postPerspective Update

Director Ang Lee discusses
Gemini Man and a digital clone
By Iain Blair

Ang Lee has always pushed the boundaries in cinema, both technically and creatively. The film Life of Pi, which he directed and produced, won four Oscars: Best Direction, Best Visual Effects, Best Cinematography and Best Original Score.

Lee’s Brokeback Mountain
won three Academy Awards, including Best Direction, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was nominated for 10 Oscars and won four, including Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score and Best Art Direction/Set Decoration.

His latest, Paramount’s Gemini Man, is another innovative film, this time disguised as an action-thriller. It stars Will Smith in two roles — first, as Henry Brogan, a former Special Forces sniper-turned-assassin for a clandestine government organization; and second (with the assistance of ground-breaking visual effects) as “Junior,” a cloned younger version of himself with peerless fighting skills who is suddenly targeting him in a global chase. The chase takes them from the estuaries of Georgia to the streets of Cartagena and Budapest.

I recently talked to Lee — whose directing credits include Taking Woodstock, Hulk, Ride With the Devil, The Ice Storm and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk — about making the film, which has already generated a lot of awards talk about its cutting-edge technology, the workflow and his love of editing and post.

Hollywood’s been trying to make this for over two decades now, but the technology just wasn’t there before. Now it’s finally here.
It was such a great idea, if you can visualize it. When I was first approached about it by Jerry Bruckheimer and David Ellison, they said we need a movie star who’s been around a long time to play Henry, and it’s an action-thriller. He’s being chased by a clone of himself and I thought the whole clone idea was so fascinating. I think if you saw a young clone version of yourself, you wouldn’t see yourself as special anymore. It would be, “What am I?” That also brought up themes like nature versus nurture and how different two people with the same genes can be. Then the whole idea of what makes us human? So there was a lot going on, a lot of great ideas that intrigued me. How does aging work and affect you? How would you feel meeting a younger version of yourself? I knew right away it had to be a digital clone.