For Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee, the American West has never been a genre exercise; it’s never just scenery. “Ride with the Devil” took him into the Civil War borderlands; “Brokeback Mountain” turned Wyoming into a place of longing, secrecy, and emotional damage; and now “Gold Mountain” will bring him back to the West from a new perspective.
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Lee’s next film has begun production in Northern California, with Chedi Chang, Sophia Xu, Yao, Zine Tseng, and Owen Teague set to star in the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s Gold Rush-era Western. The film adapts C. Pam Zhang’s acclaimed debut novel “How Much of These Hills Is Gold.” The drama follows two newly orphaned Chinese immigrant children as they cross a brutal California frontier to bury their father and free themselves from their past.
That premise gives Lee a different kind of Western: not the usual myth of guns, land, and self-invention, but a story of immigration, grief, family secrets, and survival in a country that often wrote people like its protagonists out of the legend. Zhang’s novel, published in 2020, was a national bestseller, longlisted for the Booker Prize, named a notable book by The New York Times and The Washington Post, and included among Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year.
“Gold Mountain” is adapted by Chang-rae Lee, the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of “Native Speaker,” “A Gesture Life,” and “Aloft.” The project is produced by Anthony Lee, Anthony Bregman, and Peter Cron of Likely Story, Simon Cornwell and Stephen Cornwell of The Ink Factory, and Gregory Goodman. David Lee serves as co-producer.
The cast features a mix of emerging and newly visible talent. Chang has appeared in “Interior Chinatown” and “The Resident”; Xu’s credits include “Beef,” “Based on a True Story,” and “Mortal Kombat II”; Tseng broke through as young Ye Wenjie in “3 Body Problem” and is also part of Prime Video’s upcoming “Young Sherlock”; and Teague recently led “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” after earlier turns in “It,” “It: Chapter Two,” and “Eileen.”
Lee has also assembled a serious craft team for the film. Joshua James Richards, the Oscar-winning cinematographer of “Nomadland,” is shooting the picture. At the same time, Jack Fisk—whose career includes work with Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Martin Scorsese—is a production designer. Mychael Danna, who won an Oscar for Lee’s “Life of Pi,” will compose the score after previously collaborating with the filmmaker on “The Ice Storm,” “Ride with the Devil,” “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” and “Life of Pi.” Tim Squyres, one of Lee’s longtime editors, is also aboard, with Avy Kaufman handling casting.
“Gold Mountain” also marks Lee’s first narrative feature since 2019’s “Gemini Man,” the Will Smith-led sci-fi film whose high-frame-rate experimentation largely dominated the conversation around it. This one, at least on paper, brings Lee back to a mode closer to his strongest work: characters caught between who they are, what they have lost, and what a larger world will allow them to become.
A release date for “Gold Mountain” has not been announced. [Deadline]
