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Robert W. Butler, with the Kansas City Star, writes about being on the set of Ang Lee's latest picture:

Thirty miles east of Calgary the glorious Canadian Rockies are little more than a thin blue haze on the western horizon. Here the vast Alberta plain is flat and unremarkable, each field looking much like the last.

The sameness was just what director Ang Lee had been looking for.

On a bright, pleasant morning in July 2004 the Taiwanese filmmaker and his crew assembled at an old farmhouse abandoned for decades but restored to look like it might have in 1983.

They were shooting one of the final scenes of Brokeback Mountain.

Based on Annie Proulx’s celebrated short story, Brokeback Mountain is about two young Wyoming ranch hands who in 1963 fall in love and spend the next 20 years struggling with their secret passion.

As conceived by Lee and production designer Judy Becker, the film is a visual balancing act between the beauty of the Rockies and the drabness of the flatlands. In the film’s iconography, mountains represent escape and freedom. That’s where over the years the lovers Ennis Del Mar (Australian actor Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) go to be alone together, free from prying eyes.

But most of their lives are spent in unremarkable locales like this one, on desolate ranches or in drab, windblown towns where both marry and raise families. And where a man who loves another man had best keep it to himself.

Read Robert's full report at this link.