Life-altering substance
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday August 28, 2009
Director Ang Lee continues to rebel against his upbringing with Taking Woodstock. When Ang Lee came to direct Sense and Sensibility, he could hardly converse in English with his actors. Yet the critical and box office success of the surprisingly accurate Jane Austen adaptation of 1995 provided great encouragement."I figured if I could do that, I could do anything in movie-making," the 54-year-old says. "The film was my breakthrough into the English language and it was thanks to brilliant actors like Imelda [Staunton] and the others."Lee now re-teams with Staunton for Taking Woodstock. The actress played an abortionist in Vera Drake and a staunch school mistress in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Here she is Sonia, a Jewish Russian immigrant running a rundown motel two hours north of New York and giving her son hell.Lee surely is deft at casting. Besides envisaging the burly Liev Schreiber as Vilma, a cross-dressing ex-marine on security duty, he found just the right person to play Sonia's naive son Elliot, our guide through the Woodstock experience.Demetri Martin, a 36-year-old stand-up comic who looks 20, is as new and fresh to acting as Elliot is new to everything the world's redefining concert can offer him.Based on the memoirs of Elliot Tiber, the film follows the young Elliot (renamed Teichberg) as he enables the Woodstock concert to go ahead in the area after organiser Michael Lang's permit is revoked.While Elliot has his first gay encounter during the three-day event, his coming out is downplayed in favour of showing his exposure to counterculture, including his tripping on acid and being waylaid in the back of a hippie van. Like him, we barely see the concert."Woodstock has major connotations for each person," Martin says, "but what Ang and James Schamus are trying to explore is a smaller story of someone who's a barnacle on the side of Woodstock, rather than going into the epicentre of a very large cultural phenomenon, which is unwieldy in certain ways."Lee has made the story his own, so it becomes about a man rising above repression as he himself had done. Lee didn't have an overbearing Jewish mother but a strict high school principal father, who failed to relate to his sensitive, artistic son."I was a very docile child," Lee recalls of his upbringing in Taiwan. "My mind would often drift away to the fantasy of scenes in movies but I wouldn't dare to talk about it."I hardly had any childhood, I hardly did any sports, let alone entertainment or art. During the hippie years, we all had shaved heads and it was also a regulation to wear uniforms, so there was no character, only group motivation."I saw Woodstock on the news very briefly when I was a teenager; they said it was a big music happening with lots of people and rock'n'roll. They didn't mention acid."It wasn't until age 40, long after Lee moved to New York, that he truly felt he could rebel €“ through movies. "I have to rebel now, because I never did when I was young," he says. Crucial to this growth was his friendship with the film producer, Columbia University lecturer and ageing hippie James Schamus. The New Yorker, who likes to wear a bow tie, wrote the Taking Woodstock screenplay."James provides me with the hip side of things," Lee admits. "If I never ran into him and made movies in New York, I probably would be more a Republican-type person."Lee's English is still far from perfect, though language is not his forte. He is a spiritual person who is known for organising Buddhist ceremonies on his movie sets.Lee is well regarded by all who work with him and no one loved him more than the late Heath Ledger, who delivered his most sensitive performance in Lee's Brokeback Mountain."It's very hard for me to watch The Dark Knight," Lee admits, "and the idea of seeing his new movie [The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus] is actually difficult for me psychologically. I almost didn't want to see it but then I have to see it. I miss him tremendously and the time working with him but I think we captured something very precious that is there forever."Emile Hirsch, a young, hip actor €“ "I'm definitely not square," he says €“ is reminiscent of the young Ledger. After two movies with that other rebel, Sean Penn (Into the Wild and Milk), he loved working with Lee on Taking Woodstock, in which his troubled character has not long returned from Vietnam."Ang's really specific and he encouraged everyone to dig deeper into the roles, to think about it differently," Hirsch says. "He's almost like a philosopher when he talks about character."Read the review in tomorrow's Spectrum.TAKING WOODSTOCKDirector Ang Lee Stars Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Imelda Staunton, Liev SchreiberRated MA. Now screening.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald
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