Focus Features

Much as its title signals an unpredictable change of weather, The Ice Storm marks an abrupt shift in the creative environment shared by Ang Lee and James Schamus. Nor is it the first. After the two collaborated on Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman — with Lee as writer-director and Schamus as writer-producer — it seemed they had settled into a comfortable groove of making modestly scaled, enormously successful comedies about the emotional permutations of modern Taiwanese families. Then came 1995's Sense and Sensibility, a flying leap over to Jane Austen's England that also ushered Lee and Schamus into the realm of big-budget, star-powered moviemaking and serious Hollywood recognition: the film garnered seven Oscar nominations, winning one for Emma Thompson's screenplay.

The Ice Storm returns the team to their New York base (where Schamus also teaches film at Columbia University and helps direct the multifarious activities of Good Machine, the production company he runs with Ted Hope). Yet as much as it's a homecoming, the new film is also another departure. Adapted from Rick Moody's well-regarded 1994 novel, it's the first of Lee's films entirely scripted by Schamus. With a cast led by Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Joan Allen and Christina Ricci, it's the team's first encounter with big name American actors. And as a depiction of the unfettered sexual mores and corroding social conventions of the Nixon era, the film ventures a novel depiction of a familiar, yet oddly uncomfortable, zeitgeist: It's a backflip into a world of tacky clothes and even tackier behavior.

Set in suburban Connecticut in November, 1973, as a blast of arctic weather prepares to throttle the Northeast, the story makes acerbic fun of the Sexual Revolution's retrospective embarrassments; its adults make a nervous game of infidelity while their kids pursue erotic initiation as if its playfulness were a solemn duty. Nominally all this is phrased as comedy, yet the film aims for something far more complex and risky than the usual genre guidelines allow: Lee's extraordinarily nuanced direction and Schamus' probing delineations of character (his work captured the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes) combine to suggest the inevitably bitter flavor that comes with serious self-scrutiny, whether personal or collective. That sort of scrupulous thoughtfulness, however, remains a distinguishing characteristic of both Lee and Schamus — not only on-screen but even as they ponder their latest collaboration.

Christina Ricci in The Ice
Storm

Ang, what made you decide to make this film? You said you had some reservations about it.

Ang Lee: The Ice Storm is harsher in many ways [than my other films]. Darker. I've never tried that before. It might just be everyday life to some other director, but to me, I make movies that are very comfortable to watch. This film is a challenge.

It has a very tricky mix of tones.

James Schamus: We always say, what’s the risk, what’s the gain? How do we take [the audience] to a comedic brink, get them off guard, and push them into the tragedy without pissing them off. That’s high-risk filmmaking. We were walking in the border space between genres.

Ang, did you read the novel or James’ screenplay first?

Lee: I read the novel, and it really moved me. Especially toward the end when the train arrives and Paul Hood sees his family standing there. Another thing — I got to do an ice storm. It's my obsession. It's a very powerful metaphor, a parallel of what was going on with the family structure that particular year — lost innocence, Watergate. It was the year of "funny-looking," "tacky.”

Was it essential that the film be set in 1973? Did you consider setting it today?

Lee: I think the [film's] conflict is universal and immortal. But I think it's more sharp and heavy this way. You have no choice. [The period] sucks you in. It's a place that provides you emotional warmth and security and, at the same time, you try to liberate yourself from it and flee. Binding and liberating forces come back and forth. And [setting the film at] a changing time gives a feeling about this sort of Oriental philosophy — nothing stands still. You have to constantly change. There's nothing you can rely on because things will change.

Schamus: The Ice Storm is probably the most “period” period film I’ve been involved with. For me, the major dismay is, oh my God, I grew up in a period! I’m old! But, yeah, the fractured orbits in which these family members are moving are of that time.

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Much as its title signals an unpredictable change of weather, The Ice Storm marks an abrupt shift in the creative environment shared by Ang Lee and James Schamus. Nor is it the first. After the two collaborated on Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman — with Lee as writer-director and Schamus as writer-producer — it seemed they had settled into a comfortable groove of making modestly scaled, enormously successful comedies about the emotional permutations of modern Taiwanese families. Then came 1995's Sense and Sensibility, a flying leap over to Jane Austen's England that also ushered Lee and Schamus into the realm of big-budget, star-powered moviemaking and serious Hollywood recognition: the film garnered seven Oscar nominations, winning one for Emma Thompson's screenplay.

