Smash hit

To make Hulk to his satisfaction (he saw the comic book story as a Greek tragedy), Lee became the personification of menacing rage, spending 10 months enacting the 15ft green monster’s movements himself for the computer-generated imagery. Off set, however, he reverts to an insecure version of Bruce Banner.

He told one interviewer: “When I’m not making films, I go back to the puny human stage. I’m weak, I have a very short attention span, I don’t know how to look after the kids, how to discipline them or look over their homework. I couldn’t do my own laundry. I’m good for nothing.”

The key to his self-mortification and low esteem lies in his background. His grandparents were Chinese landowners who were killed in China’s Communist revolution and Lee’s parents fled to Taiwan, where he was born on October 23, 1954, the second of four children. He was the antithesis of his father, Shang, the headmaster of a secondary school in Pingtung where Lee was a pupil. Shang was a stern disciplinarian who wanted his son to become a teacher — “an honourable profession” and to embrace the Chinese patriarchal culture as he had.

Lee says that he was a shy, docile child whose only escape was watching films. To his father’s chagrin he wanted to be an actor. He said: “The British are very proud of their theatrical history but our society looks down on it, so I always felt a lot of guilt.”

After failing a university entrance exam in Taiwan he went, at the age of 23, to study drama at the university of Illinois but found that acting was beyond him. He said: “I couldn’t speak English so I couldn’t act. Then I started to think about directing.”

He took a master’s degree in film production at New York University and won best director and best film for a short movie in the university film festival. But it was six years before he made his first feature film, scripted mostly in Chinese as were the next two. Even then he was supported financially by his wife, whom he had met in Illinois.

Lee’s atrocious English was holding him back. He was too shy to make friends and stayed within the Chinese community, finding it difficult to comprehend American ways. “Even now with talk shows, I don’t know why people are laughing sometimes. The whole world is very misty — it’s like I live in a cloud.”

He was a surprise choice to direct Sense and Sensibility, which went on to receive seven Oscar nominations but reaped only one (for Thompson’s screenplay). Unable to communicate satisfactorily, he had begun to pay more attention to the film’s texture, colours, and pregnant silences.

These heightened qualities are what distinguish his work, notably in Brokeback Mountain, which has a lean script and imparts a striking freshness to western landscapes.

Lee’s disapproving father began to thaw. Although Shang was the model for the stern parents in Lee’s first three films, he never commented on them. “After Sense and Sensibility, he said, ‘Great. You’ve made some movies. You can retire at 50 and do something sensible, like teaching’.”

Shang softened further after Crouching Tiger, the first major Chinese film backed by Hollywood and an unexpected box office sensation.

The first encouragement Shang offered was when Lee told him he was going to throw in the towel after Hulk. “I was ragged. Every cell in my body was screaming for rest. He held my hand and said, ‘Please don’t. You’ll be depressed’. Then he said he loved Hulk.” Two weeks later he died.

That’s when Lee decided to make Brokeback Mountain. “I never did tell him it was a gay movie . . .”