In an interesting aside on The Wedding Banquet (喜宴), Dilley remarks that the script originally had a leading character working at developing products specifically for left-handed people. This idea was later cut, but it provides an incomparable insight into where Lee's sympathies lie. The left-handed are still, in a lingering prejudice, routinely forced to use their right hands in much of Taiwan, and indeed in much of Asia. A sympathy with, and concern for, the metaphorically left-handed in many spheres of life could be said to characterize all the films of Lee.
There is a mass of incidental detail included - how President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) visited Lee at his parental home near Tainan, how the original author of Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx, initially doubted if Lee was the right director for it, how The Wedding Banquet was shot in six weeks for US$750,000 but made US$32 million, proportionately surpassing even Jurassic Park, and of how Lee appears himself in that movie, speaking the single but crucial line about the over-the-top wedding-day antics, "You're witnessing the result of 5,000 years of sexual repression."
Lee has said of himself "I don't have a hobby. I don't have a life," and "I would like to live inside the film and observe the world from the other side of the screen" (providing this book with its subtitle). But there's something more to this than meets the eye. It's the attitude, usually unspoken, of many of the very greatest artists. Their creations are everything, and there's no time - certainly no imaginative time - for anything much else. Shakespeare seems to have done little and traveled nowhere, while Mozart was so involved with music that his daily life reads like a sad, then a tragic, joke.
It's a big claim to make for Taiwan's most famous son, and it's not made in this book. But the point is that Lee is of that same, rare personality type, ambitious only for his work, and endlessly inhabiting a world alongside his characters - he lives, not in glamorous Hollywood, but in an unassuming New York suburb. And it's an understanding of the deep nature of her subject that makes Dilley's groundbreaking and comprehensive book such a rewarding read, and such a very fine achievement.
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