The Ice Storm returns the team to their New York base (where Schamus also teaches film at Columbia University and helps direct the multifarious activities of Good Machine, the production company he runs with Ted Hope). Yet as much as it's a homecoming, the new film is also another departure. Adapted from Rick Moody's well-regarded 1994 novel, it's the first of Lee's films entirely scripted by Schamus. With a cast led by Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Joan Allen and Christina Ricci, it's the team's first encounter with big name American actors. And as a depiction of the unfettered sexual mores and corroding social conventions of the Nixon era, the film ventures a novel depiction of a familiar, yet oddly uncomfortable, zeitgeist: It's a backflip into a world of tacky clothes and even tackier behavior.

Set in suburban Connecticut in November, 1973, as a blast of arctic weather prepares to throttle the Northeast, the story makes acerbic fun of the Sexual Revolution's retrospective embarrassments; its adults make a nervous game of infidelity while their kids pursue erotic initiation as if its playfulness were a solemn duty. Nominally all this is phrased as comedy, yet the film aims for something far more complex and risky than the usual genre guidelines allow: Lee's extraordinarily nuanced direction and Schamus' probing delineations of character (his work captured the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes) combine to suggest the inevitably bitter flavor that comes with serious self-scrutiny, whether personal or collective. That sort of scrupulous thoughtfulness, however, remains a distinguishing characteristic of both Lee and Schamus — not only on-screen but even as they ponder their latest collaboration.

Christina Ricci in The Ice
Storm

Ang, what made you decide to make this film? You said you had some reservations about it.

Ang Lee: The Ice Storm is harsher in many ways [than my other films]. Darker. I've never tried that before. It might just be everyday life to some other director, but to me, I make movies that are very comfortable to watch. This film is a challenge.

It has a very tricky mix of tones.

James Schamus: We always say, what’s the risk, what’s the gain? How do we take [the audience] to a comedic brink, get them off guard, and push them into the tragedy without pissing them off. That’s high-risk filmmaking. We were walking in the border space between genres.

Ang, did you read the novel or James’ screenplay first?

Lee: I read the novel, and it really moved me. Especially toward the end when the train arrives and Paul Hood sees his family standing there. Another thing — I got to do an ice storm. It's my obsession. It's a very powerful metaphor, a parallel of what was going on with the family structure that particular year — lost innocence, Watergate. It was the year of "funny-looking," "tacky.”

Was it essential that the film be set in 1973? Did you consider setting it today?

Lee: I think the [film's] conflict is universal and immortal. But I think it's more sharp and heavy this way. You have no choice. [The period] sucks you in. It's a place that provides you emotional warmth and security and, at the same time, you try to liberate yourself from it and flee. Binding and liberating forces come back and forth. And [setting the film at] a changing time gives a feeling about this sort of Oriental philosophy — nothing stands still. You have to constantly change. There's nothing you can rely on because things will change.

Schamus: The Ice Storm is probably the most “period” period film I’ve been involved with. For me, the major dismay is, oh my God, I grew up in a period! I’m old! But, yeah, the fractured orbits in which these family members are moving are of that time.

Sigourney Weaver cracks
the whip

The overthrow of Nixon — that was something really unusual in American politics. The President is our father and you’re not supposed to hurt our father.

Schamus: That’s absolutely right. [Watergate] did open the gates to a kind of Oedipal rage. But when we look at that period now, it triggers a different kind of rage having to do with the clothes!

What’s really frightening is that all this stuff is coming back in fashion again.

Schamus: Sigourney said it best — if you wore it the first time, you really shouldn’t wear it the second.

What were the main things that determined your visual approach to this? What did you go into thinking about in terms of the visual style?

Lee: Tacky was the essence. Something tacky is interesting. Something that worked against nature. Something man-made. And in terms of shooting, photorealism. Where people’s eyes are, the focus — they're not looking at each other. Dreamy, unfocused, very intense — that was the objective. Also, working with the snow. The way I treated the ice storm, with fast, deep reflections. It made it very transparent and liberating. [One] looks through reflective surfaces, but at the same time feels naked.

Someone said something interesting to me after the film, which was they thought you recreated the period more through emotions than through the outward ways people usually recreate the period.

Lee: I think that's more important. The emotion was why I wanted to make it.

There’s a great deal of anger in the film’s depiction of family relations.

Schamus: The film carries with it a certain clarity that is adolescent or pre-adolescent in terms of its reality — ideas of justice, retribution, morality, what’s fair. I hope the film says that we’re not endorsing [that adolescent view] but that we understand those feelings. There is an acceptance of anger without the film being a product of that anger. Not that that anger should be coopted or muted, but it should exist alongside other feelings and ideas. And that’s a more adult point of view.

Did you work with the actors much in terms of what that period was like? Your older actors would have had their own memories of that period.

