The Ice Storm
Director Ang Lee, writer James Schamus
and actress Sigourney Weaver
Even after they decided to make The Ice Storm (1997) as their fifth collaboration, producer/screenwriter James Schamus and director Ang Lee were still looking to pinpoint what was at the heart of Rick Moody's semi-autobiographical 1984 novel.
"It's less the story, it's less the characters, it's more of what you would call the essence, something philosophically challenging about it," says Schamus in New York, where The Ice Storm opened the 1997 New York Film Festival.
"We took a long time trying to get our fingers on what that was, until finally I came up with the word 'embarrassment'," he says about the novel set in the tony suburban community of New Canaan, Connecticut during 1973.
"It was a very embarrassing year to be an American," he adds, "embarrassing clothing, embarrassing hairstyles, embarrassing losing the war in Vietnam. It was all kind of falling apart."
Schamus also viewed 1973 as a point of social convergence where the liberation agenda of the 1960s counterculture met the political cynicism of Watergate and the fracturing of the 1950s nuclear family.
Add to this mixture the visual junk food of the 1970s — the crazy patchwork of riotous patterns and textures in clothing and home decor — and The Ice Storm seems like the perfect subject matter for satire.
Ultimately, Ang Lee pared down the more obvious satirical and comic elements, creating instead a profound and quietly powerful family drama which encapsulates a specific moment in the American consciousness defined by intense feelings of uncertainty and dislocation.
The Taiwan-born Lee did extensive background research of the period, then went one step beyond to "design the movie."
"I thought of myself as a storyteller filmmaker, whatever it takes to get emotions going, get characters developed and get story going, I would do that," says Lee, whose gently piercing style is evident in his other films, Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) and Sense and Sensibility (1995), which examine traditions and families breaking down.
"This is the first time I worked on a structure that needs a certain style to glue it together, a vision in other words," he added, "otherwise it would fall apart."
"I passed out notes, charts of motivation motifs, symbols and echoes," he explains, getting these out to everyone on the set so that the subtleties and underlying ideas of The Ice Storm wouldn't "slip away under the time pressure of shooting."
The combination of the script and Ang Lee's reputation as meticulous and empathic director helped attract a big-name cast to this $15 million film, which was shot on location in New Canaan. (James Schamus put a copy of the screenplay in the local library to assuage residents' fears that they were making "some Hollywood comic expose of their horrible way of life.")
"He just said one thing to me," says Sigourney Weaver of her first meeting with Ang Lee about The Ice Storm, "it should be like a knife, very sharp but we're careful not to cut anyone."
© 1997, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.