In the weeks leading up to the U.S. release of "Brokeback Mountain," director Ang Lee had no way of knowing how his controversial masterpiece would be received.

Lee felt confident that the production had done justice to author Annie Proulx's much-acclaimed short story — a feeling confirmed by Proulx's enthusiastic response — but just how an epic love story about two cowboys would play to mainstream American audiences was an understandable cause for anxiety.

"The reaction will be varied," Lee said during an exclusive Hawai'i interview with The Advertiser in November. "There will be some who oppose it, but I hope that melts. It's a story of romance and longing. I hope it will be perceived as a love story."

Yet, even without the award nominations and unanimous critical praise that eventually followed, "Brokeback Mountain" had already proved restorative for the 51-year-old director.

"This feels like the beginning of another stage," Lee said. "I feel like I'm relearning how to make movies and how to love everyone around me. I have a new contract with my emotions, my body, my relationships, my creativity."

Indeed, Lee took on the project still bruised from the perceived failure of his 2003 "The Hulk."

The much-hyped comic-book adaptation grossed a respectable $132 million in the United States, but critics panned it as tedious and overly complicated, and audiences primed by marketers for a high-energy special effects romp were turned cold by the film's psychological subtexts.

For Lee, long held in high critical esteem for his work on such diverse films as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "The Ice Storm" and "Sense and Sensibility," the backlash was jarring — particularly given the energy he had devoted to the project.

"I was burned out," Lee said. "I was doing bigger and bigger productions, and after 'The Hulk,' I was exhausted."

"Brokeback Mountain" offered Lee the opportunity to return to tight emotional and spiritual space that has been at the heart of his best work.

The story follows the unlikely and perilous love between two Wyoming cowboys, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), who meet in summer of 1963 while tending sheep on wild, remote Brokeback Mountain. They spend the next 20 years living with a devastating truth: "If you can't fix it, you've gotta stand it."

Proulx's story (originally published in "The New Yorker") takes up just 30 pages in her 1999 collection "Close Range."

Lee's film mimics Proulx's spare but eloquent prose, telling an epic story in a series of small, powerful moments.

What Lee and his actors bring to the film version is a sympathy and tenderness not immediately apparent in Proulx's characteristically steely writing.

In a world of unforgiving landscapes, Ennis and Jack — cautious man and restless dreamer — are sustained and diminished in equal proportions by an attraction they lack even the language to articulate. It's a love — made dangerous by time and place — that exacts a heartbreaking toll not just on the two men, but on the women and children who are its collateral damage.

For Lee, the most intimidating challenge in bringing "Brokeback Mountain" to the screen was creating a credible representation of the interior American West of the '60s and '70s.

"It's a part of America that most don't know too much about," Lee said. "Americans in the coastal cities know cowboys from Hollywood or the TV news, but there is a quiet place in the center that is still changing very slowly, where survival means being tough. And that is at the heart of America. That's very interesting to me."

Lee, who was born in Taiwan and educated at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and New York University, might seem an unlikely choice to direct a movie about the American West. Yet Lee built his considerable reputation by embracing projects far removed from his own history and culture.

At NYU, Lee was the assistant director on classmate Spike Lee's student film, "Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads."

Lee's first three films as a screenwriter and director — "Pushing Hands," "The Wedding Banquet" and "Eat Drink Man Woman" — explored familiar ground (cultural and generational differences within Taiwanese families) but through the lenses of a grandfather, a gay man and a trio of sisters.

He plunged into the cinematic mainstream directing Emma Thompson in the film adaptation of Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility," then took audiences along for explorations of American suburbia in the 1970s ("The Ice Storm"), the Civil War ("Ride With the Devil"), Chinese pulp fiction ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon") and canonical comic-dom ("The Hulk").

Thus, the fact that he is neither gay nor a cowboy didn't dissuade Lee from tackling "Brokeback Mountain," which demanded sure but sensitive direction.

"I'm attracted (to these types of projects) because they're fresh, they're a stretch," Lee said.

"With 'Brokeback Mountain,' there is still the idea of a love story, a romance, still the idea of a pure form," he said. "It's a great way to study humanity, not just stretch the audience's perception. It's a great provocation, but it has to be universal so we can respond to it."

Lee said his job was made easier by screenwriters Larry McMurtry ("The Last Picture Show," "Lonesome Dove") and Diana Ossana, and by his two lead actors.

"It was great working with Heath and Jake," he said. "They had a real sensitivity to what we were doing.

Lee said Ledger and Gyllenhaal were as much a study of contrasts as their characters.

"Heath was very methodical," Lee said. "After we talked about what we wanted to do and went through rehearsals, he changed very little from take to take.

"Jake was everywhere, trying out different things. I'd say he had innocence on his side. They were both very dedicated."

Where Proulx used Ennis as the focal character, Lee, McMurtry and Ossana split the film between Ennis and Jack, and the separate lives they lead.

For Lee, however, there was a third central character: Brokeback Mountain itself.

"We were dealing with a nonverbal culture and we had to represent them in a different way," Lee said. "The mountain had to be the third character in the relationship. It provided not only a link to the west, but it made it amiable to a romantic love story.

"The American landscape is very open and grand and majestic, but the characters needed this open space for privacy."

The mountain also provides the central metaphor for both short story and film.

"I was interested in the existential question of: 'What is Brokeback Mountain?' " Lee said. "What is it that we want to return to? What is love? What is the illusion of love?"

For Lee, "Brokeback Mountain" represents a fresh start.

"I hope I can enjoy another stage of my career," he said. "I want to continue to do big pictures, but only if I can privatize them the same way as a small movie. I think I have one or two big movies still in me."

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.