Interview: Ang Lee, film director

ANG Lee looks out of place. The 55-year-old Oscar-winning director jumps to his feet when I enter the room, immediately on ceremony. He seems a bit baffled, like he's just been airlifted from his home in the New York suburbs – where he was probably happily deep-frying Chinese dumplings for his wife and two children – buttoned into an expensive suit and then plonked in this posh London hotel suite and instructed to talk about his latest film, Taking Woodstock.

Directors often describe the process of filmmaking as frustrating, exhausting, like hell-on-earth with Hollywood A-listers standing in for demons. Not Ang Lee. For him, it's the world beyond the set that's the trouble. He may have one of the most diverse oeuvres in Hollywood (think Sense And Sensibility, then Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, then Brokeback Mountain) but that doesn't mean he's any good at adapting to real life. "I guess I'm kind of clumsy at life," he says quietly. Lee says everything at murmur-level, though considering actors often comment on how silent he is on set, I'm lucky I've got him talking at all. "Making movies is comforting for me. I know what I'm doing. It seems to have a purpose. With life I need a script."

This is no doubt why I end up in the unexpected position of wanting to take care of this distinguished, silver-haired man who left Taiwan for New York on his own more than 25 years ago. "Making a movie is the easiest thing for me," he continues. "A small thing can be very difficult. I don't know how credit cards work but I can cook and I can make a movie. These are the two things I can do."

The way Lee approaches filmmaking – from the gut – is fascinating. In person, he comes across as a visionary: singular, occasionally incomprehensible, not quite of this world. "If you're talented, making films is almost like a mission," he says. "I feel like a medium, like the movie chose me to get to the audience. I'm like a slave to the project instead of its master."

The emotion he invests is what makes his greatest films so rigorously cinematic, sympathetic and full of heart. It's also why they cost him so much. He says making six tragedies in a row, culminating in the erotic Chinese espionage thriller Lust, Caution, took its toll. "I felt like if I kept going down that road I might get sick," he admits and then starts chuckling, though what he's about to say isn't funny. "It hurts your nerve. It's scary, uncomfortable. I might get depressed and I don't want to convey that to the audience."

That's why a gentle coming-of-age American comedy such as Taking Woodstock was a breath of fresh air and a rest from his demons. Taking Woodstock is Lee's psychedelic vision of the summer of 1969 and it's all bell-bottomed innocence and self-discovery on acid. It's very much about the peace-loving, mud-caked crowd rather than the legends up there on stage. "The misconception is that Woodstock is about the performer," he says. "To me that's the least important thing. It's the heart of wanting to go there, mingle with friends, get high."

Lee shows us Woodstock through the eyes of a fresh-faced local, Elliot Tiber, a young gay man played by rising comic Demetri Martin, who inadvertently helps bring about one of the defining moments in American 20th century culture, saving his parents' rundown motel in the process. It's an unconventional outsider perspective that has become Lee's stamp.

Taking Woodstock also marks the first time he allowed himself to enjoy making a film. "This movie is the natural me," he says, though he adds that he still didn't smile on set. He never does. "It's social satire, comic, warm of heart, about human feelings. It has a nice nature. After Woodstock, it's over and we're more cynical, smarter, more sober."

Then comes the dissolution and dysfunction of the American family, which Lee explored in 1994 with The Ice Storm.

He has always been drawn to telling outsiders' stories, whether sympathising with Annie Proulx's gay cowboys or Jane Austen's Dashwood sisters. Lee has just finished the first draft of his next project, an adaptation of Yann Martel's The Life Of Pi, and it's another story of an outsider "living in limbo". Of course Lee is the quintessential outsider himself, a foreigner wherever he goes. The only place he feels truly at home is in the director's seat. "When I make movies I'm the insider," he says. "That's where I belong."

Perhaps that's why Lee is so emotionally involved in his films. At times he actually looks pained when he talks about them, his kind, unlined face contorting into a grimace. Chinese films are the hardest of all for him. "Psychologically, when I do Chinese films it's closer to my personal experience," he says. "It's more painful. More gut-spilling. The most personal, intense relationship I had (with an actor] was with Lust, Caution. I got very close to the three leads and it was very painful. They all play a part of me and they end up killing each other." He winces, feeling it again.

Being on the outside makes him a better director: more truthful and attuned to detail. For Taking Woodstock Lee prepared a hippy handbook for the extras and individual packs of films and books for the lead actors. For the vast crowd scenes he was known to order extras 300 yards away to shift their positions slightly to compose the perfect shot. "The first thing the outsider sees is the reality," he says. "But also the more you're on the outside, the better it looks on the inside. It's like Brokeback Mountain. Out there is pure love but you can never really get there. Or you were there, you never knew it, and now you can't get back. The idea is always the most beautiful thing. It would be fair to say that people want to live in the places I create."

He has always had a "floating" identity. Lee grew up in Taiwan but his parents are from mainland China. His father fled from the People's Republic after Lee's paternal grandparents were executed during the Cultural Revolution. Lee studied acting in Taipei against his strict father's wishes and left for New York when he was 24. "I've lived in the States for so long and my way of making movies is the American way," he says. "And growing up in Taiwan I was never a native because my parents came from China. Now when I go back to China I'm considered Taiwanese. The true identity I have – the classic Chinese way – is kind of fictional too because it has disappeared."

His father never supported his career choice and only once encouraged him to make a film. "After The Hulk I wanted to retire," Lee says. "I was wrecked. I couldn't take it any more. He said, 'you're only 49, it's a bad example for your kid. Get on with it.'" That film, which Lee describes as his salvation, ended up being Brokeback Mountain, his masterpiece – though his father never lived to see him win the Best Director Oscar for it. "He watched my films but never said a word about them," he says. "My first few movies… those father figures were him. The dialogue I wrote was from his mouth. But still he didn't say anything."

When Lee isn't making a film, he hibernates, waiting for the next acorn of an idea to drop. Between projects, he describes himself as "half-dead", which doesn't sound like much fun for his wife, a microbiologist, and their children. "I think I give the best of my life to actors and the film I'm making," he says. "Not to my family, unfortunately."

He isn't interested in cultivating friendships with actors. Asked what he remembers most about working with the late Heath Ledger on Brokeback Mountain, he says: "I like to remember him as he was on screen. Life – how we worked on a scene, friendship, conflict – is insignificant compared to the character he portrayed. I want to remember him as an artist, not a person."

Lee has no truck with Hollywood either. He would rather hang out in his wife's chicken coop at home in Larchmont, New York, where they have lived in the same modest house for years. Even in the industry he loves so much, he prefers to watch from the periphery, through the lens. "I guess ultimately the glitzy stuff doesn't interest me," he says. "I feel uncomfortable in the spotlight. I'm a shy person and I don't like to socialise much. And frankly what are parties compared to what I do? Nothing is as fun as making movies."

Taking Woodstock is on general release from Friday www.takingwoodstock.com

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 08/11/09