Lee: On the contrary. The crew was about our age and I knew most of how to make this movie by interviewing people on the crew. I thought I was making a documentary; I listened to them talk about their teens. [The younger siblings in the film would now be] about my age or a little younger. I grew up with these kids so I identify [with them]. And now they’re their parent’s age. I learned about texture from them and about attitude, particularly. The attitude [of the era] is something you really have to grasp. You have to take lessons in a sense, build it, coach what is really right. How you represent yourself — it’s more than the costumes, what you take from attics. Today, if kids [rebel] against the parents it’s their job! Another thing today, kids and their parents, they’re certain about themselves. [Today’s kids] are more definite, more confident. But back then [this confidence] was just becoming [true], so you have to get them not so certain about what they’re saying in order to provide that attitude and make the period correct.

How was it working with the casts of these last two films?

Lee: It was very different. Somehow Americans were brought up more with movies. At least with this group, [Americans] were more comfortable with the camera, the way of looking when they’re being observed. They’re more natural and more comfortable. I think they’re more used to the idea of movie stars. British performers, it’s hard to get the camera around them or observe them in some obscure place where they feel all naked and uncomfortable. It’s weird acting. They choose what they want you to see. If they’re not in control, they’re nervous. Compared to the Americans, it’s harder to get the simple, innocent but moving moments from British actors. I always end up confusing them instead of convincing them to get it.

Ang Lee on the set of
The Ice Storm

Do you try to keep the actors a little bit uncomfortable, on the edge?

Lee: That’s important. If they’re comfortable doing a scene, it’s not right. It starts from the very beginning, from the first rehearsal. You say, “God, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever played.” Whatever you do is wrong. To keep a balance is a sort of Zen approach. Whatever you do is the thing you need to deconstruct.

You’ve made The Ice Storm at a time when the subject of families is not being addressed by American movies.

Schamus: I wouldn’t know. Having kids, I see so few of them.

Well, if you only see the ones you produce, you see a lot.

Schamus: I’ve seen The Little Mermaid about 5,000 times. Having been exposed ad nauseum to Disney films, you begin to realize that what passes for family entertainment is virulently Oedipal. Most Disney movies begin with the murder of one or more parent, whether it’s Bambi or The Lion King. To be a parent in a Disney movie is to be viewed through the scope of a very powerful viewfinder attached to some very powerful artillery!

How do you see the connections between the families in this film and the families in the Taiwanese films? One thing that struck me is that The Ice Storm takes place in a area that’s not dissimilar from the place where the guys in Pushing Hands live.

Lee: It’s different.

What’s the difference?

Lee: [New Canaan, Connecticut] is more advanced, more civilized. I don’t mean [in terms of] behavior, but the civilization is looking ahead. It’s more liberated.

It seems like the cultures of the two films are almost opposite in some ways. That the Chinese, the problems come from obsessive conformity and obedience to authority and tradition. Whereas in America, in this period especially, there are more problems associated with being rebellious and too liberated.

Lee: Exactly. What moved me was not “the ’60s.” It wasn’t the student movement. This [film depicts] the hangover of the ’60s. It finally sunk in to the quiet, middle class. The structure is shaking, the world’s collapsing.

Were you in Taiwan when all this was going on? Were you in high school at this time?

Lee: The first year [of high school] was a pivotal year for me. I studied to get into college to honor my father and mother. And I blew the college examination that year! My father was the principle of the high school. That was a big turning point for me. I got into the Academy of Arts. And from the first time I stood on stage, that was it. I knew what I wanted to do.

James, do you come from a John Cheever background?

Schamus: No, I grew up in L.A. When I was an English grad at Berkeley, reading Updike and Cheever was the equivalent of drinking dry martinis at the country club.

I want to ask the two of you about your working relationship. It’s unusual in the sense that James is both a writer and producer, and this is a long term thing. It’s not just one film. How does that relationship work.

Lee: Usually, when you read scripts they’re written for studio executives. They’re built like battleship to prove that the work doesn’t leave a lot of room for the filmmaker. But Jim doesn’t do that to me. What can you do cinematically that’s exciting? It’s that kind of relationship. It’s a lot of fun. I’m lucky. I’d probably make different movies without James. Even in the Chinese movies, he’ll give me another perspective.

James, what have you learned as a screenwriter from working with Ang?

Schamus: You have to think of screenwriting as writing for somebody else. I have to think of it as a job. If I have to write a screenplay to satisfy myself, it would be the biggest piece of trash. Luckily, my primary audience is Ang, not “the American people” or Peter Guber. I have an audience, and it’s a guy who knows what he’s up to.

Now, people want to know where a film is going to end up within the first five minutes. This film violates that in a major way.

Schamus: I’m pleased we could do that and keep people with us. We were taking that from movies of the ‘70s like the Paul Mazursky stuff, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. It will never make it into the auteurist pantheon but this is amazing stuff. Another true oddity: The Swimmer, with Burt Lancaster. He’s in his Speedos the whole movie!