"One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider"

Larry McMurtry pinpoints both biography and temperament. Ang Lee’s life has been defined by crossing borders, Taiwanese by birth, educated and working in the United States, moving between languages, markets, and traditions. That “double exile” is cultural and artistic: he doesn’t fully belong to Hollywood or to any single Asian cinematic lineage, and he doesn’t settle into one genre or national myth. The result is a vantage that is neither touristic nor doctrinaire. He stands at a remove from every camp, which sharpens his perception of what people sacrifice to join one.

This sensibility threads through his films. His characters inhabit thresholds: dutiful children caught between Confucian obligation and private hunger; suburban families whose decorum masks ruptures; warriors bound by codes that deny desire; men in the American West unable to articulate love; soldiers celebrated in public and hollowed in private; castaways at sea suspended between belief and survival. Whether in The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, or Life of Pi, the central drama is the cost of belonging, how social scripts exile people from themselves.

Being an outsider’s outsider also describes method. Lee’s camera often watches from the edge, favoring thresholds, windows, doorframes, fences, deserts, oceans, visual borders that mirror psychic ones. Performances are controlled, emotions accrue in silences, and conclusions resist triumphal assimilation. He rarely punishes or glorifies; he observes with tact and compassion, letting contradictions stand. That distance is not coldness but hospitality: it makes space for viewers from many cultures to step in without feeling preached to.

McMurtry, a chronicler of American place and myth, recognizes that placelessness can be an artistic home. Freed from the impulse to protect a single tradition, Lee sees its pressures more clearly. “Double exile” becomes a tool for empathy, turning each project into a study of how people negotiate the borders between public duty and private truth, and how grace can appear, fleetingly, in the borderlands.