The celebrated film-maker’s new film pits Will Smith against his much-younger clone – a reverie on the ageing of both the star and the director
You haven’t seen nerves until you’ve met Ang Lee on the day his new film receives its world premiere. This is Gemini Man, a frantic thriller in which Will Smith plays an assassin hunted by his own younger clone; where there’s a Will, there’s another Will, you might say. Parts of the picture were shot in Budapest, and it is here that the 64-year-old film-maker shuffles into a hotel suite overlooking the Danube. “Everything feels harder than you can imagine right now,” he sighs, sinking into an armchair. He picks up a glass from the table in front of him, then puts it down again. “Even lifting that was hard.”
He doesn’t carry himself today like one of the most celebrated film-makers of all time, a man who has never won a major award without going on to make it part of a matching pair. He has twice beaten Steven Spielberg to the best director Oscar, first for his gay love story Brokeback Mountain and then for the CGI fantasy Life of Pi; receiving the prize for the latter, he gave thanks to “the movie god”. He also has two
Golden Globes and two Baftas – for Brokeback and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, his ground-breaking, treetop-scaling martial arts adventure. His movies have twice scooped the top prize at
Berlin (for his Taiwanese-American
comedy of manners The Wedding Banquet and his English-language breakthrough Sense and Sensibility) and Venice (Brokeback and the erotic thriller Lust, Caution).