108 Time October 21–28, 2019
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MOVIES
Ang Lee wants to
change the way you see
By Andrew R. Chow
A
ng Lee aLready knows how you feeL
about 3-D movies. “It gives you a headache—of
course you don’t like it!” the Academy Award–
winning director says at an editing studio in
midtown Manhattan. “The projection is bad. It’s too dark.”
Complaints like these have driven many moviegoers
and filmmakers away from the medium over the past de-
cade. To many, it’s little more than a gimmick for super-
hero blockbusters, a quickly receding novelty.
But Lee, long an iconoclast, still believes in 3-D. In fact,
he’s doubling down: his latest effort, Gemini Man, was shot
in 3-D and at 120 frames per second, a far higher rate than
the usual 24 frames per second. The visual effect is one of
extreme fluidity, more like a video game than a traditional
feature film. The movie, out Oct. 11, is in many ways a stan-
dard action sci-fi flick—Will Smith plays an aging hit man
fighting a younger cloned version of himself. But Lee
hopes it will be a Trojan horse for a mind-set shift around
the divisive medium.
So why would one of film’s leading auteurs devote his
career to what most view as a technological trifle? Lee
claims that 3-D is a fundamentally different art form from
2-D—that when the brain perceives a realistic third di-
mension, it prompts a heightened sense of immersion and
deeper emotional connection. He also believes that the
shared movie-theater experience still possesses an un-
matched power—and that in the Peak TV era, 3-D might be
a key way to lure audiences out of their living rooms.
Whether Lee remains a lone warrior or the leader of a
revolution hinges on the financial support of Hollywood—
and whether other filmmakers follow him into a largely
untapped dimension. “2-D is home,” he says. “I want to go
to a new world.”
The direcTor has made a career out of defying norms.
In 1995, when Asian filmmakers were scant in Hollywood,
Lee, a native of Taiwan who spoke minimal English, spear-
headed an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibil-
ity to overwhelming acclaim. In 2000, he brought martial
arts to Western audiences with Crouching Tiger, Hid-
den Dragon, which became the highest-grossing foreign-
language film in American history. And his 2005 drama
Brokeback Mountain marked a turning point for queer sto-
ries in mainstream culture and earned him an Oscar for
best director.
While Lee raced between genres, styles and obses-
sions early in his career, his current decade has been one
of single-minded intent: to advance 3-D filmmaking. After
James Cameron’s 3-D epic Avatar was released in 2009,
grossing nearly $2.8 billion at the box office, the form
experienced a renaissance: films like Alfonso Cuarón’s
Gravity, Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific
Rim and Lee’s own Oscar-winning
Life of Pi—which was praised for its
stunning aquatic visuals and glower-
ing digitally created tiger—all achieved
success within the next four years, sug-
gesting that a new era of filmmaking
had arrived.
But 3-D’s triumphant arrival was
soon beset by a harsh backlash from
consumers, who bristled at putting on
bulky glasses and shelling out extra
cash. Box-office returns dropped
steadily throughout the decade, hitting
a low point last year, as studios stopped
greenlighting projects and theaters quit
investing in 3-D digital screens. Lee’s
ambitious and highly anticipated 3-D
drama Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,
which failed to break even at the box of-
fice in 2016, looked like it could be the
form’s last stand.
Rather than concede, Lee became
convinced the problem wasn’t the me-
dium but the approach. Many recent
3-D releases, including Star Wars: The
Force Awakens and Avengers: Age of
Ultron, weren’t filmed with 3-D in mind
but were converted in postproduction.△
Lee, with Smith, hopes
3-D might be a key way
to lure audiences out of
their living rooms