Ang Lee has just been washed ashore after an arduous three-and-half-year journey bobbing around in a small boat adrift in choppy sea waters. The Oscar-winning Hollywood director is “exhausted” and “a little lost” — much like how his young Indian shipwreck survivor, Pi, feels when he finally lands on a beach.

Pi’s adventure — in Lee’s new 3D film Life of Pi — is slated for release in India on November 23. And Lee is in the country to promote the celluloid version of Booker winning Canadian author Yann Martel’s novel, parts of which were shot in Puducherry.

“It’s been a long exhausting journey,” says the Taiwanese director. This time, though, the reference is to his 22 years of filmmaking. Lee has directed such successful films as the martial arts movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which won him the Best Foreign Language film at the 2001 Oscars, and Brokeback Mountain, a low budget film on the forbidden love between two gay American ranchers, which won him an Oscar in 2006 for the Best Director.

Lee is at the Hyatt in Chennai, going through all that a foreigner waiting to be embraced by India does. He folds his hands in humble namastes and praises Tamil culture and the warm hospitality of India. He talks about all that went into making the film — including waiting in a four-hour-long queue during a visit to a south Indian temple.

At the same time, the 58-year-old director with salt-and-pepper hair and a kind smiling face comes across as a humble man. “To be humble is a good virtue, it makes me feel safer,” says Lee, who believes in karma and feels it is best not to tempt it with any “chest up” behaviour.

It is not easy to be humble when you have been occupying centre stage in Hollywood. A director of Chinese and arthouse movies in his homeland Taiwan, he suddenly emerged on the international celluloid front in 1993 with The Wedding Banquet, a film on a gay Chinese American, who enters into a marriage to keep his parents happy. This film went on to win a slew of awards, including the Golden Bear award at the Berlin film festival.

This film caught the attention of Hollywood producers who gave him his “big break” by hiring him to direct the 1995 Emma Thompson-starrer Sense and Sensibility. The Oscar winners followed and Lee — the eldest son of a “very traditional” Chinese father who always wanted his son to “get real”, excel in academics and become a teacher — was catapulted into Hollywood’s Big League.

Before he died, however, Lee’s father, a school principal, had seen his son’s dramatic rise. “He told me: I reckon at this rate you might get an Oscar at 50. Then you will be satisfied and start thinking of doing something for real and regular instead of being an entertainer.”

But much before success, there was the mandatory struggle. Lee studied film production in New York and then sat at home for six years, looking after his children while his wife, a microbiologist, went to work.

“I had no work,” he reveals. Did his wife want to give up on him? “Oh, she must have wondered if I was ever going to get out and earn my bread. She just left me alone after a while, however. I guess she thought she was stuck with me and went about doing her research work and looking after the kids. I also looked after the kids a lot and became a pretty good cook staying at home.”

Lee also stuck to his guns. “I am not good at anything else. When I’m directing, I become focused. Otherwise I’m a lost soul and a spaced out person,” he says. So he wrote scripts and did the occasional rounds of studios. That — and the ensuing success — taught him that “life is an illusion”, he says.

“Everything can change in an instant,” he stresses. “There is no security in life — don’t be so sure that what you feel, touch or can prove will last forever,” says Lee, who strongly believes that people need to have a spiritual side since “spirituality is the essence of existence”.

But he is clearly a hard-nosed director as well, and knows the importance of marketing a film. Earlier in the day, journalists watched bemusedly as he pulled out all the stops in a local cinema theatre to promote his new film. Clad in casual beige trousers and a black jacket, he would spryly jump on to the movie stage each time to enthusiastically introduce teaser sequences from the film to the media. “Have fun with this sequence,” he would say, before a battery of flying fish (3D in full blast) hit you almost on the face as they crossed Pi’s lonely and treacherous seaward journey with a tiger for company.

Journalists got a glimpse of intense, jaw-dropping scenes, created with computer graphics largely executed in Mumbai and Hyderabad. There were dramatic underwater scenes of the capsize of the freighter carrying Pi, his family and the menagerie; a scene when Pi peeks under the tarpaulin and discovers (gasp) the presence of a full-bloodied Bengal tiger in the stowaway boat with him in the wide, open blue seas.

After three successful films, Lee could have stuck to making successful formula films for Hollywood. However the director, who clarifies he is not an American citizen but just a green card holder who lives there for work, was afraid of being “pigeonholed” and not producing exciting films. So he was open to taking different kinds of movies while travelling around the world. “The world is like a big film school for me,” he says.

His father egged him on too. When Lee was ready to retire after completing a film on the Marvel comic hero Hulk in 2003, it was his father who advised him not to set a bad example to his children by giving up directing. “Everybody in the family looked up to my father. He was the centre of the family, a patriarch and very traditional. When I make movies it is always about him. There is always a father-son conflict in my films. I was a very docile child who grew up in a patriarchal society,” he reveals.

His mother was, he says, obedient and quiet. “I never describe her in my movies; it always about this dramatic thing with my father. It is an honour and a shadow,” he says.

His father died two weeks after urging him not to hang up his megaphone — and Lee, true to his father’s word, and “without much ambition” and “half alive”, decided to make one more movie.

“It was to be a small arthouse film. I thought nobody is going to see a gay cowboy movie, let me make it and be done with it. I still give my best when I make a film, but I kept the shooting simple and the acting was secure. That was Brokeback Mountain,” he says with a laugh.

When Fox Studios approached him to do Life of Pi, Lee got hooked on the challenge of converting a mind-boggling adventure to celluloid. He was hounded by the thought of transforming a philosophical, multi-layered book into film.

“How do I make it a success without a Tom Hanks and just a tiger and an unknown boy,” he asked himself. But after an inner dialogue for eight months, he gave his nod to Fox.

“India has money now and they are big investors in cinema. A big part of Fox is Indian money and they are very powerful. They are going to bring Indian influences to Hollywood for sure,” he reckons.

Life of Pi was an extremely difficult film to make, he keeps stressing. “We are so exhausted. You cannot imagine the pain I went through. It is not just the film technique; it was mostly because it is such an unusual movie. How do you combine an emotional ride with a fantasy which should also make you think? How do you show illusion in an illusion? On the surface, it is also a mainstream movie which was expensive to make and the pressure is very high because it has to work,” he says.

The ocean sequences were shot in a humungous blue and green tank built on an airport runway in an old discarded airport in a Taiwanese city. Lee donned the mantle of a teacher-guru to the protagonist and debutant Indian actor, Suraj Sharma, who is carrying the entire movie on his shoulders. Suraj was spotted when he accompanied his brother who’d come for an audition. The director saw “something” in Suraj and cast him instead.

They had daily yoga and meditation sessions together. Lee says he felt he had a deep connect with him from some past life.

Lee believes that as a director he is “not skilful, verbally capable or a forceful person”. But what he has is vision. “I see things before people do,” he stresses.

For him, a film is all about people. “I make films to fulfil my curiosity about how people’s minds work when they stare at a big silver screen or how they absorb a story and react. All this tells me a lot about life, about myself and the world,” he says. “I’m a lazy man. If I stop making movies I stop learning.”