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WATCHING MOVIES WITH/ANG LEE; Crouching Memory, HiddenHeart

By RICK LYMANPublished: March 9, 2001

ANG LEE sat on a swivel chair, his hands folded, a bank of dark monitors before him. ''Every

time I see this movie,I cry,'' he said. ''It's a little embarrassing. From when I was a little boy

until now, I always cry.'' Sure enough, he just thought about it, and his eyes began to moisten.

The unadorned whitespace, its paint slightly peeling, is one of the gadget-filled editing suites in

the offices of Good Machine, an independent film financing and distribution company where

Mr. Lee makes his headquarters. It is in a thick, slightly dingy building near the mouth of the

Holland Tunnel,within muted earshot of the cacophonous tumult of Canal Street. Mr. Lee took

a videocassette of Li Hanxiang's ''Qi Cai Hu Bu Gui'' -- which Mr. Lee said is best translated into

English as ''Love Eternal'' -- from its blank white sleeve, and with a mechanical whoosh it slid

into one of the VCR's.

''I am sorry, this is the only version I have of this film,'' he said. ''It is O.K.?''

A truck rumbled by outside. Mr. Lee, 46, swiveled to face the largest of the m onitors, which

flickered then burst to light, a Chinese fanfare over the sparkling, gaudy logo of the Shaw

Brothers' Hong Kong film studio. It was O.K.

''This is a movie I don't always think about, until you asked me to pick one movie to watch,'' Mr.

Lee said. ''I think the reason I wanted to talk about this movie is because it reminds me always

of my innocence.''

It was 1963. Mr. Lee was 9, living in a small town called Hwalian on the east coast of Taiwan,

the self-described nave son of a school principal. His was a traditional Chinese household, with

servants, Mandarin sensibilities and a yearning, shared with most of its neighbors, for a kind ofdream vision of the old, lost China of the mainland.

''I think that for every movie I make, I always try to duplicate that feeling of purity and

innocence that I got when I saw this movie,'' he said. ''I bring in Western drama. I bring in

metaphor. I bring in Jean-Luc Godard. Whatever I bring in to my own films, I am forever

trying to update and recapture that feeling. I call it juice -- the juice of the film -- the thing that

moves people, the thing that is untranslatable by words.''

When w atching a favorite film, Mr. Lee said, most directors will inevitably concentrate on the

craft, the strategic bursts of directorial inspiration, and indeed he did, too, while watching this

film.

''But how a scene was shot, that is minor to me,'' he said. ''It is more the juice, the core emotion,

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8/12/2019 WATCHING MOVIES WITH_ANG LEE; Crouching Memory, Hidden Heart - New York Times

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how it moves us. It is whether the whole film works at a deep level. You know, that primo

feeling. There is no word for it. But that is what this movie did to me, and ever since, I am

always trying to recapture it.''

''Love Eternal'' was a stupendously popular, melodramatic version of a Chinese opera that was

already familiar to many of the Taiwanese who flocked to see it in the mid-1960's, when it was a

recurring favorite across East Asia.

''I was able to recite the whole movie before I ever got to see it,'' Mr. Lee said. When this film

opened to acclaim in Taipei, the entire soundtrack, music and dialogue, was released on a four-

record set, and Mr. Lee's family bought it. But he lived far from the capital, and it took several

months for the film to make its way to his coastal town. He spent those weeks listening to it over

and over until he could recite the entire movie.

The film became so popular in Taiwan that some claimed to have seen it 500 times, Mr. Lee

said. Lines of its dialogue became part of everyday conversation, the way catch-phrases from a

''Saturday Night Live'' routine (''You look maaahvalous!'') can sometimes permeate American

pop culture.

''People would take two box lunches, go the theater and watch it all day long,'' he said. ''My

parents were watching it often. I remember the third time they went to see it, there was a

typhoon coming, and they still left us at home. 'O.K., we're going to see this movie, bye.' '' He

laughed. ''And this was on a typhoon night.'' The film was popular with everyone, he said, from

children to housewives to university intellectuals.

''It was a big hit in China, but particularly in Taiwan,'' Mr. Lee said. ''This is because of the

Mandarin culture in the movie. We had escaped from the mainland in the civil war, and we

missed that culture. For those of us too young to remember the mainland, we did not really

know the old culture. So when we would see it in this movie, we would think, 'Oh, that is China.'

When I went back to China to m ake 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,' I knew nothing about

the real China. I had this image in my mind, from movies like this. So I projected these images

as my China, the China in my head.''

A Musical Fantasy

The China in Mr. Lee's head is a sumptuous fantasyland of rich homes and sparkling streams

and forest pagodas, interrupted by the tragic calls to duty of the traditional codes of filial piety

and social loyalty. It is the setting of Mr. Lee's ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,'' which

received 10 Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Lee's direction, and has become the

biggest foreign-language box-office hit in American movie history.

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