BAFTAs and the Oscars. “I didn’t know what I had in common with gay cowboys but it was a great love story,” Lee reflects. “I was also exhausted after Hulk, so it was a very nurturing experience that gave me back my love of moviemaking.”
“THE CHALLENGE I S A LW A Y S T O TRY SOMETHING N E W. I WO U L D LIKE MY CAREER TO BE LIKE A NEVER-ENDING F I L M S C H O O L .”
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Returning to China for Lust, Caution (2007), Lee treated audiences to a heady saga of World War II espionage before decamping to the US for the sweetly nostalgic Taking Woodstock (2009). Life of Pi (2012), meanwhile, saw him deploy the most sophisticated visual effects available to bring Yann Martel’s tale of a young Indian sharing a lifeboat with a tiger to stunning, three-dimensional life. (“Water, a kid, animation, 3D – it was all the most difficult elements mashed together,” Lee chuckles.) Lee’s fascination with cutting-edge technology was on display again in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016), a war hero’s rite of passage he shot using an extra high frame rate. Similarly, in 2019’s Gemini Man, he used de-ageing motion capture to pit Will Smith against his cloned younger self.
