ELLENVILLE -— Ang Lee was first inspired by the 1969 Woodstock Festival as a teenager living some 7,800 miles away in Taiwan, watching the news reports in black and white. From his rural village, he saw the changes taking place in America. 

Hearing the music, and watching the hippies, he somehow felt connected to a period he describes as a “tipping point from the age of innocence.”

Some 40 years later, the multi-Academy Award-winning director took on the challenge of telling the story of that historic event in “Taking Woodstock,” the comedic true story based on the memoirs of Elliot Tiber, the man who found a home for the concert in Bethel.

Although the film shows an immense traffic jam, fields littered with trash and hippies gleefully sliding through mud, “Taking Woodstock” pointedly shies away from the spectacle. Instead, Lee decided to focus on how the lives of individuals caught up by history are transformed. His movie is a celebration of the way this event has gone into memory – what it must have been like to be there.

Lee will discuss his film which took only 42 days to shoot, and the hits and misses of trying to tell the Woodstock story, on Saturday night during the Borscht Belt Film Fest in Ellenville. 

The director of such acclaimed films as “Sense and Sensibility,” “The Ice Storm,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Brokeback Mountain,” Lee shared in an interview the hits and misses he experienced filming “Taking Woodstock,” and the special technical techniques he used to tell the inside story of a music festival that even as a young teenager shaped the person he is today.

You described Woodstock as a little story in the shadow of a bigger one.

Our impression of Woodstock is a great time, music, helping each other, all those issues. Most of the performers complained that it was the worst experience and performance they had given. I deliberately put the stage as far away. To me, that’s the real Woodstock. Not necessarily the stage. You see how people get drawn into it. I wasn’t doing the core, I was doing the periphery, which I think is what Woodstock means. It’s a spirit. It’s a period of time. 

Unfortunately, that’s not what audiences 

wanted to see.

The box office was cold. The movie didn’t do much. Over the years I’ve heard people say, ‘I was there, and it was like that.’ I felt OK but at the time I was very disappointed. I didn’t know better. It was the move that I wanted to make. Some want the fantasy, the romanticized version of Woodstock, or the documentary. I take the real Woodstock, and how that changed our lead character, a dramatic piece, centered on family. That’s what attracted me. I went for it. I was hoping to find the sweet spot. 

You used a lot of different techniques in filming.

Split scene was the fashion of the time. To shoot the chaos, I thought I should use 16 mm and that was fun. I started out shooting 16 in film school and I still remember how it was. Handheld and all that. It still needed to be choreographed because we were also using multi-cameras. I had a split screen in my mind, very grainy, similar to the Woodstock documentary. 

You were encouraged to take acid to shoot 

one of the scenes.

There’s a scene where they take acid in a van. We were doing 16 mm reversal, like we did in film school. The only ones who didn’t take it were the crucial camera people, our actors and myself. My kids said, ‘Dad you should try, a mushroom.’ Even my wife said, ‘Look, it won’t kill you.’ That’s when I said, ‘Look, I’m not a woman, but I do those woman movies. I don’t have to go through a sex change. I can film an acid trip without being on one. I heard from a lot of folks it was the best acid trip scene. 

You trained actors 

how to be hippies.

It was a two-month camp for the core actors in the foreground. I could not train hundreds of people. We got real hippies, hippie experts from New Hampshire. We trained about 75 young people. No shaving hair. No muscle build-up. No definition. No high-fives, no backpacks, everything period. That was fun. 

You shot in New Lebanon, in Columbia County. Did you ever visit the actual site? 

Yes, I went to the real places in White Lake, and the nearby town. That was the first time I went to Ellenville to check the location. That was a runner-up where to shoot. 

Knowing what you know now, would you have made a different kind of movie?

No. I think we filmmakers see a movie differently than producers or studio audiences. We have an impulse to make them. We try to make it work. Hopefully, it speaks to the people. We put everything we have there. Then it gets out of your system, don’t have to think about it anymore. To me, that’s a precious time. The memory of doing the movie, the experience, that was gold to me. I treasure the time I spent making that movie. It nurtured me back to movie-making again.

What was it that attracted you to the movie?

I didn’t care for the first half of the book. I think I just the last 80 pages, when the event happened, how they make the deals that’s something, that’s how Woodstock happens. When I do the research, a lot of people, I will call it, Woodstock according to me, who saw that hill for the first time, at least four people claim they were the first ones to discover that. So that’s how people’s memory works. What attracted me to Woodstock was something abstract, a romanticized idea, an actual person going through it. That interested me. How it changes a person.  Not the stage but the periphery of Woodstock. The whole idea of going to Woodstock interested me. It still does.