Appealing to Hollywood director Ang Lee to make a movie of ‘Flight Behavior’

Yes, with this blog post from Taiwan, I am appealing to Taiwanese director Ang Lee to make a movie adapted from the 2012 cli-fi novel “Flight Behavior” by American novelist Barbara Kingsolver.

American actor Will Smith recently paid tribute to Taiwan — while visiting the home country of Hollywood director Lee who was born and raised here until he was 22 — as the place that fulfilled his lifelong wish to work with Taiwan-born and Oscar-winning film director Ang Lee. Yes, Will Smith put out an appeal 6 years ago to Lee and Lee got the message eventually through the media.

“Ang Lee has been on my list for most of my adult life [as] someone that I wanted to work with. So Taipei made the dream come true,” Smith told reporters in Taiwan recently while promoting his new Lee-directed action thriller ”Gemini Man.”

Smith was referring to the time he expressed his desire to work with Lee at a press conference in Taipei 6 years ago, which was held to promote his 2013 action adventure movie ”After Earth.”

Smith also asked people worldwide who heard about his appeal to Lee to tell the Taiwanese-American director of his desire to someday collaborate with him.

Those wishes were finally fulfilled through their work together on ”Gemini Man,” and Smith said the new slogan for Taiwan’s capital should be “Taipei, the place where dreams come true!”

In response, Lee said with humor, “Yeah, I heard the mating call.”

“I was in New York, but it was all over the media and all over the newspapers and I hoped that I would fulfill his dream because the dream was bilateral,” Lee explained.

At a press conference in 2014 during a previous visit to Taiwan to promote his 2013 film, “After Earth,” Smith had expressed his wish to work on a film with Lee and asked his contacts to inform the Taiwanese director. Six years later, Smith on  triumphantly declared, “Ang Lee has been on my list for most of my adult life [as] someone that I wanted to work with. So Taipei made the dream come true.”

So in my opinion as a climate activist of the literary kind, Lee would be the perfect director to turn “Flight Behavior” into a Hollywood movie. Therefore this public appeal in the Times of Isreal blogs.

So as this blog post goes to press, here and on via a brief tweet link on Twitter, I have issued a public appeal from my office in Taiwan to ask Director Lee to adapt the cli-fi novel titled “Flight Behavior” published to global acclaim in 2012 into a Hollywood movie, helmed by Lee, with a screenplay by Lee, and a stellar cast chosen by Lee. He’s the man!

If you are reading this on on my blog or later on Twitter or Facebook or in a newspaper, please take a moment to boost this appeal to Ang Lee to even more people around the world, getting a message to Lee: “Can you make a movie about ‘Flight Behavior’ after you adapt the novel and buy the film rights and choose a cast to star in the movie version of the acclaimed climate-themed novel?”

Dear readers of the blog post and its subsequent Twitter link: Please forward this blog post to everyone you know in Hollywood and the book world.

It’s 2019. If we are successful with this appeal and it reaches the ears and eyes of Director Lee one day, it is possible that his movie version of the Kingsolver bestseller could appear in world cinemas sometime in the mid-to-late 2020s or early 2030s.

If Will Smith could do it, we can do it, too. How about it, Ang Lee?