Ang Lee, the director who bet on 120 frames a second and is starting over

Ang Lee

Photo: nicolas genin / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 23, 1954 Chaozhou, Pingtung County, Taiwan
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Life of Pi, Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Awards	2 Academy Award · 2 Golden Bear · 2 Golden Lion · BAFTA · Praemium Imperiale

Ang Lee spent the last decade asking a question most of Hollywood had stopped asking: what would happen if a film looked less like cinema and more like being in the room? He shot two features in three dimensions at five times the standard frame rate, a format only a handful of screens could project. Audiences answered by staying home. Then came something stranger for a director with two Oscars for directing on his shelf, a stretch of years in which nothing he wanted to make got made.

That gap closed this summer in Northern California, where Lee finished shooting Gold Mountain, a Western about two orphaned children of Chinese immigrants at the tail end of the gold rush. It is a return to the material that built his name, families under pressure and outsiders reading a country from its edges. The film will have to show whether the man who chased the future of the image can still trust the old one.

His father, a school principal, wanted him to become a professor. Both parents had crossed from mainland China after the civil war, and Lee was born on 23 October 1954 in a military dependents’ village in Chaozhou, in Taiwan’s southern Pingtung County. He grew up in Hualien, where his father ran the local teachers’ school, and later failed the national university entrance exam twice. The arts college he entered instead, now the National Taiwan University of Arts, put him on a stage, and a screening of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring pointed him toward the camera.

After navy service he left for the United States in 1979, studying theatre at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and then film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he worked on the crew of Spike Lee’s thesis film. His own thesis, Fine Line, won a prize for direction. Then nothing. For roughly six years Lee wrote scripts and stayed home with his children while his wife, the microbiologist Jane Lin, supported the family. In 1990 two of those scripts, Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet, took first and second place in a Taiwanese government screenplay competition, and the producer Hsu Li-kong hired him to direct.

Those two films and Eat Drink Man Woman became known as his Father Knows Best trilogy, each with Sihung Lung as a patriarch watching tradition slip away. The Wedding Banquet, about a gay Taiwanese man in New York staging a marriage to satisfy his parents, won the Golden Bear in Berlin. Sense and Sensibility, his first English-language film, won him a second, and no other filmmaker has taken that prize twice. Emma Thompson, who wrote the Jane Austen adaptation and starred in it, recalled a director startled when actors offered ideas, whose notes turned out “so brutal and funny.”

What followed was a run that refused to settle into a genre. The Ice Storm, a cold portrait of 1970s American suburbia, won the screenplay prize at Cannes; Ride with the Devil, a Civil War Western, flopped. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a Mandarin-language martial arts epic with Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi, grossed $128 million in the United States, more than any foreign-produced film before it. After Hulk divided critics, Lee considered retiring, and his father told him to keep working. He made Brokeback Mountain, a modestly budgeted story of two Wyoming sheepherders in love, while wondering aloud what he could know about gay ranch hands. It won the Golden Lion in Venice and made him the first director of Asian descent to win the Academy Award for Best Director. Two years later Lust, Caution, his adaptation of Eileen Chang’s story of a student spy in occupied Shanghai, brought a second Golden Lion.

Life of Pi settled the argument about whether Yann Martel’s novel could be filmed. It took more than $609 million worldwide and earned him a second Oscar for Best Director in 2013.

That is usually where the standard account of his career ends, and it skips the most revealing chapter. Lee came out of Life of Pi convinced that sharper, faster images could bring an audience closer to a character’s inner life. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, about a young soldier paraded at a Thanksgiving football game, became the first feature shot at 120 frames per second, in 3D and 4K. Many critics objected to the look itself, and it took $31 million against a $40 million budget. Gemini Man repeated the bet, with Will Smith fighting a digitally de-aged clone of himself, and lost Paramount an estimated $111 million. The harder reading is that a director whose gift had always been restraint, the two shirts hanging in a closet at the end of Brokeback Mountain, spent most of a decade on films that left no room for it.

The years after Gemini Man were spent on projects that stalled. In 2022 he announced a Bruce Lee biopic starring his son Mason Lee, written by Dan Futterman and set up at Sony; at an event in Taipei in late 2025 he said he had spent eight years trying to make it and that it was on hold over creativity, funding and copyright. Gold Mountain itself stopped four weeks before shooting was due to begin and was pushed into 2026.

The honours kept arriving while the films did not: the BAFTA Fellowship in 2020, France’s Legion of Honour in 2021, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in 2024 as the first Taiwanese laureate, and the American Cinema Editors’ Filmmaker of the Year award in February 2026. Lee divides his time between Larchmont, New York, and Taipei, and has said he is a permanent resident of the United States rather than a citizen. He and Jane Lin have two sons.

Gold Mountain adapts C Pam Zhang’s novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold, from a screenplay by the novelist Chang-rae Lee. Chedi Chang and Sophia Xu play the orphaned siblings Lucy and Sam, Yao and Zine Tseng play their parents, and Owen Teague also stars. Jack Fisk designed the production. Joshua James Richards, who shot Nomadland, replaced Emmanuel Lubezki as cinematographer, and Mychael Danna, a composer Lee has worked with for decades, is writing the score. The shoot ran from May to August.

It is now in post-production, his first feature since 2019, and its premise is a pointed choice for this moment in his career. After two films that tried to make the image do the feeling, Lee has gone back to the scale he has always handled most precisely: two children, a hostile landscape and a family history nobody around them wants to hear.

Tags: Emma Thompson, Will Smith, Life of Pi, Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon