A leading contender for next year's Oscars, Brokeback Mountain earned a leading seven Golden Globe nominations last week. Shot in southern Alberta, it opens locally on Friday.

Proulx's short story of a rodeo cowboy and ranch hand who fall in love in the summer of 1963 was first published in The New Yorker in October 1997.

Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) discover and bask in their love for one another in the remote Brokeback Mountain area of Wyoming.

Over the next 20 years, they try desperately to keep their relationship a secret, even from the women they marry. It is Ennis who refuses to fly in the face of convention and settle down with Jake on a ranch owned by Jake's parents.

Other directors had been circling the project for three years but kept shying away from its uncompromising treatment of a gay romance between two cowboys.

"It was one of the happiest days of my life when I learned Brokeback was available again,'' Lee says. "I would have been so jealous if someone else had made the movie.

Lee says Brokeback Mountain has more in common with his Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon than it does with his 1993 gay romance The Wedding Banquet.

"The Wedding Banquet is a family drama,'' he says. "It explores the family unit, which is the basic unit of Chinese society. Brokeback, Sense and Crouching Tiger are about repression of one's true feelings because of the obligations society imposes on individuals.

Once he began working on Brokeback Mountain, Lee had to find actors brave enough to deal with the emotions as explicitly as Lee wanted them explored.

Lee had been impressed with Gyllenhaal's work in such films as Donnie Darko and October Sky. He says his basic direction to both actors was that they "had to believe the story and that they had to genuinely care about the relationship.

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