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VENICE - Oscar-winning director Lee Ang says shooting the explicit sex scenes in his new tragic melodrama, Lust, Caution, was harrowing - like taking a trip to hell.
He thought he was going insane and broke down in tears once on the set, he told Taiwanese reporters at the Venice Film Festival, where the movie is in competition.
The Taiwan-born Lee, who won a Best Director Oscar for Brokeback Mountain last year, said making movies, like cooking, had always been easy for him.
But directing actors Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Tang Wei in those sex scenes was difficult because 'I worried about how Chinese people would see it, and didn't know how to face my family, my children', he said.
Based on a short story by Chinese writer Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution is set in the 1940s, mostly in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.
Tang plays the heroine, Wang Jiazhi, who belongs to a university drama troupe plotting to assassinate a collaborator named Mr Yi, played by Leung.
Assigned to seduce him, she falls into an affair driven by both passion and suspicion.
So over 11 days on a closed set, with only the main camera and sound personnel present, Lee would talk through the physical and emotional content of each sex scene with the two actors.
In a New York Times interview published before the Venice premiere, he had said: 'It was hard for me to live in Eileen Chang's world. There are days I hated her for it. It's so sad, so tragic... this is the story of what killed love for her.'
The writer had a doomed romance with an older man publicly known as a traitor and her story, though inspired by an actual assassination plot in the 1930s, incorporated elements of her own life.
In Venice on Sunday, Lee said: 'Shooting the sex scenes left me on the verge of breaking down. The only thing that sustained me was the thought that I had to get the actors through this hell.'
On the day the usually repressed Lee lost control of his emotions and cried before the cast and crew, Leung had to hug and comfort him.
The actor, who was also at the interview with the Taiwanese press, said: 'I was worried that we couldn't continue shooting.'
The director can now heave a sigh of relief. When he showed his wife and two sons Lust, Caution, he got excellent reviews from them. They said he had gone a step further in film-making.
The movie has received the strictest NC-17 rating in the United States, which means viewers under the age of 17 are banned.
But noting that his US-born teenage son liked the film, the director said: 'This proves that there is no need for age-related ratings. A 14-year-old minor doesn't necessarily understand less than a 41-year-old.'
The other difficulty of the shoot, he said, was playing mentor to Tang, who had never acted in a film.
'Three months' coaching, five months' filming - I spent a full eight months on her. I've never put in so much effort on one person.'
It was not the same as coaching Zhang Ziyi, the then newbie who shot to stardom in his gongfu hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Explaining that Zhang was in a supporting role and Tang is in a leading role, he added: 'Zhang Ziyi was the one stealing the show. Tang Wei is the one shouldering the show.'
And he had hand-picked the classically beautiful woman for Lust, Caution, after all.
'I looked at more than 10,000 people. I also met Zhang Ziyi for a meal. But Tang Wei is Wang Jiazhi. It's very difficult to find somebody like this nowadays.'
stlife@sph.com.sg
Lust, Caution opens here next month.
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