Ang Lee talked to the Honolulu Star Bulletin about adapting Brokeback Mountain, which is showing this week at the 25th Hawaii International Film Festival:
“It’s really just a great American love story. I do not feel so courageous for doing it. Maybe it seems like it would take some courage, but once you’re involved in it and read it and believe in it, once you get in that zone, it’s a lovely, very benign love story, a sad, tragic, poignant, realistic western. The film is about feelings of love and loneliness that anyone can relate to. If you open yourself to the story, you will discover that it’s not provocative, or a comedy or a parody or ‘Blazing Saddles.’ I think some will say how dare us to be serious about this.”
He answers whether he thinks audiences will buy into a gay love story in the context of the masculine western genre:
“Love is love, essentially. We put limitations on it that keep us in a comfort zone. This is the kind of connection people dream about making with another human being. Everybody has a Brokeback. If we’re lucky, we get to go there. I believe this is very possible, that it is true, that it’s human. In doing art you must borrow from some experience. It is the key for acting, and if you don’t believe in the character, who will? Whether the audience is the gay community or the straight world, you must invest that kind of belief.”
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