STORM ALERT

Four years after his career-making The Wedding Banquet, director Ang Lee has come up with his most epic treatment yet of his favorite subject: the family. Set in 1973, in a privileged Connecticut suburb, Fox Searchlight's The Ice Storm focuses on two monumentally dysfunctional clans. The conflicted, chaotic lives of both parents and children emerge against the backdrop of the Watergate hearings, the bright new world offered by college, blithe universal drug experimentation, blandly adulterous 'key parties' for the country-club set, and high-school band practice. Alienation, amorality and anger run rampant in these entitled settings until nature's awesome force, in the form of that titular storm, steps in, leaving tragedy of a Greek proportion in its wake.

Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Allen, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood, Adam Hann-Byrd and Jamey Sheridan, actor's actors all, head an impeccably select cast. Lee's direction is as masterly as ever. He recreates an utterly lost, recent era, and its vast, unfulfilled and bitterly ironic quest for human adventure and potential, with profound poignancy. Every detail is scrupulously in place: the horrendous brown-rust-avocado color scheme of the time; bongs in the dormitory; grotesque 'Tricky Dick' masks; those paperbacks that were everywhere, like Fear of Flying and How to Be Your Own Best Friend. 'What happened?' is the ineffably sad question that resonates throughout this panoramic yet intimate period drama. The Ice Storm opens the New York Film Festival on Sept. 26 and is slated for national release in mid-October.With all of his recent triumphs and well-earned eminence, the director remains as engagingly modest, funny and down-to-earth as he was when we first encountered him circa The Wedding Banquet.

Ang Lee: The Wedding Banquet was like a last life, each movie is like a last life. This film carries on my family thing, except this one is like 'Father Knows Worst.' I used my own father as a model for my first three 'Father Knows Best' movies, with the same actor, the same kind of tone and me, the filmmaker, in the position of son. This time I used Kevin, who's really playing me, my fear of what the modern family is, breaking apart in society. I sort of put myself in that part. I took the basic elements of the book [by Rick Moody], but with the characters we almost started from scratch. James Schamus worked it out scriptwise, in terms of movie structure. It's really more inspired by the book.

What brought me to this project were two scenes that really moved me in the book, both of which come near the end. When Kevin finds the dead boy's body, that really comes as a retribution, like Greek tragedy. That idea of moral retribution really interested me, when your kid dies, that big 'Why?' That hit me really hard. It's that fear of nature and somehow feeling responsible. I hope it's nothing moralistic, yet somehow it's a force of nature that puts a limit to your free will. That's what I tried to capture. The other thing that really hit me was at the very end. You can say all the negative things about family you want. It can be totally fucked up, but there's always a certain understanding and a certain warmth in the relationships. So that's from the book. And, of course, we had to have an actual ice storm. I've never seen that in movies, so that was very attractive.The setting being 1973 provided a lot of texture. For me, that was a pivotal year. I got into the Taiwan Academy of Art and that was the year I decided to be a filmmaker. For me, 1973 has became a constant drama, bringing back memories. In the beginning of the book, there's a page and a half of explanation, bringing you back in time when there were no fax machines, no frequent mileage, no this, no that. It was hard to find period props that functioned, like dial telephones and old television sets, with really old tubes.

Film Journal International: As always, you have these strong visual motifs, like those old, unwieldy metal ice trays, with that cracking sound they make.

AL: Your hands would stick to them-aach! That really hit me, so I made the most of that. Jim worked a lot from his memory in terms of a lot of the stuff the kids did. In Taiwan, I wasn't exposed to the drugs or progressive rock. I was raised pretty seriously. I'd only hear the more AM pop type of songs.

The project was originally set up with Tom Rothman, who had sold The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman at Samuel Goldwyn. Then he moved to Fox Searchlight and we went with him. And Lindsay Law, of course, who's no stranger to us, from American Playhouse, also became involved. It cost $18 million, the highest budget Searchlight has ever done and everyone was very, very nervous. It's a lot for a movie like this. The scope of the film is not that big, but the cast was expensive, and making the ice storm and, of course, to have total creative control. I had final cut.

I cast Kevin first as the father because I wanted a likeable comedian like him to play this serious role, to capture its pathetic qualities and gain sympathy. He had to be likeable to get away with all the character's confusing, adolescent behavior. He jumped at the role. He's turned down so many scripts that his agency calls him 'Kevin Decline,' always saying, 'Send me something darker.' But this he loved. In the film, the characters are much younger than in the book, because people marry and have children much earlier today than back then. So when the characters are only 39 and 40, their kids are already in high school, teenagers.

