Ang Lee talks 'cult' nature of his Hulk movie on 20th anniversary

Funny enough, this year will be the 20th anniversary of Hulk as well. The reaction to that film seemed to be kind of mixed at the time, which surprised me growing up because I just absolutely adored it. So I’m wondering, looking back at that film how you feel about it now and if you would ever revisit that character or another superhero film?

Ang Lee: I think it would be harder now because back then superhero movies were not a genre yet. Six months before mine was coming out, there was [Sam Raimi’s] Spider-Man. You take the comic books, but you do whatever you want with them. It was not a genre. I decided that I wanted to do like a psychodrama, like a sci-fi/horror film was where my head was at. It was really adventurous. At the time, with movies that had over $100 million budgets, nobody really knew how to control them. Without previews or anything, we just kept going, “Hopefully, this will work.” So it was an indulgence, which I think is harder to happen now.

So [Hulk] is like Crouching Tiger, I did it once and that was that. I’m glad I did those things, but I was not comfortable when the movie came out and got this mixed reaction. It was confusing for the market. I wasn’t happy about that. But I worked certainly very hard. I was very proud of the filmmakers who made the movie with me. And then only years later, I didn’t know there was kind of a subculture. It was like a cult movie, but it wasn’t meant to be that way. It was a big, expensive studio movie. But I’m happy some people like you really like it. I’m happy about that, something very cool about it.

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