The only director to win two Best Director Oscars in the 21st century working in two different languages on three different continents.
Ang Lee studied theatre in Taiwan and film at NYU. His first feature, Pushing Hands (1992), was a small Taiwanese-American film about a tai-chi master adjusting to retirement in Queens. The film won prizes at Asian-American festivals. His second feature, The Wedding Banquet (1993), broke through internationally — Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. His third, Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), also Oscar-nominated. Almost no other director has launched a career with three consecutive Oscar nominations in their first three features.
What followed is one of the most-genre-promiscuous filmographies of any working director. Lee has made: a Jane Austen adaptation in English (Sense and Sensibility, 1995). A 1970s American suburban drama (The Ice Storm, 1997). A Civil War Western (Ride with the Devil, 1999). A wuxia martial-arts epic in Mandarin (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000). A Marvel superhero film (Hulk, 2003). A gay Wyoming-set romance (Brokeback Mountain, 2005). A Chinese espionage thriller (Lust, Caution, 2007). A 3D-IMAX survival drama (Life of Pi, 2012). A high-frame-rate war film (Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, 2016). A high-frame-rate science-fiction thriller (Gemini Man, 2019).
Lee has won the Best Director Oscar twice (Brokeback Mountain 2006, Life of Pi 2013) and been nominated three times in total. The two-time win across two languages and two completely different genres is unique among contemporary directors.
Almost every Ang Lee film involves the translation of one cultural framework into another. The Wedding Banquet translates Taiwanese family expectations into a Manhattan gay-rights context. Sense and Sensibility is a Taiwanese director adapting an English-language novel. Crouching Tiger is a Taiwanese-American director making a Mandarin-language wuxia film for global audiences. Brokeback Mountain is a Taiwanese director adapting an American short story about white Wyoming cowboys.
Lee has spoken about this as deliberate. He has said that filmmaking, for him, is about finding what is shared between cultural frameworks rather than what is specific. The work is partly anthropological — he tries to understand the framework of each setting from the inside before he begins. The cross-cultural fluency is one of the reasons his films travel so well across markets.
Lee's post-2012 career has been increasingly focused on technical experimentation. Life of Pi was one of the first major studio films to use 3D as integral storytelling rather than as marketing addition. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016) was shot at 120 frames per second in 4K 3D — a technical specification almost no theatre at the time could project. Gemini Man (2019) extended the 120fps approach with a digitally-de-aged Will Smith.
The high-frame-rate experiments have not, commercially, paid off. Almost no major exhibitor has invested in the projection technology that would render Lee's late-career work as he shot it. The films, as released on standard equipment, look 'unnatural' in ways audiences have rejected. This is, in retrospect, one of the most-significant arguments against the assumption that more technical resolution is always cinematically better.
Lee's most-respected films are unusually restrained with material that, in less-disciplined hands, would have tipped into sentimentality. Brokeback Mountain is, in less-careful hands, a soap opera. Life of Pi is, in less-careful hands, a fable that lectures. Sense and Sensibility is, in less-careful hands, a Hallmark Channel adaptation. Lee's specific gift is that he treats each story's most-emotional moments with quiet camera framing and small acting choices that let the audience feel the emotion without being instructed in it.
The restraint is also Lee's main critical complaint. Some critics find his films emotionally remote on first viewing. The defenders — and the consistent track record of Lee's films being reappraised more warmly on rewatching — suggest the restraint is the point.
If you've never watched a Lee film:
Bergman, Antonioni, the Taiwanese New Wave (particularly Hou Hsiao-Hsien), classical Hollywood (David Lean), and the wuxia tradition of the 1960s and '70s Shaw Brothers films.