Interview

Taking Woodstock is not a movie about music. Director Ang Lee is very clear on that. There is no vintage footage of Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, or Jimi Hendrix playing to a sea of mindzonked hippies. What Lee’s latest film offers instead is an exuberant psychedelic comedy about a young man who, in trying to save his parents’ upstate New York motel, ends up hitting on a scheme that results in a threeday music festival so iconic that even those of us born years after 1969 still feel ashamed to have missed. Taking Woodstock, which stars Demetri Martin as the entrepreneurial son and a ragtag ensemble cast that includes Emile Hirsch as a shellshocked Vietnam veteran and Liev Schrieber as a guntoting drag queen, might seem like rather light fare for the Taiwanese director known for intense dramas like The Ice Storm (1997) and Brokeback Mountain (2005). But Lee proves as agile in a muddy pasture as he is on dangerous suburban ice or homoerotic western horseback. What’s really impressive is that a man who seems haunted by his own Chinese family traditions has been able to capture the nightmares and dreams of American culture like no director since Robert Altman. Schrieber talks to the master filmmaker about how and why he has been able to produce such haunting movies—and why Woodstock means a lot more to the world than simply a rather vivid acid flashback.

Watch Taking Woodstock trailer:

LIEV SCHREIBER: I heard Cannes went well.

ANG LEE: Yes, people around the world seem to be enjoying the film. Except some Americans feel they should see the actual stage. We use the title Taking Woodstock, so they think they’re going to see Janis Joplin and all that. They expect a documentary. So we really have to work to tell people that this is not a concert movie.

SCHREIBER: My friends who were at Cannes saw the film, and they said it was very well received.

LEE: There was applause after your first scene. The jokes come so fast, I figured the audience couldn’t catch all of them. But when you say your last line, they get a chance to applaud and laugh. That was the highlight of the film.

SCHREIBER: There’s really nothing as amusing as a hopelessly unattractive, 225-pound drag queen, is there? [both laugh] Velma was a Korean War vet, and I’ve been thinking about a conversation you and I had, I think during the second week of filming, about the significance of Korea and its relationship to Woodstock as an American event. With all of the saberrattling that’s been going on in North Korea recently, I remembered having that conversation with you about the political and cultural significance of the Korean War, which really is an undercovered war.

LEE: To me, there are two things. When I grew up, in Taiwan, the Korean War was seen as a good war, where America protected Asia. It was sort of an extension of World War II. And it was, of course, the peak of the Cold War. People in Taiwan were generally proAmerican. The Korean War made Japan. And then the Vietnam War made Taiwan. There is some truth to that. So when this hippie thing started to come up, I remember admiring the Americans. They were far out. The music was brilliant. It was pretty cool. On the other hand, you feel this insecurity—like any conservative view—that if America decided to go the other way, what would happen to us? Where is the protection, the foundation? So there is some of that tension in the film. And it’s great because your character was also a bridge between the members of that antiestablishment generation, and those parents who were World War II heroes. You’re in the middle of it, like a big brother. And so was the character Billy, who is a Vietnam veteran. He is an angel to everybody. I needed good actors who could be functional.