Ang Lee shot to international fame after directing the Oscar-winning Chinese martial arts and romance epic Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Having decided it was time to do a Hollywood film he got to work on the much anticipated film of Marvel comic monster The Hulk. Viewlondon reviewer Matthew Turner caught up with Ang in London to have a chat.

What attracted you to the Hulk project?
Actually it was a kind of extension to what I'd already done with Chinese pulpy art. I found after five or six movies, I became interested in digging into what I'd call the hidden dragon, something like a wild energy hidden under pulpy art, in this case a comic book.

I didn't read the Chinese and Japanese comic books because, as well as martial arts fictions, they were prohibited by my school and by my parents. But I always associate them with hidden pleasure.

It takes a B-movie genre or pulpy art form to get into that kind of wild energy, for it to be harnessed, whether it's sexual repression or repressed aggression that's hidden. It's all about fear, sexual desires, under stress - it's the sub-consciousness that I'm very much into.