Sigourney came next; she and Kevin are best friends. She read the script and got very excited about the project. Her husband, Jim Simpson, in particular, was very moved by the script. Not the drama so much, as the time in which it was set. Just talking about it, he was in tears: 'This was my childhood!' Most of the filmmakers involved, in fact, are all about this same age. So what we were doing was basically impersonating our own parents up there on the screen. It was a very hard part for Sigourney to gain sympathy in. She's a bad mother and, you should know as a director, it's very hard to have boredom as the motivation for a character's behavior. It helped to have a star in this kind of character role, with her natural charisma. James' lines, as delivered by her, were a brilliant stroke.

And then, gradually, we got the kids. I was nervous in the beginning about their acting process. I had never worked with American teenagers before, didn't know what kind of monsters they would be. But they really related to the script and their real-life parents were great, very supportive. They were all very easy. You don't want to tamper with their basic innocent selves; you know the audience's heart is going to go out to them. Of course, they had to make the adjustment to the period attitude: lazy, spaced out, with certain enunciations which I'm not an expert on, but the whole crew was. And then you don't want to screw them up or confuse them by telling them too much, 'Do this, or do that' because they should just be able to go along with it. Sometimes, in rehearsals, they gave me such inspiring ideas. They'd have problems with what they'd do when they'd be hanging out after school together. We'd do a little improv of having them just watch television and see what came up in the first stage of rehearsals. Sometimes they'd realize that they wouldn't even say much to each other, especially at age 13, yet they're still discovering each other at the same time. When I first met them, I was kind of shy and told them that I had been in Taipei in 1973, so I didn't know anything about Con-necticut at that time. And Christina Ricci said, 'Well, we weren't even born yet!' So I snapped out of it.

Joan Allen was remarkable. She, like Sigourney, was very cooperative. They brought some ideas to their characters but were really aware that this was a director's piece. Even as a director sometimes, you're just pretending you know how to put things together. This didn't have a linear structure, it was edgy. Nobody could tell how it was going to work out until we saw the dailies. It was a hard picture to visualize in your imagination. It was very much a director's piece, so they were all more or less playing along with my ideas. It was a very different atmosphere from, say, Sense and Sensibility. It was more similar to when I did Chinese films. Not that they'd come in with an empty head, but they wanted to see where they were going before contributing ideas. When we rehearsed, Kevin said, 'Everything I'm doing is wrong.' And he was right, because it was exactly that kind of uneasy edge that I was looking for. So I did a lot of tries and, for the first time, I shared some of my major homework as a director as well as my personal life with them, being a parent and the ache of having children. Usually you don't do that, you just tell them what they have to know and work from there. There are two very good reasons for this. First, you don't want to distract them by telling them things they don't need to know. And the other thing is to keep your director's superior presence, so you do know more than they do. As a director, you don't want to tell them everything, you just don't. My kids are 13 and 17 now, so I was able to bring that, as well. A lot of what they had to do was react, not like in Sense and Sensibility. It wasn't about them performing, but reacting, seeing how they'd behave in a certain situation. It was a very collaborative setup.

An actual ice storm did occur while we were filming in New Canaan, but we only captured a few shots of it. You'll notice there are no actors in that shot. Mostly, we created it using gels and spraying water to enhance the shots. We ruined an entire train for that climactic sequence. We sprayed something like hair gel all over it. It was 80 degrees that day when we shot it and the stuff just melted and clung. And they tried to use hot water, steam, anything to remove it but we just ruined it. We shot it in a very strange station that has a stop sign and ends right where the road ends. One week later, they still hadn't cleaned it so they refused to let us use any more trains. So we had to build a model.

Visually, in the first half of the movie, I was shooting for photorealism, a hyper-intense, objective way of examining things, more intense than a photo, even. We used a lot of reflective surfaces, such as glass and mirrors, which eventually built into the ice. We used a lot of negative space. All that I liked. You don't see that in dramatic films and I wanted to build a tacky world, circa 1973, lots of brown. I even had to yell at the costume designer: 'No more brown! What's done is already done, but don't give me any more.' You don't want to mock the time. The costume designer had so much fun just doing the reality of the time. (That dress for the key party hostess was a little out of hand, though.) The first day of shooting, Sigourney was in hair and makeup for hours. It always takes a long time for me on the first day, warming up with the crew on the set. So we were doing that, and in the afternoon she showed up for the first time. I stared at her and said, 'You look just like Jane Fonda in Klute!' And that was one of the most terrible things I could have said, because the last thing any actress wants is to be compared to somebody else. She said, 'Uhh. She's period, right?'

With the art direction, I had all these artificial textures, like polyester, for the actors to overcome. I used it more like an obstacle, instead of supporting the story. So, for the music, I had this idea of human nature being overcome by nature nature. I wanted to mix '70s tacky music, the electronic sound of it, with something more haunting and primitive, like the call of nature. We hired Mychael Danna, who brought in the use of the gamelan and Native American wood flute, in a minimalist way. I was very pleased with it, for in a way it gave the movie guidance, a structure. With this film, more than any other, music played the most important part.

