Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee doesn’t deny a greater sense of responsibility on his native-language films. While he ascribes to filmmaker Jean Renoir’s famous adage that all his films are his children, Lee admits that with
these projects there’s a special level of involvement, exacting detail
and anxiety, even, due to the additional scrutiny they receive in the
Far East. “Doing an Asian film is like doing three Hollywood movies,”
he says in a recent interview. There is a sense that “each
one is making history. I would need a long break in between if I were
to do two back-to-back.”

Brokeback Mountain, and his first abroad since 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is Lust, Caution. A wartime drama that shines a light on the clash of disparate forces
and ethics — beauty and cruelty, desire and fidelity, personal
awakening and patriotic duty — the movie is based on Eileen Chang’s
short story of the same name, and co-adapted for the screen by Lee’s
longtime collaborator, James Schamus. Part cloak-and-dagger tale of political espionage, part quite uncloaked
tale of sexual release, the movie premiered to much chatter at this
year’s Venice Film Festival, and earned a rare, if deserved, NC-17
rating for its aforementioned scenes of frenetic and not always
pleasantly erotic coupling.

“I don’t know of any other modern day Chinese writer who is more
revered and argued over than Eileen Chang,” says Lee. “And yet this
short story is very different writing than her other works.” It was the
opportunity to delve into female psychology and patriotism — two
subjects not frequently explored within China, and even rarer still
together — that most intrigued Lee, and made him want to tackle a
filmic adaptation of Chang’s 46-page source material.

Both because of this culturally incendiary subject matter and the fact that Lust, Caution hinges so completely on a young “mahjong Mata Hari” at the story’s
center, Lee knew that he would have to find just the right actress for his young leading lady. To that end, a huge search was undertaken. The winner, and
perhaps a newly minted star: neophyte actress Wei Tang, then 27 years
old, a recent graduate of Beijing’s Central Academy of Drama directing
program and a former model and Miss Universe pageant runner-up.

Tang, dressed in a knit red dress, alternates between using a
translator and speaking directly, but apart from an obviously
restricted vocabulary and some occasional pronoun slippage, her
accented English is for the most part direct and to the point — quite
unlike her character, who is steeped in masked silences and
uncertainty. A sly sense of humor even pokes through the cultural fog —
“Oh, want to sleep?” she says when a reporter’s tape recorder tips
over. Talking about the film, Tang details an exhaustive series of five auditions and call-backs,
a process that she says was intimidating because of the idea of
competing against “hundreds of other girls.” (In fact, Lee pegs the
number even higher, saying that between he and his casting associates,
10,000 girls were seen.) After making it to the second round, Tang was
granted an audience with Lee. “The second time I saw Ang, and we talked
a lot,” she says, “all about my education, my family, my background and
other things.” The Oscar-winning director’s filmography wasn’t one of
those things, however; rather amazingly, Tang hadn’t seen any of Lee’s
movies. “I just knew [he] was very nice, because I’d seen pictures,”
she says with a sheepish grin. “And so I believed my feelings.” For the full feature, from Reelz, click here. For a review of the film, meanwhile, click here.