I'm quite lazy.
— Ang Lee
The woman's perspective is like the dark side of the moon: it always exists, but it is never exposed, at least not in my culture.
I had to test a new terror in myself.
I don't know if I make the best gay films.
Summer blockbusters are very expensive to make. They have things that have to be expensive, such as 600 effects shots or CG characters that have to go a certain way, or a film design that is different but expensive.
Economically, it's more expensive to make movies. I hope digital movies change that.
I grew up pretty much prevented from knowing anything from Communist China except that they were the bad guys that stole our country.
Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.
You can get rich or famous by doing the same thing.
Sensitivity and money are like parallel lines. They don't meet.
Making movies is a way of understanding myself and the world.
Fighting for identity is something that is very much in my life.
For six years, from 1985 to 1991, I felt pretty weak and useless.
When I'm not working, I get very down, but when I am working, I get very immersed in it.
It's not a pleasure torturing actors, although some of them enjoy it.
I have a lot of repression. So repression is what I make movies about.
I'm a drifter and an outsider. There's not one single environment I can totally belong to.
I'm not macho, I'm not a Mel Gibson sort of person.
Americans are hidden dragons to me.
Kids don't even read comic books anymore. They've got more important things to do - like video games.
Everyone in the gay community doesn't think alike.
Film study was considered disgraceful by my father.
When I started out, nobody gave me scripts, so I had to write.
I like to think I'm un-categorisable.
I'm still a novice student.
I don't have incredible knowledge about films or of filmmaking history; I'm not that kind of person.
I don't have a superpower.
I find it hard to deliver straightforward things.
When something possesses me, I go ahead and do it.
Many times when you make a movie, it feels like your biggest mistake. But even if a film isn't a hit, you shouldn't view it as a mistake.
I think a lot of people do big movies not because they are talented artists but because they can function in the circumstances.
What is really a stretch to me is to make quick decisions.
Sometimes, you have to get angry to get things done.
I'm just a pretty regular dad.
In my culture, there's a tradition that when you're in an overwhelming situation and you don't know what to do, you put yourself in a woman's shoes.
I had to find my way of translating the excitement you get when you're reading comic books to the big screen.
I think great romance needs great obstacles and textures.
The fear factor actually brings the genuineness.
My hometown was one of the major U.S. Air Force bases.
I don't care about writing really.
After making several tragic movies in a row, I was looking to do a comedy, and one without cynicism.
The thing we call critics are not really reviewers, they are not really critics. They don't have the discipline to write what we would term as critique - it's really just reviewers. They have a common man kind of taste. If you watch them overall, they are not different from the box-office. That's my view.
I'm actually living my life with the material I choose to work with.
You become the movie you are making.
I think that at heart I am an old-fashioned Chinese, really I am.
I'm not a master of films, I'm rather a slave.
Thinking back to those earlier days, I felt I was weak when I wasn't making movies, and then when I was, I thought I was weak as a family member.
Some actors give you what you want. Some you have to make do what you want.
I'm aware of what's missing from my life.
My cultural roots are something illusive.
