Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee has long been one of my favorites, since I was first introduced to his simply told stories about finding a place in a society that might not accept you, with works such as PUSHING HANDS, THE WEDDING BANQUET, and EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN. Although even his early films featured characters speaking English, he kicked the door to his career wide open by tackling Jane Austen's SENSE AND SENSIBILITY for his fourth film, followed by two unique American stories with THE ICE STORM and RIDE WITH THE DEVIL.
He hit something of a creative peak with his martial arts epic CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON and the groundbreaking BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (for which he won his first directing Oscar), with moviedom's first crack at a HULK feature film tucked between them—reaction to which was decidedly mixed; I happen to like it. After the virtually ignored LUST, CAUTION and TAKING WOODSTOCK, Lee is back strong with one of his most visually arresting and ambitious (and supposedly unfilmable) work in 2012’s LIFE OF PI, which garnered him his second directing Oscar.
His first film in four years, BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK is the first to be shot using the 120-fps, high frame rate 3D technology. The trouble is that there are only a very small number of theaters in North America equipped to project the film the way it was meant to be. But Lee was able to convince Sony executives that this fictional story (based on the novel by Ben Fountain) of an Iraq War solider and his squad taking part in a Thanksgiving Day football halftime show as part of their “hero tour” would be the best film to use this technology to make. The result is a mixed bag, but not having seen it in 3D, I can’t attest to the quality of the finished film. I can really only judge the film as a film and not as a technical achievement.
Still, any opportunity to chat with Ang Lee at length is a welcome one by me. I was fortunate enough to talk with him four years ago about LIFE OF PI, and it was great to do so again on the phone recently. By the end of our talk, he convinced me to try and see BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK again in the proper conditions. With that, please enjoy my talk with the great Ang Lee…
Capone: Hello, sir. How are you?
Ang Lee: I’m good. How are you?
Capone: Good. I’m sure at this point you might be sick of talking about all the technical aspects of making this film.
AL: Right, you’re watching a movie after all.
Capone: That was my point. Are you afraid people are going to miss the movie’s story because they’re so focused on the frame rate and the 3D?
AL: Yeah, I think the frame rate, the 3D and all that, that paved the way for the film in my mind for the future, so I’m obliged to talk about it and set things up and see how it works. But whatever that is, you’re examining humanity and doing the same thing you’ve always done; it’s just a different format. To me, I would like you to see [the film in 2D] sometime, to see if there’s a difference in terms of feelings and engaging in the movie. I think the engagement to the movie is different, but the content remains the same.
Capone: Well, they showed it to us yesterday in 2D, so I have to go back now and go see it in it the way you intended it.
AL: Did it work for you?
Capone: I will say there were a couple moments where I could see where a 3D version of what I was looking at would have been extraordinary.
AL: Yeah, the battlefield and the halftime show.
Capone: The half time show in particular.
AL: I think the biggest difference for me are actually the close ups. The amount of information you see from a face. I didn’t use makeup. You can see through the people. You read thoughts in the eyes, the emotion, that gut feeling from the countenance of the face. That to me is the biggest difference. I think you become engaged in no time the way you saw it, and it takes maybe, for the first-time viewer of the new format, a few minutes—some say 10 minutes, some say right away. Once you get into that, your mind is set, then you just function in whatever that form I give you and have your experience in the movie. I don’t think technology matters anymore.
Capone: I did notice that there were a lot of closeups of faces, and people looking directly at the camera.
AL: That’s set up for the other format.
Capone: Right, but even still, it’s strangely unnerving. They’re not speaking to us, but they’re looking right at us.
AL: I’ll tell you what, in traditional movies, or at least movie culture, we have established that it’s somebody else’s business. You’re watching [a movie] from a third-person perspective. The French call it voyeur. If you’re peeping somebody’s life, you get a kick out of it. So nobody looks at the lens, because you’re not that person that’s watching. It’s slightly offset, so you know you’re outside of the story. In some ways, it’s voyeur, and you get a kick out of it; in some other ways, you feel safe. There’s a distance between you and the story. But when we tell a story it’s always “Once upon a time, far, far away.” You put in a distance. So you have a structure that allows yourself to be in that illusion of the story, that distance. That’s something we’re also very used to.
The new format difference is it takes that veil away a little bit. The way you engage the mentality needs to be adjusted a little bit, but still I think when it goes back to this format, which I have to relight and recreate in post to get the viewing we’re used to. I’m still in a transitional time, in both worlds. You have to let that work too. But almost nobody has looked at the lens before unless they’re talking to the audience. Very few movies have done this before. And filmmakers have been thinking about this for a long time actually, they just don’t normally do it. When it happens, it’s still a film language, it’s just something we didn’t use in the past that much. I think it still works someway in its own terms.
Capone: The one shot I really wish I’d seen in 3D is when Billy catches the bottle of Advil right in her face. I think I would have flinched if I had seen that in 3D.
[Both laugh]
AL: Every 3D movie has those badass shots. It challenges the focus puller.
Capone: This is based on a very popular novel. What do you remember responding to about the way Ben Fountain approached this subject matter, and what drew you into that story?
