BECOMING THE HULK.('The Hulk')(Movie Review)

From last October until the end of May, the director Ang Lee was holed up at George Lucas's Industrial Light + Magic, in San Rafael, eleven miles north of San Francisco, working fifteen hours a day with the eponymous star of his eighth film, "The Hulk." Even by superstar standards, the Hulk is exceptional. He is green and, at the height of his powers, stands about fifteen feet tall. He is also completely computer-generated. The challenge for Lee's three-hundred-person visual-effects team was to make the Hulk sufficiently real so that he could coexist on an imaginative level with the movie's flesh-and-blood stars, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Connelly, and Eric Bana. The challenge for Lee himself was to marry his art-house sensibility to the vigorish of a Hollywood summer blockbuster--the first he's attempted. Behind Lee's desk at his temporary office in San Rafael hung a framed birthday card from the Hulk's creators, Marvel Comics. At the top of the card was a drawing of Lee's unassuming, puckish face with its cap of black hair. "Hulk, you're making me angry. You won't like me when I'm angry," Lee said in a cartoon bubble, repeating the character's famous mantra. Below, the Hulk, with his familiar jutting forehead and a square jaw that made him look like a tinted Bronko Nagurski, complained, "Hulk not understand motivation."

In his comic-book incarnation, the Hulk had little in the way of motivation. Unlike other superheroes, who are agents for good, the Hulk was conceived as a mutant. Part Gargantua and part Green Man, he could not control his power, which, in any case, was neither good nor intelligent; he simply raged when provoked, smashing his world to smithereens. A rampaging manifestation of self-destructiveness, he was a danger to his sane, buttoned-down other half, Bruce Banner, and even to himself. The character was born in 1962 and came of age in the mid-sixties, when the idea of protean transformation fuelled the drug culture and the rock-and-roll revolution--a fantasy of escape from the oppressiveness of the Vietnam War. Hounded, bewildered, strong beyond his ability to calculate, at once a menace and a marvel, the Hulk was the ultimate adolescent daydream. He was as confused as the next man, but more devastating. Onscreen, however, Lee has given the Hulk psychological depth; he has reimagined the Hulk's history as part of the universal struggle between patriarchy, repression, and desire, which Lee has spent much of his career exploring. "Everyone has a Hulk inside," Lee has written, "and each of our Hulks is both scary and potentially pleasurable. In fact, it's the pleasure that's the scariest thing of all."

At first glance, it's hard to imagine a Hulk inside Ang Lee. He is, by Hollywood standards, sensationally calm and self-effacing. Short and wiry, with slightly hunched shoulders, he meets the world, as Nick Nolte says, "with a smile and that gentleness coming at you." Even Lee's wife, Jane Lin, a cell biologist at New York Medical College, says, "He has never lost his temper, really. We could never have an argument." Western drama is built on the escalation of tension; Chinese life is built around the reduction of it. Lee is a curious amalgam of both influences. The Chinese have no word for "individualism," and Lee, who is now forty-eight, says that he didn't even think of himself as an adult until the success of his film version of Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility," in 1995, and he didn't see himself as "Ang Lee, director" until the release, five years later, of the sleeper hit "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"--the highest-grossing foreign film ever made and the first Chinese movie to win an international audience.

Because Lee doesn't exude any of the imperialism of self associated with most directors of his stature, he is sometimes difficult to read. Ted Hope, who was a producer of Lee's first three movies--"Pushing Hands" (1992), "The Wedding Banquet" (1993), and "Eat Drink Man Woman" (1994)--quickly discovered that "part of the role I had was getting Ang to say no." Hope remembers looking over at Lee during the filming of a scene in "Pushing Hands": "He was clearly unhappy. I asked him what was the matter. 'The dress.' 'It's a brown dress. You said you liked the brown dress.' 'Yes, I liked the brown dress.' 'Then what's the matter?' He goes, 'Well, I liked the blue dress more.' 'Why didn't you say that?' Ang said, 'Well, you just asked me if I liked the brown dress.' "

Lee doesn't hector; he doesn't bluster; he doesn't insist on his own superiority; and he's not materialistic. He still drives his first car--a 1995 Mercury minivan--prefers sweatsuits, jeans, and sneakers to more elegant attire, and lived, until 1997, in an eight-hundred-and-twenty-five-square-foot three-room apartment in White Plains, New York, where he and his wife slept in the same room as their two sons. (He now lives in Mamaroneck, in a four-bedroom house with seven rare breeds of chickens at the bottom of his garden.) In fact, there is nothing conspicuous about Lee's behavior but his talent. "He has the most quiet footprint, a tremendous humility," Hope says. "He once said to me, describing his process, that movies pass through him."

Still, because Lee likes to find his films as he is making them, he requires from others a special quality of collaboration and from himself a special quality of attention. "Ang is as concentrated as any director I've ever worked with," Nolte says. "He keeps the actor constantly churning. Ang always wants to go beyond and find something new." Emma Thompson, who starred in "Sense and Sensibility," explains, "The quality of listening makes you want to do your best to surprise him, because he's allowing you that space. It's the silent equivalent of somebody like Robert De Niro, whose mumbling makes one lean forward. You don't necessarily see this great intelligence on the surface, but as soon as you come toward it you receive the strength. Ang could always throw us off balance physically, as well as with his words. That's what all creative people need. They need to be pushed off their runnels."

When Lee first met with Nolte to persuade him to play the over-reaching scientist David Banner--who murders his wife and turns his son, Bruce, into a literal extension of his own Faustian power--Nolte asked Lee why he wanted to make the movie. "He said, 'I can't make a comic book, but I can make a tragedy,' " Nolte recalls. Lee sees the Hulk as an embodiment of "the unconscious--it doesn't have a logic." He says, "The Hulk is the aggression and the fear and the unknown drive you have in life, which are hiding in the dark, which are not how you want to see yourself." In Lee's case, those turbulent forces translate into only one thing: filmmaking, which he calls "my devil side." For Lee, the making of movies is at once a thrill and a danger, an unsettling explosion of energy, in which greatness and goodness are always at odds. The enterprise tempts him away from normal life and from his family, in pursuit of his own selfish fantasies. It ...