Top 100 Ang Lee Quotes
#1. I think people are universal.
Ang Lee
#2. I feel that everyone has a Hulk inside, and each of our Hulks is both scary and, potentially, pleasurable. That's the scariest thing about them.
Ang Lee
#3. I have two sons in America, and all they care about in Chinese culture is Jackie Chan and Jet Li.
Ang Lee
#4. A movie is really provocation. It's not a message, it's not a statement.
Ang Lee
#5. My father was the center of the family, and everyone tried to please him.
Ang Lee
#6. My hometown was one of the major U.S. Air Force bases.
Ang Lee
#7. These days I'm mostly familiar with two parts of L.A.: one is movie culture, and the other is Asian culture. The Westside is work, and the Eastside is Chinese - which means my friends.
Ang Lee
#8. Now I'm kind of established as a director, I much prefer directing to writing.
Ang Lee
#9. As artists, we like night more than day sometimes.
Ang Lee
#10. First we pre-visualized it so the actors could act. It took a long time to get that to come to life and to design those coming out of the screen. We had great fun with that. It takes a long time, a year maybe.
Ang Lee
#11. I don't lead a Hollywood lifestyle.
Ang Lee
#12. I'm aware of what's missing from my life.
Ang Lee
#13. It's just what I am. When I am in the zone making one movie, I just didn't want to read anything else or do anything else, so I don't really develop projects.
Ang Lee
#14. I don't have a superpower.
Ang Lee
#15. To me, Ennis stands for the conservative side of America. He's the biggest homophobe in the whole movie - culturally and psychologically - but by the time he admits his feelings, it's too late.
Ang Lee
#16. Making movies is a way of understanding myself and the world.
Ang Lee
#17. San Francisco is one of my favourite cities in the world ... I would probably rank it at the top or near the top. It's small but photogenic and has layers ... You never have problems finding great angles that people have never done.
Ang Lee
#18. American films are less American every day, because you have to please a world audience. There's less authenticity, so it's more accessible.
Ang Lee
#19. After making several tragic movies in a row, I was looking to do a comedy, and one without cynicism.
Ang Lee
#20. I'm actually living my life with the material I choose to work with.
Ang Lee
#21. 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.
Ang Lee
#22. You become the movie you are making.
Ang Lee
#23. We need storytelling. Otherwise life just goes on and on, like the number Pi.
Ang Lee
#24. I think a movie is a media that is evoking feelings.
Ang Lee
#25. I'm such a late bloomer.
Ang Lee
#26. Film study was considered disgraceful by my father.
Ang Lee
#27. I was very quiet, very shy and docile.
Ang Lee
#28. Things that don't have a big impact seem to be crucial. Always when you go out to make a movie you have questions, "What if this doesn't work? What if that doesn't work?" you want to cover yourself, you want to bring back enough [footage] so you can do something.
Ang Lee
#29. I'm just a pretty regular dad.
Ang Lee
#30. The most mysterious feminine factor, the existence that we men, we don't know. It's woman. It's feminine. That's what the sword is about. That's the symbolic meaning of the sword.
Ang Lee
#31. When you talk about God, the first thing that comes along is not love, it's fear. You have to fear, and be in awe. You have to be scared. Any religion, it's like first thing ...
Ang Lee
#32. My father's family were liquidated during the Cultural Revolution in China because they were landowners. He was the only one to escape. I was born and brought up in Taiwan. But you absorb the trauma. My parents had no sense of security.
Ang Lee
#33. My culture doesn't regard acting highly.
Ang Lee
#34. Many times when you make a movie, it feels like your biggest mistake. But even if a film isn't a hit, you shouldn't view it as a mistake.
Ang Lee
#35. I have a lot of repression. So repression is what I make movies about.
Ang Lee
#36. I think, if allowed, 3D is a new film language. I can have more adventure exploring a new media, that's very exciting. 2D we know most of it, things haven't changed for decades; it's the same principles, so 3D's more exciting.
Ang Lee
#37. I think the American West really attracts me because it's romantic. The desert, the empty space, the drama.
Ang Lee
#38. 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.
Ang Lee
#39. I'm not a romantic. In life I didn't have much experience with romance.
Ang Lee
#40. Some actors give you what you want. Some you have to make do what you want.
Ang Lee
#41. I'm a shy human being.
Ang Lee
#42. I'm not macho, I'm not a Mel Gibson sort of person.
Ang Lee
#43. For six years, from 1985 to 1991, I felt pretty weak and useless.
Ang Lee
#44. On a Chinese film you just give orders, no one questions you. Here, you have to convince people, you have to tell them why you want to do it a certain way, and they argue with you. Democracy.
Ang Lee
#45. I like to think I'm un-categorisable.
Ang Lee
#46. When there is a strong woman character in a story - that always grabs me.
Ang Lee
#47. I think I can work with any type of actor.
Ang Lee
#48. I'm not a master of films, I'm rather a slave.