AL: Well, as a filmmaker, I couldn’t help make the movie because there’s a halftime show—over the top, sensory overload, which to a battled solider, all the same senses open up, and they’re still living the memory, which is extremely sensitive and dark, and what happened on the battlefield. During the halftime show, they’re celebrating this heroic act, but it’s so vastly different. The public’s, the nation’s projection onto those heroes, and the reality of it is so hugely different. That dramatic contrast is a gold mine for filmmaking, for drama.
The other thing is actually obstacle, which I took as a challenge. It’s a very internalized book, which is nearly impossible for filmmakers, who is this angry [laughs], middle-aged intellect with his brilliant thoughts and observations filtered into a 19-year-old soldier boy’s head. In the book, in a way, he can really exaggerate it and really use that innocence in the boy’s eyes, but then the thoughts, the brilliant writing belongs to a middle-age intellect. The two together make the book really inspiring, heartbreaking, but that’s literature. When you see a young innocent boy’s face, what you see is what you get. He could not have those thoughts, even though you put images, commentary in the voiceover, it wouldn't work that way in cinema. So how do you make that work? That's the challenge that got me worked up.
But like I did with PI, the new technology inspired me to make that movie, but when I put it back to 2D, I think it still worked. But without the push of the the new technology, it probably won’t work; I’d be in my comfort zone, thinking the same logic. I probably wouldn’t have the breakthrough.
Capone: It is definitely a unique perspective on the way soldiers are treated when they come home, even by well-meaning people.
AL: It’s irritating to them.
Capone: About halfway through the film, every time somebody comes up to them and thanks them and starts asking them questions, we just shake our heads, because they clearly want to be left alone.
AL: “Give us money, if you want to thank us.” Or something real. We don't have the draft here anymore since the Vietnam War. Those are professional soldiers who become a special class. They’re not being really understood or related to, so when people thank them, in their mind—I have read this a lot and talked to soldiers—that’s often irritating for them.
Capone: So tell me about finding Joe Alwyn [who plays Billy Lynn]. This is his first film. Did you want to find this new actor to go along with this new technology? Was it easier to work with an actor who didn’t know what it was like to make a normal movie, so that he didn’t know that it was strange that the camera was huge?
AL: [laughs] That’s not why I go for the new actor, but yeah, that’s all true.
Capone: Why was he the right guy to play Billy?
AL: Take a look at him. He’s heartbreakingly soulful, and his eyes, his eyebrows, the gaze—he’s a soulful-looking young man, and he just happened to be a top-notch talent. One, two minutes into his reading, it was a done deal. We still tested him a lot, but this is a tremendous talent. In a way, for someone new to cinema, it’s best to test them. He had no working experience, at least for movies or any media, but he’s the best, drama school trained, top-of-the-line. So I just feel very lucky to have him.
Capone: Please tell me about recreating a full-scale halftime show. How do you even begin the process of that, because that is so impressive to me. How much of that is real?
AL: It was a real show. Except they worked the camera angle that’s behind them. It’s behind the scene of the show from the scolders’ perspective, inside the show, not from outside looking in. Not in a presentative way, but inside viewing it, the sensation of the battling soldiers. In terms of putting on the show, I had great people to work with. Don Mitchell, who’s king of halftime shows, the big shows, he happes to be a friend of mine, so he helped find the right people and tell us what’s it like to be inside the franticness of inside the show, and also helped us staging it and find the right people to stage it.
We had the field choreographer, we had the stage choreographer, so I tell them I want to have the best music numbers since THE PRODUCERS [laughs]. And he laughed. I told him we were going for North Korea meets Las Vegas. They all cracked up. That was a joke. But then we have the real show, too. This really happened in 2004, and that was the halftime show. We saw it. Of course we wan to sex it up, we wanted to do all kinds of movie things. A lot of rehearsals with a cast of hundreds of performers getting in and rehearsing—it was a big deal. But actually shooting time was only four nights. It was a limited time that we had in that stadium.
Capone: There’s a really strange subplot in this film that seems to be about the process and the deals that went into getting this film made. There’s even a line about about going to China for financing?
AL: The “go to China” line was my line. Plus, it’s funny, not because of what’s happening now, but 10 years ago, when you say that, it’s a joke, but it’s not a joke now. That, by the way, got the biggest laugh with the Chinese audience.
Capone: Was the subplot all in the book, or was this something you added?
AL: Yeah, it was in the book. It’s not the favorite part for me, because I’m a filmmaker, so that part was not the most exciting, but I could not put that aside, because that’s an important ingredient in the book, simply because that money could change those boys’ lives, so I didn’t cut it short. [Hollywood] lifts their expectations so high, and you think their life is going to change, and then they dump them and get beat up and sent back to the battlefield. For that reason, I had to make it work. I tried to make it fresh, but as I was making it, a strange thing happened because, being a filmmaker, that part was about my life too, so there’s a parallel there.
Capone: Vin Diesel is almost in another movie, because he’s a wise, slightly older soldier. Tell me about that character’s role in Billy’s life, because he really does instill him with a certain amount of wisdom that I don’t think all the other guys got.
