Ang Lee: I could do "whatever I wanted" with Hulk because "superheroes were not a genre yet"

(L-R) Stan Lee, Lou Ferrigno, Ang Lee, Eric Bana and Nick Nolte at the Hulk premiere

Pre-MCU Marvel movies are relics of a bygone age, perhaps none more so than Ang Lee’s 2003 entry Hulk. The Eric Bana version of the character was shuffled out a mere five years later for Edward Norton, who was shuffled (or maybe shoved) out for Mark Ruffalo. But the lack of the MCU structure didn’t mean a lack of support; in fact, “back then people indulged me to do whatever I wanted, so the support was great,” Lee tells DiscussingFilm in a new interview.

You simply can’t get that kind of freedom in comic book filmmaking these days. “I think it would be harder now because back then superhero movies were not a genre yet,” Lee reflects. “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.” It wasn’t just the genre that was new: “[With] movies that had over $100 million budgets, nobody really knew how to control them,” Lee adds. “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.”

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For his Hulk, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, Lee “decided that I wanted to do like a psychodrama, like a sci-fi/horror film was where my head was at,” he says. “It was really adventurous.” But he “was not comfortable when the movie came out and got this mixed reaction. It was confusing for the market,” he recalls. “I wasn’t happy about that.”

Within the context of the larger superhero industrial complex, this “big, expensive studio movie” has become “like a cult movie,” Lee says. While he’s glad the film has found an audience, and “very proud of the filmmakers who made the movie with me,” he’s not looking to make a return to the now-ubiquitous genre any time soon. “I did it once and that was that.”

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