Clearly, Woodstock was more than a festival. For the more than 500,000 concertgoers who made the trip to that dairy farm in upstate New York 40 years ago, it was a three-day invocation that summoned up music as a shackle-busting experience, an uncorking of generational exuberance, aided along by sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.
Director Ang Lee’s experience with the event, however, was much more subdued but transformative nonetheless. It came via an old black-and-white TV. He was a 14-year-old middle schooler in Taiwan, studying docilely and relentlessly for his high school entrance exam. Then he caught a brief glimpse of the muddy Bacchanalia in New York.
“It was an unsettling image,” he says. “Taiwan was in the middle of the Cold War, and America was its lone protector against the engulfment of mainland Chinese.” He remembers feeling unsettled by the images, thinking: “If America is not the good guy and the policeman, what will become of us?”
And yet that glimpse of Woodstock was intoxicating. “Guys in big hair playing guitars. … You just have to worship them,” says Lee, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Still, the name of his new movie, “Taking Woodstock,” which opened in wide release Friday, can’t be translated into his native Chinese. If it gets to China, it’s going to be called “The Disturbance of Woodstock,” the 54-year-old director explains, or perhaps “The Woodstock Event.”
Lee seems amused at the idea of writhing, acid-tripping kids being reduced, at least linguistically, to a mere “disturbance.”
In his films, he returns obsessively to characters grappling — or bursting through — societal dictates. They include Heath Ledger’s laconic cowboy who faces homosexual desire in “Brokeback Mountain” and Wei Tang’s spy heroine of “Lust, Caution,” who becomes undone by sexual passion for the sadistic secret police official she’s trying to help assassinate.
With “Taking Woodstock” Lee returns to the light comedic vein of his early Chinese movies. It is adapted from the real-life story of Elliot Tiber (played by Demetri Martin), a then-closeted gay man who enticed the promoters of Woodstock to set up their music festival at Max Yasgur’s dairy farm and used his parents’ crumbling, about-to-be-foreclosed Catskills resort next door as their business headquarters. In other words, this isn’t a movie about Jimi, Janis and the Who rocking out, but one person’s experience of the Aquarian explosion.
Lee met Tiber in the green room of a San Francisco TV station as he was promoting “Lust, Caution.” Tiber thrust his autobiography into Lee’s hands and pitched it as a kind of bookend to “The Ice Storm,” Lee’s film about suburbanites wrestling with the hangover of the 1960s. That piqued Lee’s interest enough for him to show the book to Focus Features Chairman James Schamus. “It seems like it’s random occurrence, but that randomness happens all the time,” Lee says. “I chose to do it, and I connect with the material. I think that’s fate.”
Few directors have had as varied a career as Lee, who’s able to shift genres with dispassionate ease. Making films, with their beautiful three-act structures, is how he’s learned to make sense of the messiness and illusions of history, and of his own existence that has straddled cultures and continents.
He recalls coming to the United States to study, first at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and eventually attending NYU film school. It was there that he delved into communist books from China that were banned in his native Taiwan. “That turned my whole belief system upside down, and I crawled out, in a sense, lost. The whole establishment of Taiwan is based on the illusion that we’ll go back and rightfully recover our homeland, and all of that was a lie. That had a big impact on me.”
Film gave him a home. “Making those movies, somehow I feel more belonging. Like the story belonged to me, and I belonged to the world.”
His Chinese films tend to be more personal. This said, when forming “Taking Woodstock,” Lee fleshed out the character of Elliot with aspects of himself. “Some of the leading characters at some point become you,” Lee says. “I think Elliot has a lot of me. I am somewhat shy and very reluctant to go outward. I’m not cool,” or, he begins to laugh, “hip.”
Of course, the shy, dutiful Elliot — with a certain amount of determination and chutzpah — managed to become an integral part in one of the seismic cultural events of the era. The pull of the unknown, of psychic liberation, tugs frequently on Lee’s characters, just as it does for the director himself.
