Ang Lee

Interview

Ang Lee: 'I know I'm gonna get beat up. But I have to keep trying'

This article is more than 4 years old

Ryan Gilbey

The celebrated film-maker’s new film pits Will Smith against his much-younger clone – a reverie on the ageing of both the star and the director

Thrusday 3 October 2019

Y

ou haven’t seen nerves until you’ve met Ang Lee on the day his new film receives its world premiere. This is Gemini Man, a frantic thriller in which Will Smith plays an assassin hunted by his own younger clone; where there’s a Will, there’s another Will, you might say. Parts of the picture were shot in Budapest, and it is here that the 64-year-old film-maker shuffles into a hotel suite overlooking the Danube. “Everything feels harder than you can imagine right now,” he sighs, sinking into an armchair. He picks up a glass from the table in front of him, then puts it down again. “Even lifting that was hard.”

Ang Lee / Life of Pi by Yann Martel / Review

Life of Pi – review

The versatile Ang Lee brings Yann Martel's tale of shipwreck and spirituality to the big screen in magnificent fashion

Philip French
Sunday 23 December 2012

T

he Taiwan-born Ang Lee rapidly established himself in the 1990s as one of the world's most versatile film-makers, moving on from the trilogy of movies about Chinese families that made his name to Jane Austen's England (Sense and Sensibility) and Richard Nixon's America (The Ice Storm). If he revisits a place or genre it's to tell a very different story – a martial arts movie in medieval China (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is followed by a spy thriller in wartime Shanghai (Lust, Caution), and a western with a US civil war background (Ride With the Devil) is succeeded by a western about a gay relationship in present-day Wyoming (Brokeback Mountain).

Review

Gemini Man review – Will Smith v Will Smith leaves audience in a coma

This article is more than 4 years old

The digital de-ageing gimmick adds little sprightliness to Ang Lee’s humourless thriller about a government agent on the run

Peter Bradshaw

Friday 4 October 2019

D

igital youthification and deepfakery is the new frontier in studio movies, taking regular live-action films into a deeper uncanny valley. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman features a young-looking Robert De Niro and now comes this very odd, dodgily acted, semi-intentionally bizarre action-thriller directed by Ang Lee and written by David Benioff, Billy Ray and Darren Lemke. It stars Will Smith as Brogan, a special-forces assassin who discovers his corrupt government paymasters are harbouring a secret and subsequently finds there is a new and worryingly familiar-looking young assassin in town. It’s a youngster who has, to coin a phrase, started making trouble in the neighbourhood.