The Right Words at the Right Time by Marlo Thomas & Friends

Author:Marlo Thomas & Friends
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2002-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ang Lee

Director

My words are not from anybody’s mouth. My words are the title of a book: Sense and Sensibility.

I became aware of these words for the first time when I was given the book by a producer, Lindsay Doran, who was making it into a film. She had a script written by Emma Thompson, and she was thinking of me as the right person to direct it.

Until that time, I had made no English-language films. I had just done three Chinese-language films. They were family dramas— because basically I am a domestic person—about the tensions between the world of social obligations and the world of personal freedom. It was the world I grew up in, a society where there was always a struggle between the rigid Chinese classic traditions and the liberal social ideas (particularly regarding women) that came when the Communists took over China. This great clash of traditions can be troubling. And now, it is even more so because China is moving toward the West and changing even more.

So I was thinking about how you maintain your own culture during that kind of clash of traditions. This is not life, but the sub-current of life. It is what forms life’s texture in my country and for people everywhere as well. So I was making films about this clash and some aspect of this idea was present in all the work I was doing. But the strange thing was that, at that time, I could not say exactly what my work was about. Perhaps I was too close to the work, but I could not explain the theme that now seems so clear, even to myself.

But suddenly, just reading the title Sense and Sensibility, I realized what I had been doing. I was sorting out the difference between the way we act because we are told to by society and the way we act because we want to. I realized that my work was about the tug-of-war between personal desires and cultural obligations. So that was quite enlightening to me, and it clarified the essence of my struggle.

The words of this English lady gave me another important understanding. They showed me that in some ways “sense” and “sensibility” are the two ways I have of seeing the world. To an Asian director like me the thing that stood out about them was that they are words that express a duality. Most people, I think, know of the yin and yang that is so much a part of Eastern life. Jane Austen’s words showed me that in the West you also see duality. And that tells me that—East or West—duality is essential to life. It is the source of our struggling. It is deep in our nature. This cleared up a lot of things for me.

At first I thought of the word “sense” as meaning rationality and the word “sensibility” as meaning emotion. Those are very different concepts. Yet when I was making the film Sense and Sensibility, I saw that the words describe far more than that.

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