Ang Lee
#49. Meanwhile, the Ice Storm was still in development, And that was something I really wanted to do, and frankly I don't think I was ready to do a big production like this.
Ang Lee
#50. I wanted to shoot straight, mainstream, somehow off-beat. Not only realistic West, which is quite unfamiliar to the world's population - even to a lot of Americans.
Ang Lee
#51. My mother loves me and everything goes well. I have no conflict with her, so that's not dramatic.
Ang Lee
#52. There's a certain time in the core of making a movie from pre-production to halfway through post-production I don't read any project, my agent will tell people that "he's not reading." And then when I know how the movie's probably gonna work halfway into post-production, I'll come along.
Ang Lee
#53. Sometimes, you have to get angry to get things done.
Ang Lee
#54. I don't care about writing really.
Ang Lee
#56. I just did a dramatic love story. Whether it's a cultural phenomenon is not for me to say.
Ang Lee
#57. So many times you see beautiful lovemaking scenes with a lot of exposure or an awkward lovemaking scene, but I think it's very rare that you see it private.
Ang Lee
#58. 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.
Ang Lee
#59. I had to test a new terror in myself.
Ang Lee
#60. I'm a big boy now, and I have to deliver.
Ang Lee
#61. The fear factor actually brings the genuineness.
Ang Lee
#62. 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.
Ang Lee
#63. I like to go back to Chinese film-making from time to time. I don't think I can make Chinese films back to back; it's such a big effort. I'd have to take a very long break.
Ang Lee
#64. I think life without spirit is in the dark, it is absurd.
Ang Lee
#66. The father figure is something I love, but also suffocate from and want to work against.
Ang Lee
#67. Depending on the budget. I think I prefer 3D to 2D now. Also, because of 3D I have to use a digital camera, which is the way it's going anyway. That still confuses me, a digital camera versus film.
Ang Lee
#68. No matter how widely spread out the films are, how different, you still are you.
Ang Lee
#69. Making a martial arts film in English to me is the same as John Wayne speaking Chinese in a western
Ang Lee
#70. Sensitivity and money are like parallel lines. They don't meet.
Ang Lee
#71. There's a level of sophistication of filmmaking that's mind-boggling. Anything you need for your movie, there's an establishment that can make it happen really fast.
Ang Lee
#73. If it was a choice between making movies and doing nothing, he'd probably still wish me to make movies, So he made me keep going.
Ang Lee
#74. When I'm not working, I get very down, but when I am working, I get very immersed in it.
Ang Lee
#75. I think I prefer 3D to 2D now.
Ang Lee
#76. 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.
Ang Lee
#77. I don't know if I make the best gay films.
Ang Lee
#78. I did a women's movie, and I'm not a woman. I did a gay movie, and I'm not gay. I learned as I went along.
Ang Lee
#79. I find it hard to deliver straightforward things.
Ang Lee
#80. I grew up pretty much prevented from knowing anything from Communist China except that they were the bad guys that stole our country.
Ang Lee
#81. Everyone in the gay community doesn't think alike.
Ang Lee
#82. 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.
Ang Lee
#83. I'm a drifter and an outsider. There's not one single environment I can totally belong to.
Ang Lee
#84. With 3D you're right there immersed in the world.
Ang Lee
#85. 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.
Ang Lee
#86. I feel like all of my characters now take this congested situation, they clash, and from there you purge yourself.
Ang Lee
#87. My cultural roots are something illusive.
Ang Lee
#88. I guess in Hollywood you chart your life by Oscars. You say to each other, 'Remember when that movie won that year? It was 2006. Remember that?'
Ang Lee
#89. Directing, I get all kinds of inspiration. It's working with people. It's a lot more fun.
Ang Lee
#90. I think doing period piece is easier, because after a certain distance, everybody is equal, I think. The relative contemporary is harder. I think that's the way it is.
Ang Lee
#91. I had to find my way of translating the excitement you get when you're reading comic books to the big screen.
Ang Lee
#92. Every movie is unknown.
Ang Lee
#93. You have to know the rules, otherwise you have no tools to communicate to the audience, but to keep it fresh you have to break some. I don't choose genres as the element, but the material itself is the element, then I'll decide what genre I need. That's just how I work.
Ang Lee
#94. Sexuality is a big issue, but there are others - how much you commit to a relationship, to social obligation, to honesty and being honest with yourself.
Ang Lee
#95. 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.
Ang Lee
#96. 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.
Ang Lee
#97. Summer blockbusters are very expensive to make. They have things that have to be expensive, such as 600 effects shots or CG characters that have to go a certain way, or a film design that is different but expensive.
Ang Lee
#98. I see a movie as a way of learning about the world, about myself, and learning about my relationship with people and art.
Ang Lee
#99. I look at American movies, the big muscles, and try to apply that to Chinese film-making.
Ang Lee
#100. I think a lot of people do big movies not because they are talented artists but because they can function in the circumstances.
Ang Lee
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