Quotes By Ang Lee

When there is a strong woman character in a story - that always grabs me.

Thinking back to those earlier days, I felt I was weak when I wasn't making movies, and then when I was, I thought I was weak as a family member.

I'm not macho, I'm not a Mel Gibson sort of person.

I have two sons in America, and all they care about in Chinese culture is Jackie Chan and Jet Li.

There's only one movie in my career I've had regrets with cutting it shorter, and I think some scenes maybe I shouldn't have cut.

Usually with this genre the first thing that happens is a good fight sequence to show that you're in good hands. So we broke that rule. I think a lot of that comes from the western audience.

Sometimes films ignore other points of view because it's simpler to tell the story that way, but the more genuine and sympathetic you are to different points of view and situations, the more real the story is.

Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.

I'm quite lazy.

Now I'm kind of established as a director, I much prefer directing to writing.

Americans are hidden dragons to me.

When I grew up, in Taiwan, the Korean War was seen as a good war, where America protected Asia. It was sort of an extension of World War II. And it was, of course, the peak of the Cold War. People in Taiwan were generally proAmerican. The Korean War made Japan. And then the Vietnam War made Taiwan. There is some truth to that.

Not taboo - it's just that straight actors still risk their careers commercially and economically. They have to please the crowd - they're movie stars; their image is their industry. It goes beyond acting.

In the past I've made movies that were pretty universally liked. You can't really hate them. You can discard them, but you can't really hate them.

I'm still a novice student.

Fighting for identity is something that is very much in my life.

When I'm not working, I get very down, but when I am working, I get very immersed in it.

I like to do drama, something about life that could be disappointing.

I'm a drifter and an outsider. There's not one single environment I can totally belong to.

No matter how widely spread out the films are, how different, you still are you.

If there's something that can be formulated, regulated, give you security, then nobody would lose money. Every movie would be successful. And that's certainly not the case.

My first instinct was to cast as close to the short story as possible, but then I realized that I needed actors who could go for it and that they had to function well as a couple in a love story.

I'm not a romantic. In life I didn't have much experience with romance.

I am a shy person.

I like to think I'm un-categorisable.

I'm aware of what's missing from my life.

I'm actually living my life with the material I choose to work with.

I find it hard to deliver straightforward things.

I had to find my way of translating the excitement you get when you're reading comic books to the big screen.

In my culture, there's a tradition that when you're in an overwhelming situation and you don't know what to do, you put yourself in a woman's shoes.