Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (
Crouching Tiger, released by Sony Pictures Classics, was the biggest winner, capturing the award for best picture, best director for Ang Lee (
PHOTO: REUTERS
Zhang had barely arrived from Las Vegas, where she is shooting Jacky Chan's (
PHOTO: CHENG, CHIEH-WEN, LIBERTY TIMES
She said jokingly to Taiwanese reporters: "Jacky said Ang Lee got the Golden Globe Awards just because he wore a Chinese style outfit from Jacky's store." The good luck seems to have rubbed off on Zhang.
Speaking in Chinese in her acceptance speech, Zhang said: "I'm learning to be independent, to face challenges and learn more about working with people. I would really like to thank Ang Lee who taught me many lessons that will be valuable for my life and career. I hope to work with him again," she said.
PHOTO: AFP
Zhang won the award for her role as the mischievous Jen in Crouching Tiger.
Her role also won over American fans, many of whom waited for her outside the event, calling her character's name "Jen" when she appeared.
Lee, speaking from a comfortable easy chair on stage at the event with his fellow nominees, frequently had the audience bursting into laughter with his frank comments on writers, actors and all sides of the industry.
Lee's Crouching Tiger has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best picture and best director, and is widely considered the favorite for the foreign-language award.
Lee said that when he and his longtime collaborator, writer/producer James Schamus, write, they start with the final scene and consider how they want the audience to feel when they leave the theater. Then, he said, "we structure the film backwards."
But overall the writing can be fairly streamlined, he said. For the fight scenes in Crouching Tiger, a fantasy martial arts film, Schamus simply wrote, "They fight."
Lee said he had wanted to do a film like Crouching Tiger since childhood.
"I wanted to do justice to this pulp fiction genre," he said. "Everyone was trying to fulfill a childhood fantasy ... to pursue a China that is fading away in our heads," he said, in a nod to the many members of the cast and crew who are Chinese and who have emigrated to the West.
On actors, Lee said he had a love-hate relationship with them. Working with actors could be "like a mountain I have to climb through," he said. "There are millions of psychological battles."
At a later event Lee said: "I think the audience is getting cynical today [and longing for] old fashioned filmmaking, that innocence."
"I think maybe Hollywood has failed to do that ... they don't always provide the most fresh and exciting and unpredictable movies that give people a thrill," he said.
Smartly dressed in a tailored navy Mao suit and impossibly good-natured after a day of media appearances, Lee said he believed this movie harnessed the creative power of Hong Kong filmmaking, still the dominant force in martial arts film.
"You feel the production power which the top of Hong Kong film-makers do obtain with the proper... effort and knowledge. Somehow I think it hits that core of emotion... the naivete of going to a movie, enjoying an emotional tour, crying and laughing and enjoying the action," he said.
"Meanwhile, I think that intellectually, they have something to chew on," he said.
Crouching Tiger is the favorite at least for the foreign language award and was given a boost in the best director category earlier this month when the Directors' Guild honored his "outstanding directorial achievement in feature film," one of the prestige stops on the road to the Academy Awards.
If the movie wins best picture it will be the first subtitled film ever to do so. If it wins foreign-language film it will be the first Asian film to be so honored although Japan won three "honorary" awards in the 1950s.
It is already the first foreign-language film to make more than US$100 million at the North American box office.
It's not surprising, then, that hopes have risen that the film will usher in a new era of critical and commercial success for Asian film in the US market.
A list of the cast and crew read like a map of the Chinese diaspora, with Zhang from China, love interest Chang Chen (
At Saturday's beachfront "Indie" awards, Lee told reporters he will do another film in China, "but not anytime soon, it's so exhausting."
"I'm thinking of doing something like an American movie for a change ... and then going back. I will always go back."
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