when he announced to his family he wanted to leave his home town and go to Taipei to study film."My father was a high school principal. He would have preferred I chose a more stable profession, but I had such a love of movies," recalls Lee.
From Taipei, Lee took an even more adventurous leap when he moved his wife and children to New York so he could continue his studies in America.
"My wife is a medical researcher, so she was able to get a job quickly in New York. For the first six years of our marriage, I was a house-husband.
"I stayed home, studied and cooked all the meals."
Between meals and household duties, Lee wrote two screenplays. The Wedding Banquet was a comedy about a gay Chinese man living in New York who must stage a marriage when his parents unexpectedly visit him. Pushing Hands was a bittersweet story of a Chinese family trying to adjust to a new life in America.
These films opened the doors for funding for Eat, Drink, Man Woman and Sense and Sensibility, both of which earned Lee Oscar nominations.
Lee describes his newest film The Ice Storm as a tragic story "of an extended family that gets stranded during a blizzard. It's about a lot of food and a lot of bad sex."
It took Lee almost a year to release The Ice Storm, which was made for a paltry $18 million.
"My editors and I went through 18 versions of the movie before we were satisfied.
"The actors gave me such incredible performances that I literally could have created six or seven different versions of this film."
To test the audience waters, Lee took The Ice Storm to the Cannes and New York film festivals, where it received rave reviews.
The Ice Storm is the story of two families in an affluent Connecticut town whose lives become intertwined.
Kevin Kline, the father of one family, is having an affair with Sigourney Weaver, the mother of the other family.
"The film is sad, funny and hopeful," says Lee. "But it is also uncompromising in its treatment of the sexual revolution that had America in its grips in the '70s."
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