Director decides to leave tragedy behind

Henry Goodman and Demetri Martin play father and son in Taking Woodstock. Photo / Supplied by Paramout

After a decade of heartbreak, Ang Lee felt the need to lighten up.

The eclectic Taiwanese-born, New York-based director had followed his Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain with Lust, Caution, his sexually explicit film set during the Japanese occupation of China which he found a harrowing experience. "It was pretty nerve-wracking, 10 times more scary than portraying American gay cowboys."

So for his next film, why not do a comedy, one of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll? "After the release of Lust, Caution, I was in an abyss. I'd done six tragedies in a row and I was looking to do something lighter and happier to give me a lift. So when Elliott Tiber's book came along I just lit up.

To Lee, Tiber's autobiographical Taking Woodstock, about his role in the 1969 event, sounded like the prequel to his 70s-set 1997 film The Ice Storm. Tiber was a guest on the same San Francisco television show where Lee was talking up Lust, Caution. Tiber gave him a copy of the book and 18 months later he was able to see a version of his life on the big screen.

As played by comedian Demetri Martin, Tiber, renamed Elliott Teichberg in the film, is the son of eccentric Jewish parents who run a ramshackle motel in the Catskills town of Bethel. Young Elliott usually organises an annual music event in the area and when Woodstock organiser, 24-year-old Michael Lang, is denied a permit, Tiber lets him to use his.

Nobody could have imagined the magnitude of the concert - 160,000 tickets were sold, half a million people attended, while another million couldn't get in - which would bring the counterculture of peace and love to mainstream America.

Ultimately it's a sweet trip of a movie, though we only get to see the concert and hear the music in the background. That was partly to keep the film's budget down, but it was also an artistic issue, Lee notes.

"The whole thing was about taking Woodstock to heart. To have a sense of mystery was the best idea."

Since Elliott is so delirious, he barely sees the concert. The whole event becomes an awakening for him personally as it was for society in general. "Looking back, Woodstock really means something for today," says Lee. "It planted the seed for many of the issues we are dealing with more seriously now. It was very spiritual."

Lee says he was anything but a drug-taking hippie during his youth in Taiwan. His father, a strong disciplinarian and high school principal, in fact cast a strong presence in Lee's Chinese movies, and the general repression of his characters harks back to his strict upbringing.

"I was a very docile child," he recalls. "My mind would often drift away to the fantasy of scenes in movies, but I wouldn't dare to talk about it. I hardly had any childhood, hardly did any sports, let alone entertainment or art. During the hippie years we all had shaved heads. It was also a regulation to wear uniforms, so there was no character, only group motivation.

"Maybe I never rebelled ... after I turned 40 I started making movies that sort of challenge the system or examine it. I try to observe things from a different angle."

LOWDOWN

Who: Director Ang Lee
Past films: Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), Ride with the Devil (1999), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), The Hire (2002), Hulk (2003), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Lust, Caution (2007)
Latest: Taking Woodstock
When and where: Opens at cinemas on Thursday