Ang Lee on Crouching Tigers & Oscars

If someone had told director Ang Lee two years ago that "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" would be nominated for 10 Oscars in the same week that it became the highest-grossing foreign-language film of all time, he might have thought he'd been in the bamboo rain forest for too long.
At the time, Lee was in the middle of a nightmarish shoot in a Chinese rain forest. He found a way to convince the film's martial arts choreographer that the actors could indeed defy the laws of gravity and mount a sword fight atop the trees' thin branches. Western audiences, he was told, would not buy those flying scenes.
On Tuesday, Lee's belief in "Crouching Tiger," a martial-arts romance styled after the movies Lee loved as a boy in Taiwan, was vindicated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gave the movie a record number of nominations for a foreign-language film. It's been a long, hard journey for Lee--and the Oscar nominations meant he had officially arrived.
"I have not slept at all, but I'm hyper," said Lee, who was up all night filming a short movie in New Jersey. "By 8 o'clock in the morning I hit traffic coming in from New Jersey to New York and then when I was checking into the hotel I was told about the nominations. By the time I got to my room all the press was there, jumping up and down. I have been talking nonstop since then."
Before the film was released here, Lee was fearful it would be his third "flop" at the U.S. box office, following "Ride with the Devil" and "The Ice Storm."
"I think you only get three times to flop and frankly I thought this one would be the third one," he said. "I was very confused the whole time we were filming."
Despite his fame as a filmmaker, Lee ("The Wedding Banquet," "Eat Drink Man Woman," "Sense and Sensibility") and his producing partner James Schamus had to fight to cobble together enough money from around the world to make the film. Once they secured financing, Lee demanded so much of his actors that a few came away with injuries, and one actress--who was offered the part that 21-year-old Zhang Ziyi eventually got--turned it down because it was too much work. He battled with the film's famed choreographer, Yuen Wo-Ping, about the fight/flight scenes, insisting that they be included in the movie.
Lee acknowledges he would never do it again, but that success feels oh-so-good.
"It starts to feel less like we created something and more like this is a cultural phenomenon and we are just participating," he said by phone from New York. "There is a very emotional connection with movies--we get easily bored by life and we need fantasy. Certain repressions get released spending two hours in a dark room. When it happens it is wonderful and it becomes a fantasy release."