NEW YORK — “Yeah, I very much felt like a guinea pig,” said Ang Lee toward the end of his Directors Dialogue discussion with New York Film Festival director Kent Jones at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center amphitheater the day after the world premiere of his latest film, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” That offhand comment points to the visually experimental nature of his latest film: a psychological drama about the titular PTSD-stricken Iraq War veteran, shot at 120 frames per second and presented in that high frame rate as well as in 3D and 4K. That frame rate exceeds even the 48 frames per second Peter Jackson adopted for his ‘Hobbit’ trilogy, to put that technical bit into perspective. The result is an image that is hyper-real in ways not even Jackson perhaps even thought possible — something that, according to Lee in his introductory remarks before a midnight screening of the film on Friday night, was meant to approximate the way we all view the world around us every day.
With this and “Life Of Pi” — the latter his first time working in 3D — Lee seems to be entering a new phase in his career: one in which he’s expanding his eclecticism into the realm of digital technology, trying out new formats in telling stories. Whether he was successful in this case is an open question, with initial reviews very much mixed (our skeptical take is here). Nevertheless, ‘Billy Lynn’ dominated Lee’s discussion with Jones: the reason he chose to try the higher frame rate, the effect it had on his direction of actors, and the hopes he has for digital cinema in the future, among other topics.
On choosing to shoot ‘Billy Lynn’ at 120 frames per second
For Lee, he said the combination of working with 3D on “Life Of Pi” and then seeing both the ‘Hobbit’ movies and James Cameron’s 60 fps footage opened the floodgates. “I did my own tests at 60 frames, because at that time I was doing a boxing movie. I couldn’t see any boxing, but with a higher frame rate, you see the attention, you see the thoughts behind it, you see action — it just opens a strategy, it’s a lot smarter. And then I noticed the performances are different. 3D and 2D performances are different. When you raise the frame rate, the performances look shallower, more exaggerated. Everything started to fall apart; the movie world, I believe, started to fall apart.”
Lee said it took him about a year to understand the differences between 60 fps and 120 fps, which led him to the crucial question of whether to shoot ‘Billy Lynn’ in the already proven lower frame rate or take what he called a “leap of faith” with the untested higher one. The deciding factor turned out to be, quite simply, personal in nature: “I became a grandfather, and I said, ‘Fuck it.’”
READ MORE: ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’: What Worked & What Didn’t
On what drew Lee to this kind of material
Notwithstanding his interest in experimenting with the higher frame rate, Lee said he identified with Billy Lynn, comparing filmmaking to being a soldier in war to some degree, saying, “you have a bunch of soldiers, your comrades, and you try to survive, dodge the bullets.” Mostly, though, he just found himself drawn to the idea of exploring a soldier’s anguished, complex humanity, a subject that he became more fascinated by the more he talked to soldiers who shared “their traumatic experiences, how they come back home, how they feel, what it is like, everything’s heightened, how they deal with — not reality, but truth, of each other and the world.” He even talked to refugees from Iraq and Jordan, saying, “sometimes with both in one room, with the soldiers in another, just going through what they went through.”
Otherwise, though, he mildly chafed at members of the media asking him that kind of question at all. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he claimed. “I just do the thing…do what you have to do, and your comrades, you do it together, whatever makes things work.…People ask me all kinds of questions,” he went on. “What do you think about the war? Where do you see the future of Chinese cinema? What do I think about the war and the future of Chinese cinema? I think about how to make that scene work…I’m dealing with filmmaking. That’s my life.” These comments drew some of the biggest laughs from the audience.
On Lee’s vision of digital cinema’s potential
“Your eyes want information. It’s comforting when you get enough information. …When someone is telling you where to watch, that short focus, the camerawork, the montage, stuff like that — it’s good for storytelling, but there’s a limitation,” he said. “I think the new kind of digital cinema should be more inviting. …Make it more clear, more depth, and your eyes wander in there, you decide what you want to see. It’s more inviting, more respectful, more thoughtful. And I’m pretty sure in 3D — certainly in high frame rate — your mind acts a lot sharper. It’s harder to make believe. But me, I welcome the challenge.”
“I fluctuated frame rate and resolution, too,” he explained further. “I found each combination has a different…psychological mindset. For normal eyes, you could not tell a difference. It’s not so much manipulation. Rather, it is like suggesting a mindset that you should be experiencing. …But then, at times, I’m not putting any comments. I stage something, and you go in there and experience. I think there’s a lot of potential, new territory to explore.”
READ MORE: Retrospective: The Films Of Ang Lee
On choosing newcomer Joe Alwyn for the role of Billy Lynn
Upon being asked by an audience member what about Joe Alwyn attracted Lee to cast him in the central role of Billy Lynn, Lee opened his reply by joking, “He’s a good-looking dude, compelling. Usually when somebody hits me as my leading man, or becomes my avatar…you know, the leading man is usually the better-looking version of the director. I think I see myself in this guy somehow.”
On a more serious note, he continued: “There are kinds of talents, looks aside…[that are] like little Buddhas to me — like, something they already know and do well in a past life, you just reminded them of something they already know, it feels like that. The kid in ‘Life Of Pi’ gave me that feeling — he was never trained. And Joe was even better; he was trained at a top London school. And he has an all-American Texan boy look, more than most Texan boys. …Normally, people look at their performability — how much they can perform, they can do this and that. I don’t really care that much. I don’t think that’s as important as the willingness or the talent they can invest in the situation you pitch them. And Joe is one of those who can just stay there.”
READ MORE: 14 Must-See Films At The New York Film Festival
Finally, towards the end of the discussion, Lee — who, at the aforementioned midnight screening of ‘Billy Lynn,’ exuded insecurity about how people would receive this brand-new visual experience — said, “I would like to think I hit a home run, but that’s not going to happen, because it’s an overwhelming experience. They’re going to have a lot of questions, even resistance; it’s going to split this way and that way. That’s only natural. But I hope enough people start pondering that possibility, and I can only hope that my colleagues and fellow filmmakers, some of them see this and are willing to give it a try.”
We will all be surely keeping our eyes peeled as to whether the future of cinema lies in 120 fps or not. “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” opens on November 11th.