Ang Lee is a Taiwanese director who has worked in Hollywood with success in English and Chinese language films. He is a versatile director who has worked in a variety of film genre. He studied in America but initially struggled to find work and was supported by his wife. He then started writing scripts. One of which became his first feature film, Pushing Hands. This was the first of three family films, that have a theme of the clash of different generations and hence culture clashes. In these it is possible to how his style as a visual story teller. The second of these, The Wedding Banquet, was his break out film and gained him wider attention. He gained an Oscar nomination for a foreign language film. Sense and Sensibility was a risk at it was culturally different. In The Ice Storm he looks at failures of family relationships in a film set in the 1970's. Ride With The Devil was set at the start of the American Civil War and is between a western and a violent coming of age film, but it was a commercial failure. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is his masterpiece and his martial arts epic. It was a move from what had been more domestic setting to big sweeping action scenes. This was the most successful foreign language film at the American box office and for which he was nominated for Best Director Oscar. In Hulk the lead is not a superhero but more of a monster and the sense of the monster that is hidden and suppressed inside us. Brokeback Mountain finally gained him a Best Director Oscar. The film is about the growing relationship between two cowboys, but the emotional performances came from the female performances. Lust, Caution is a spy story set during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and is about the relationship between the woman recruited as spy, the man who recruited her and the man she is instructed to trap. With Life Of Pi a young boy is adrift in a lifeboat with a tiger. It is visually impressive and a great piece of film making. Gemini Man was a story that had been around for years and Ang Lee finally made it and has Will Young as an assassin that has a younger clone version of him sent to kill him.