AL: I think the character is the alpha male on one hand; on the other hand, he’s somebody that transcends what’s in front of them, what they experience, that there’s no answer to all this, the frustration and all that. As literature and the inspiration to the viewer and readers, he is transcendent. In the book, he’s described as the Buddhist Rambo. I thought that was great, and his name is Shroom, so he must have a bald head, so it was like “Vin Diesel, yeah.” And he happens to like to talk about philosophy a lot. I think even though his regular roles are as action heroes, I think he fits for this role, and the transcendent part is interesting, actually. Otherwise, there’s no way to justify what the young soldiers are going through. Of course, it’s heartbreaking at the same time how they identify themselves as soldiers, heroes, and bond together to carry on in Shroom’s spirit. That’s the heartbreaking part.
Capone: I know that you’ve been trying to get this THRILLA IN MANILA film made for a while. Is your plan to shoot it in a similar fashion with the high frame rate?
AL: Yeah. Maybe, if i’m allowed to.
Capone: How close is that to actually happening at this point?
AL: I think it’s getting close. I went to China to look for money after everyone turned me down here in this town. [laughs] So I went to China to try to raise the money. You become the movie you’re making [laughs].
Capone: The joke in the movie has become the status quo.
AL: Yeah. I think it’s great that you watched it in a regular movie form. That’s very encouraging to me; that means I keep on trying the new format.
Capone: We here about those events that make Billy famous before we actually see how they play out. You save that until the end, and it actually builds up a lot of tension. Talk about the differences in staging that sequence verses the rest of the film.
AL: Yeah, from very early on, I design a script—I want a two-story parallel. One is what really happened in chronological order, and one is what happened in that one day in a boy’s life, the halftime show day when he wakes up to the revelation that he has to identify his own fate, his role in life, it’s a coming-of-age, one-day journey. It’s kind of like a three-unity play; it has that structure in it. That’s one of the first things that comes to my mind, is that I want a parallel story to happen, both in chronological order, which also helps build suspense, too.
Capone: Billy has these two women pulling at him in terms of a decision he’s going to make at the end of the film. He’s got his sister and he’s got this cheerleader. Talk about that aspect of the film.
AL: Yeah, I got the inspiration from the book, of course. To me, it hit me that one girl, the cheerleader, represents the dream of America. I came to America in 1978 and I had the same dream. And the other is the reality, the anger reality, the disillusion one, the scarred one. That’s his sister. In the book, there’s a lot more about the economy and what the family is going through, including his parents, but for the length of the movie, I just couldn’t develop that. So I thought these two women, when I had to narrow it down for the movie, they become the two sides of America, I think. In the new format, I shot with different clarity, different resolution.
Capone: You’re pretty much giving me no choice but to go back and see it again, aren’t you?
AL: [laughs] You can feel it. I also lit it differently. In 3D, I used different depth, 3D depth. Yeah, I shouldn’t tell you too much.
Capone: Did you encourage the actors who played the soldiers to hang out together and to form that bond even before they started shooting?
AL: Encouraging is an understatement. I put them into a bootcamp. As the Army says, I break them and then rebuild them, and it naturally happened. I think they’re probably bound for life. I think that’s very important. They have to act like one unit, because that’s an important part of the story. They’re inseparable.
Capone: I have to ask about Steve Martin’s character, because I didn’t even know he was in the film. Is he in any way based on Jerry Jones [owner of the Dallas Cowboys]?
AL: No, and also he doesn’t look like Jerry Jones.
Capone: But he starts out being this financial hope for these guys, and by the end, we hate him. Talk about selecting him for that role, because that’s a really unusual choice, but it definitely works.
AL: I just wanted something like Albert, played by Chris Tucker. In the book, he’s an old, Jewish, successful producer, which has been done many times in other movies. I just wanted to bring new ideas and make it fresh. [Martin is] from Texas. He’s Texan. I think he did a great job.
Capone: Completely. Billy has a cynicism to him, especially when he comes into contact with people who aren’t his fellow soldiers. How do you keep the film from becoming too cynical and too negative about the experience of coming home?
AL: Yeah, and you can not help but be cynical. Put those experiences and phenomenas in front of them, provoke them, and anyone would be cynical, which I inherited form the book. So I didn’t really have to work for that. We just staged it and have him not blinking, or just cover it and be cynical. But I think the harder part is to be emotional. I think Joe did a great job. Those boys did a great job. It was hard to deal with without being cynical and lose the heart. I think keeping them funny and cynical is the easier part. We’re like Ben Fountain. We’re grown ups. We have our opinions. But those young boys still hold on to each other and believe in each other, just those looks, that’s the bigger task for us.
Capone: Thank you so much, and best of luck to you with this film, and with MANILA, because I really wanna see what you come up with for that. And I’ll try to see this movie again in the proper format.
AL: Thank you. Sit in the center and front a little bit.
Capone: That works.
AL: The best screening room is in Beijing, actually. It’s a newer theater, more immersive.
Capone: Okay. You can send me a plane ticket, and I’ll go see it there.