FJI: This is a little off the subject, but I've got to ask it. How could you have been overlooked as a Best Director nominee for Sense and Sensibility? I saw it as pure Hollywood racism, that everyone else connected with the film gets the nod, except you. That one they withhold.

AL: (laughs) I don't know, I wasn't there. I get asked that question a lot, actually, and it makes me more uncomfortable than not having been nominated. With The Ice Storm, I don't even care. I'm happy with the result and proud of it. It's edgier, it's made in New York. But Sense and Sensibility was perfect Oscar material, I thought. I just simply couldn't understand it. Frankly, I don't care that much. Sometimes, though, I cannot not care, when I think about what it would mean to the Asian community. It would be nice in terms of being able to command a bigger budget for my films. It's always a struggle, I'm always trying to get a little bit more, based on the power of my previous films. After this one, I'll be able to get a budget of just under $20 million, with final cut. But it probably doesn't mean anything, the studios have a million ways of getting to you. Luckily, I have Jim Schamus to talk to the studios for me. I don't have to do it. In a way, we're kind of scared to face each other and talk. So, that's kind of good. They're supportive, but you need a middle person.Compared to the other movies I've made, you don't get many chances to do something like The Ice Storm, with this kind of budget. It's a privilege. Far more of an honor for me than an Oscar, is the fact that it's opening the New York Film Festival. But I hate doing that public-appearance, red-carpet thing.

I enjoyed doing Sense, but it was a lot of pressure. Not creative pressure, but just me alone dealing with all the top-of-the-line British cast and crew in the English countryside. Auggh! It took me completely into another culture, and here I was supposed to direct this national treasure which I had very little idea about. I took lessons in history and period dance and etiquette, along with the actors, because I assumed I didn't know anything, either. I was paranoid about not knowing the difference between the different traditions: Jane Austen vs. real life vs. the theatrical. I realized that it wasn't really about movement, it was about attitude. In a way, The Ice Storm was even scarier to do, historically. With Austen, it's a lot of conjecture based on research, but here everyone remembers how it was, in different ways. There were more decisions to make.FJI: I enjoyed that TV special on the making of Sense. How all the women on the set ganged up on you for the scene in which Willoughby rescues the sister, Marianne, in the storm and sweeps her up in his arms. 'Don't worry about it. Just do it,' they told you when you objected to the corniness of it and how it wasn't even in the book. 'It's a girl thing.'

AL: There were two things I had to learn from the girls. Any liberated women's movement aside, somehow that image of being scooped up goes beyond that. That tall guy, Gary Weisz, he was a new actor. After five takes, I had to tell him, 'Don't pant so much. Lift her like she's a feather.' (Even in The Ice Storm, when Kevin and Jamey Sheridan carry their kids, who are pretty big, they had to be specially coached for that, how to use their strength.)

The whole project was really Lindsay Law's baby. In a way, I felt that for the first time in my life I could say to my father, 'Look, I have a job.' I was a totally hired gun. They came to me to offer me the job. Lindsay had spent 15 years trying to get it off the ground. He had hired Emma before she was really famous, when she was still Kenneth Branagh's wife. He'd seen some television skit Emma had written and decided she could do Jane Austen. At that time, the studio's reaction was, 'Can she not act in the movie?' And, of course, now she's Emma Thompson.

It was good training for me, to collaborate. Chinese directors are not trained to do that. The Oriental upbringing is: first you take orders and then someday, hopefully, you'll be mature enough to give orders. You don't explain. But I found that an eloquent debate is actually helpful in cleaning out your thoughts. And, at times, the talk can even be vague, or stupidly wrong. I think even brilliant directors can be totally stupid at moments. Sometimes I didn't really know where I was going. The Oriental conditioning of being humble, and never over-confident, has a lot to do with that. I'd just have to assume that I was right. And, in the case of doing something as unfamiliar as Jane Austen, sometimes I was, and that was scary.

My next project is a Civil War movie for Fox. It's not the typical image you might have of it. It's about the guerrilla wars on the Kansas-Missouri border, the bushwhackers. It's very exciting. If I get the money, it'll be an epic: horses, troops, massacres. I'm struggling with the casting, the scheduling of shooting days for action sequences and the building of a mining town which we'll burn down. I've done five family films, so it's time for a change. I fell in love with period films after Sense. Now I don't want to do anything else. They're fascinating, not only the research, but it's easier to do abstract emotions because you're not distracted by reality. In a way, they're like foreign films. I've done Chinese films for Chinese audiences, but when I worked in England, it was like doing a foreign film.'