Oscar-winning Taiwanese director Ang Lee (李安) expressed his appreciation to the nation’s film fans for their support for his 3D box office hit Life of Pi (少年PI的奇幻漂流) on his return to Taiwan yesterday.
“I’m very thankful to audiences in Taiwan,” Lee said at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport.
However he urged movie fans to not forget the excellent cast of the film.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
Lee is scheduled to meet the press and fans at Hsin-Hsin Showtime Cinema in Taipei today. The director is in Taiwan after wrapping up a visit to Japan to promote the film, which was honored for Best Original Score at the 70th Golden Globe Awards on Sunday
The movie has received 11 nominations, including for Best Director and Best Picture, for the 85th Academy Awards to be presented on Feb. 24. The only film to garner more nominations was Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln with 12.
Asked about the film’s Academy Award prospects during a news conference in Tokyo on Thursday, Lee said he was not afraid of the competition with Lincoln and did not feel any pressure.
“What worries me more is that if I win, I will have to give a speech on stage,” he joked.
Lee said it was a great honor for Life of Pi to receive 11 nominations, whether it wins the awards or not. However, he said it was “a pity” that the movie did not receive any nominations in the acting categories, despite fine performances by its cast.
Adapted from Canadian novelist Yann Martel’s 2002 Man Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name, Life of Pi explores faith through the story of a shipwrecked Indian boy adrift on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.
The movie has emerged as the highest grossing film of Lee’s career, raking in more than US$450 million at box offices worldwide as of Jan. 11.
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
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