Ai-Ling Lee is taking it easy in the lead-up to Oscars

SINGAPORE – As the Oscars draw near, Singaporean sound editor and audio engineer Ai-Ling Lee is being invited to parties and events, and is fielding countless press interviews.

But although this is the lead-up to what could be the biggest night of her life, Los Angeles-based Lee wants to "wind down a little so all this can sink in".

Speaking to TODAY over the phone early on Saturday morning, Lee recalls her first brush with the awards ceremony nearly 20 years ago, in 1998. She was just 19, and had moved to L.A. to try and make a career for herself.

"A couple of weeks after I got here, they were preparing for the Academy Awards," she said. "I went (to the Shrine Auditorium) one night just to take photos of the red carpet," she said.

“I only started watching the Oscars when I was a teenager because in Singapore, because of the time difference, it would be shown on a Monday during (school) hours," she said.

This time, she will be walking on it and taking a seat at the Dolby Theatre at the 89th Academy Awards on Sunday (Feb 26, or Monday morning in Singapore), and waiting to see if her name will be called. 

The 38-year-old is nominated for Best Sound Editing with Mildred Iatrou Morgan and Best Sound Mixing with Andy Nelson and Steven Morrow, for their work in the movie La La Land. 

Where this might seem to be overwhelming, Lee is taking everything in her stride, even if she is part of a piece of history in many ways. Lee and Iatrou Morgan are also the first women to receive an Academy Award nomination for sound. If she gets the sound mixing award with Nelson and Morrow, she would become the second Asian winner in the category. The first was India's Resul Pookutty, who took the award in 2009 for his work on Slumdog Millionaire.

La La Land, written and directed by Damien Chazelle and starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, is nominated for a record-tying total of 14 Academy Awards. The other films to receive this many nods were All About Eve (1950) and Titanic (1997).

Sounding calm and collected, Lee said: “Sometimes it takes a while…to be able to work on a film that people all like." 

She should know - she has worked on over 70 films. Her work in movies range from blockbuster action flicks like Deadpool, X-Men: Days Of Future Past, Thor, Man Of Steel, Godzilla, Mr. And Mrs. Smith and Spider-Man 2 to dramas like Hitchcock and The Sea Of Trees.

 "Getting a nomination is an honour, because it’s voted by your peers," said Lee. And perhaps the popularity of La La Land "helped contribute to the nomination, since I know everyone does their best work all the time. But I am very excited and honoured", she added.

SINGAPORE CONNECTION 

Lee, who has a diploma from the now-defunct School of Audio Engineering in Singapore, moved to Hollywood to make a go of a career there. She had only done work in TV and radio, and so she started at the bottom in various studios, sometimes visiting studios on her own time just to learn how things were done.

She is now married to an American, and is currently a permanent resident of the United States. Her parents - her father is a shipyard worker who instilled a love of movies and sound in his daughter and her mother is a housewife- still live in Singapore.

Lee spends about two weeks to a month every year here. On her short visits, she gets her fill of local food like chicken rice and roti prata.  

She doesn't intend to give up her Singapore citizenship. 

"(It's) mainly because my parents are in Singapore," she said, adding that the fact that she and her husband don't have children yet is also a factor.

Her parents will not be able to fly out to the US to celebrate Lee's Oscars career milestone, she said. In fact, they may not even be able to watch the show on TV.

"My dad still works (so) I am not sure if he will be watching," she said. "If I am not wrong, they don't have HBO. Maybe they will see the highlights which I think most likely will not include sound categories. It'll be fine, it'll be somewhere on YouTube or something," she added with a laugh.

Asked about how other Singaporeans can follow in her footsteps, and she said: "It's very important to be creative and to be open to ideas and try things … I learned the most on the job. School is good to teach you the basics and fundamentals but in the end it's really up to (you to build) your creativity and good communication with the filmmakers."

MOVIE MAGIC

When asked about if she has any regrets on movies she has worked on, and Lee would rather cast her eye on the positives.

She believes movies are “collaborations” and a lot ultimately depends on the “filmmakers’ vision”. She is most proud of the 2014 film Wild, directed by Canadian filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallee and starring Reese Witherspoon.

A collaborative effort there was what made it special.

“It’s just the way they had written (sound) into the script and the way Jean-Marc edited the picture and the way he worked with sound,” she said. 

“As he was cutting the picture, he would give the scene to me and I would work on the sound design, and he would go, ‘hey, if you need me to adjust a bit of pictures to match the rhythm and flow of your sound, let me know’, and it would go back and forth that way.”

With La La Land, Lee also found that she was able to enjoy the movie without paying too much attention to her own work – an occupational hazard after 19 years in the job.

“There are some good movies that are just so heavy emotionally that you can only watch (them) a couple of times. La La Land has good emotional themes, but it is so, so joyous you can watch it so many times … I was able to just enjoy the film and not pay too much attention to the minute details of (my) work,” Lee said.

Come Sunday night, Lee is also looking forward to spending time with the cast and crew of La La Land, most of whom she would never have met if not because of the award nominations.

“It’s so rare that so many members of the cast and crew are all nominated. In fact, over the past several weeks we have been seeing each other, (people you) normally would not meet at all from working on a film, because it’s such a big group of people working in movies,” Lee said.

“Everyone is so nice and so talented, it felt like we were becoming a little family. It will be nice to see everyone again, and cheer for them and to hang out with them, the cast and crew of La La Land.”

And what about after the Oscars? She expects to "be tired on Monday, having stayed up all night on Sunday".

"I guess it'll be a long night on Sunday with all the after parties, and on Monday (things) will be back (to normal), hopefully," she said.

The 89th Annual Academy Awards airs on HBO (StarHub TV Channel 601) on Monday at 8am, with an encore telecast the same day at 7pm.