Chi?

AL: It's her first movie, and we found her by interviewing ten thousand actresses. I myself saw about a hundred of them, and no one had heard of Tang Wei. She's very close in disposition to how Wong Chia Chi is described in the story - she's like one of my parents' generation, which is pretty rare these days. She didn't seem strikingly beautiful but she did the best reading and there was something about her. Most of all, she's like the female version of me - I identify with her so closely that, by pretending, I found my true self. So the theme of the story has a personal identification for me and I found a vibe of hers that's very close to myself.