Three years ago today, on October 18, 2019, Ang Lee's first 120-frame 4K3D film "Twin Killers" was released in the mainland.
This work that is technologically ahead of the times has not received a good market response, and word of mouth is polarized.
Since then, Ang Lee has almost disappeared from the public eye and no new work has been released.
So, since that "defeat", what has Ang Lee been doing in the past three years?
Returning to "Twin Killers", Ang Lee's ambitious combination of the high frame rate he tried with the sci-fi action genre is, in theory, an industry revolution like "Avatar", but the results are not satisfactory.
Douban 6.8, IMDb is only 5.8 points, and the same failure as word of mouth is the box office (230 million yuan in the mainland and only 170 million US dollars in the world).
This will naturally have a deep impact on Ang Lee, who does not belong to the "can make a lot of money" route.
"Twin Killers" cost more than $100 million to produce
Today, when we look back at this work, different audiences will still give completely different evaluations.
From a technical point of view, the completely revolutionary visual effect brought by the high frame rate of 120 frames + 4K+3D is beyond doubt.
Audiences who chose to watch the film on the big screen may still recall this unique experience, and the technical experiments that Ang Lee has insisted on from "Billy Lynn's Halftime Battle" to "Twin Killers" have indeed brought a visual "new movie".
But at that time, or even now, there were very few theaters that could screen such a high-standard film, and many audiences did not have the opportunity to experience this film that belongs exclusively to the big screen;
On the other hand, "Twin Killers" put aside technological breakthroughs, and at the story level, it is an old and decent traditional genre film, which is indeed disappointing for fans of Ang Lee who have high expectations.
In that sense, Twin Killers failed.
And it just so happened that the epidemic broke out a few months after the release of the film, and many filmmakers' new projects also came to a standstill.
Of course, there is also Ang Lee.
In a 2021 interview, Lee said that this was the longest period he had spent in Taiwan in several years, and he also spent time with his family and friends.
Li Ang and Zhu Yanping visited Director Li Xing
In addition, the time when you can see Ang Lee the most in recent years may be the film festival. The two Golden Horse Film Festivals after the epidemic were exactly what Ang Lee insisted on holding before he stepped down as chairman;
At the 2020 Berlin Film Festival, he talked with Hirokazu Kore-eda and held master classes at the Beijing International Film Festival;
In 2021, Ang Lee also received the BAFTA Lifetime Achievement Award.
Ang Lee and Hirokazu Kore-eda
Coupled with the announcement of his son Li Chun's marriage this year, for Li An, who is a father, watching his son start a family is also a matter of mind.
Unlike Ang Lee's return to daily life in life, Ang Lee on social media has become "hot" in another way -
Various screenshots of documentaries and interviews that year were reprocessed into various memes by netizens, and the widely circulated sentence "I can't understand, but I'm shocked" was even selected as one of the "Top Ten Internet Terms of 2021".
From the first-line celebrity director to the emoji director, from time to time to appear at the baseball stadium to watch games or party with friends, Li Ang, who looks relaxed and idle, is it really as he said, to consider retirement?
Not necessarily.
There are probably fans who remember that Ang Lee had planned to try high-frame rate shooting experiments again after "Twin Killers", and the next new film on the schedule was "The Battle of Manila".
This work actually had preparatory action as early as "Young Pi's Fantasy Drift", but at that time, Ang Lee chose to start "Billy Lynn's Halftime Event" and "Twin Killers" to try new shooting techniques, and waited until the experience and timing were ripe before filming "The Battle of Manila".
But who knew that the market pressure and sudden outbreak of the epidemic caused by the box office failure of two high-frame rate films disrupted Ang Lee's entire plan.
In an interview with reporters this year, Ang Lee admitted that "The Battle of Manila" is still "waiting for the east wind", and the lack of money has also become the biggest dilemma for the Oscar for best director.
After stopping for three years, for Chen Kexin, he can "make up" by filming a few more works after that.
For Ang Lee, it wasn't that easy. Because the works he wants to do can't be "redeemed" by turning to the streaming media that is now in the limelight like other directors.
At the same time, the combination of 120 frames + 4K + 3D is still far beyond the requirements of the times and the audience's viewing habits, not only most people have doubts about this attempt, but a large number of theaters and theaters have no motivation to update equipment.
The challenge for Ang Lee is not only to make a recognized new work, but also to single-handedly change the viewing habits that have existed for a hundred years.
For example, the movie is 24 frames, and the blur effect and graininess brought by 24 frames is the "film sense", and even in the digital age, we still have to deliberately imitate and create this look.
It is precisely this that Ang Lee is most unconvinced, in his opinion, film has the charm of film, and digital technology should also find its own way.
Still in the works, The Battle for Manila will focus on the battle of the century between a generation of boxing champions Ali and Joe Fraser.
The sharp images that come with high frame rates, the presence of handheld photography, and the intensity of boxing may make this new film better than Twin Killers in terms of presenting the potential of new technology.
But the question remains, can Ang Lee still raise money to make this work, which is likely to fail at the box office again?
At that time, the global high box office of "Avatar" forced theaters to update equipment, if Ang Lee wants to make more people feel the value of high frame rate, then it is really necessary to come up with a work that is sufficiently market-driven.
Ang Lee, who is nearly 70 years old, said that he has wanted to retire since "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", but he has still been shooting new films around the world one after another in the past two decades.
Whether his new imaging experiment will succeed this time, we don't know.
After these three long and struggling years, we have also seen countless filmmakers struggling to get back on the right track of creation and expression.
It is expected that Ang Lee can continue to move towards the unknown field he longs to enter, and also look forward to his next work being seen by more audiences on the screen.
Note: Some of the pictures in this article are from Douban and the Internet, if there is infringement, please contact us.