Deep Throat, polyester, modular furniture and Erica Jong - you might not expect these totems of 1970s Americana to have much resonance for Ang Lee, a director who in 1973 was still living in his native Taiwan. But then you might not have expected him to have an acute feel for the social niceties of Jane Austen's England, and yet Lee's hugely successful 1995 version of Sense And Sensibility showed up other big-screen costume dramas as so much bonnet-trimming.
Now, in his new film The Ice Storm, based on Rick Moody's novel of troubled suburban mores, Lee has recreated a world as stylistically precise and almost as distant as Austen's - bourgeois Connecticut in 1973.
These last two films are the work of a director with a remarkable ability to beam himself into a particular time and space, arming himself with historical and cultural data by the folder-full and somehow capturing the specifics with bang-on accuracy. His next film, his most ambitious yet, is set during the American Civil War.
Lee's early features suggested an amiably unassuming director rooted in the everyday. Pushing Hands (1992) and The Wedding Banquet (1993) were about a situation with which Lee was familiar - young Chinese in New York confronting their traditionalminded parents. For his 1994 film, Eat Drink Man Woman, he took the generational theme back to Taiwan and staged it amid a cornucopian spread of cooking imagery.
Sense And Sensibility, although a departure, confirmed Lee's reputation as an intelligent, feelgood director who could make you leave the cinema enlightened as well as elated: one review of The Wedding Banquet remarked, "He could give a lesson to Disney".
Yet The Ice Storm is as bracingly chilly as its name suggests, which may explain its disappointing box-office performance. After 16 weeks it had only taken $7.5 million in the US, and it cost 18 million to make. At least the critics were impressed - influential TV pundits Siskel and Ebert proclaimed it the best film of 1997.
In person, Lee is politely reticent. He is stocky, soft-spoken and not entirely Americanised - after 20 years, his English still has a creaky edge. You can appreciate that he might have an empathy for the teenage traumas depicted in The Ice Storm: he has described his younger self as "a super-docile, embarrassed, dreamy boy". The film's star, Sigourney Weaver, has said he is "a gentle, accepting man". Yet he notoriously showed his harsher side while filming Sense And Sensibility, upsetting Hugh Grant and prompting Kate Winslet to confess that Lee's criticisms often reduced her to tears. "Making movies is my devil's side," Lee has admitted.
He was born in Taiwan in 1954, the oldest son of parents who left China during the Revolution. After high school he attended the Taiwan Academy of Arts and did two years' military service. In 1978 he went to America and studied drama at the University of Illinois, then film at New York University.
His student short, Fine Line, won a prize in the New York Film Festival, and Lee was courted by the William Morris Agency, which persuaded him to stay in the US and pitch at the mainstream. But the next six years were spent in limbo while the would-be director tried to develop various scripts; the family lived in a cramped apartment over a garage in White Plains, in upstate New York, and his wife, Jane, funded them for much of that time while Lee suffered anxiety-induced insomnia.
The waiting for recognition ended when Lee won first and second prizes in a Taiwanese script competition. His two submissions became his first films, Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet, both made with the small, independent production company Good Machine, founded by Ted Hope and film lecturer James Schamus. He has worked with them ever since, and Schamus wrote the script for The Ice Storm. Lee loves their ability to stretch a tight budget: it allows him to work with Hollywood support while maintaining the independent film-making spirit.
It was The Wedding Banquet - which cost under $1 million dollars and made almost $24 million worldwide - that made Lee an international name. He based the story on the experiences of a gay Chinese acquaintance who always had to put on a straight performance when his parents visited. Lee could empathise: his own lowkey wedding distressed his parents, who had expected something more flamboyant. In Eat Drink Man Woman, Lee returned to Taiwan and drew on his own passion for cooking, an occupation he returns to compulsively when stressed. "I was cooking at home for 10 years and developed the obsession that some day I wanted to make a movie that would make people's mouths water, same way they excite people with sex," he says.
When Lee was hired to direct Emma Thompson's script of Sense And Sensibility, it seemed a wildly improbable leap. Yet he had established himself as a specialist in fine-tuned family comedy, and the rituals and repressions of Chinese family life were perhaps not so different from those of Austen's world. But Sense And Sensibility proved nervewracking for all concerned.
"I was thrown with an English cast and crew," Lee remembers, "and it was a lot of pressure for eight months, constantly having to prove in a very subtle way that I could handle the material. I was learning from them while giving directions. Usually I'm like two or three years ahead of everyone when everyone else is getting on board. This time it was work for hire and I was 30 years behind."
Lee handed his actors dense stacks of documentation about Austen's time, and set them written homework, making them fill in questionnaires and write to each other in character. Kate Winslet, who he coached in t'ai chi, turned in a 75-page piece, only for Lee to read it and comment, "This is wrong, very wrong".
Hugh Grant was told his acting was "nerdy", and Emma Thompson was instructed, "Don't look so old". Lee also took some of the actors' suggestions amiss, fearing they lacked confidence in his direction.
All this he now attributes to culture clash. "In Taiwan, they expect the director to come up with everything. You enjoy all the authority and no one challenges you. We weren't brought up communicating - you grow up taking orders until you're old enough to give orders. Sense And Sensibility was my first taste of having to convince people to do what I wanted."
After that film, Lee says, he learned to be more polite. But Joan Allen, who stars in The Ice Storm, says he can still be unusually tough: "It took us all some time to get used to his method of communicating - he's very blunt and very specific and he won't settle for less than what he wants. Sometimes you had to have a thick skin. But everybody got it from time to time - we just got to roll with it. But he's not a mean person."
The Ice Storm has reinforced Lee's reputation as an acute, sensitive orchestrator of women's roles, a sort of latter-day George Cukor. Joan Allen, however, sees him less as a women's director than as one attuned to ensembles and their body language: "I remember a couple of exercises where he had us walking across the room to see if we could walk similarly, because families do that."
This is not a new approach - on Eat Drink Man Woman, Lee had chefs teach his cast the "choreography" of busy kitchens. This time too, Lee provided his cast with folders full of information about 1973 America - from pop, fashion and Watergate to the selfhelp manuals that were booming then - (he also gave them his notorious questionnaires, although Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline somehow managed not to hand theirs in). The film's scholarly dimension bolsters its sympathetic diagnosis of a traumatised moment in US culture, piling up the minutiae without taking the obvious option of satirical kitsch.
The Ice Storm is so precise an anatomy of American living that it is hard to imagine Lee was ever pigeonholed as a "Chinese filmmaker". But he plans to make another Chinese film in the near future, a Beijing-set period piece. First, however, he will head deeper into Americana in his Civil War film Woe To Live On, with a cast including neo-folk chanteuse Jewel. It contains "looting, shooting, comradeship, racial tension, romance," Lee says.
This hardly sounds like a recipe to please his former audience, whose hopes of cockle-warming entertainment will already have been dashed by The Ice Storm's glacial brilliance. But Lee doesn't seem to mind that. "I think `audience-friendly' is the stupidest term," he says. That counts as heresy in Hollywood, but now he has a "difficult" film on his hands, a little fighting talk can only be good for his reputation.
Ang Lee is one of the few filmmakers to emerge from America's independent scene who seems never to have been dubbed a "maverick". But if The Ice Storm is indicative of his new direction, this quiet man may turn out to be the most single-minded maverick of them all.