Best Director

Ang Lee: Kimberly French

Ang Lee

Count on Ang Lee to be predictably unpredictable. His filmography reads like a syllabus from a directing master class, ranging from tart indie comedy (The Wedding Banquet) to Jane Austen period adaptation (Sense and Sensibility) to Hong Kong action (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) to comic-book melodrama (The Hulk). With Brokeback Mountain, Lee has taken another seemingly left-field choice and turned it into a masterpiece of doomed love between two Wyoming cowboys who just can't quit each other. Lee, who initially passed on Brokeback to do The Hulk, spent years haunted by the project's elemental impact on him. ''Gay ranch hands couldn't be further away from me, but somehow it was calling,'' says the 51-year-old director. ''I had to find out why I was hit so hard by the material. I felt the movie belongs to me. If someone else did it, I'd be very pissed.''

It's hard to imagine another director who could have given this story the kind of bone-rattling emotional resonance and universal appeal that's made it the clear Oscar front-runner. Still, Lee's not clearing space on the mantel just yet: The last time he was nominated, for 2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he lost to Steven Soderbergh for Traffic and became the rare director to take the Golden Globe and DGA award for directing but not the Oscar. (He also lost out as a producer of the Best Picture nominee.)

Lee elicited a spate of award-worthy performances by keeping his actors slightly ill at ease during production, offering little feedback and refusing to play armchair psychologist about characters' motivations. ''He's manipulative and brilliant,'' says Jake Gyllenhaal. ''He doesn't say anything and pretends he doesn't hear what you're saying throughout the shoot. I liken working with Ang to having a great honeymoon, then getting married and having sex once a year.'' But with results this good, working with Lee may be better than sex.