Further reflections on working with Ang Lee

This time as an excerpt from my book

Sometimes it is good to go down a rabbit hole.

Two Saturdays ago, the director of the NEW version of The Wedding Banquet, Andrew Ahn, answered “5 Questions” for us. It led me to an old post I wrote ten years ago about what I had learned from producing the original The Wedding Banquet. So I shared that with you. That in turn led me to take a look at what I had written even earlier, when I wrote my book “Hope For Film”. Do you mind if I share that with you now?

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alas, I can’t find a good photo of Ang and me…

“Let me take a minute to think about it.”

The phrase seems innocuous enough. But for Ang Lee, perhaps the most commercially successful and critically regarded director whom we ever worked with at Good Machine, the comment was far more than a simple request to ponder.

Ang really took a minute to think about things—often far longer. You’d say something to him, and he’d nod and take it in, and you’d move on, maybe have lunch, and then go on to something else. And then he’d finally answer the question that you asked him hours before—often without acknowledging that time had passed or that other events had intervened. Ang would just start back in, expecting you to be right there with him. We learned to give him this time, as he frequently had some critical, important, and sometimes brilliant points to add.