Ang Lee’s film, ‘Taking Woodstock,’ received kudos at the Cannes Film Festival for a colourful sequence in which the main character takes LSD for the first time. But the scene was not inspired by personal experience on the part of the Oscar-winning director. This despite the efforts of his family.

Lee has never dropped acid, according to Starpulse.com. So, his kids tried to get him to try it as research, but he wouldn’t go on the trip. Lee said, “I’m almost embarrassed to say I’ve never taken LSD myself, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter if you’ve taken it or not, you have to visualize it — this is what I said to my kids when they said ‘Daddy you should try it’.”

Lee says you don’t have to live the experience to be able to make a movie about it. He told the UK’s Metro paper, “I said to them I didn’t have a sex change to film the character of Vilma (a transvestite played by Liev Schreiber) why should I take drugs?”

The Metro says Lee did, however send his extras on a two-day hippy “camp” where they learned all about the Flower Power era in a “hippy handbook.”

“It was kind of like school. I gave them books to read and they had to take exams. They watched loads of documentaries. I think they really enjoyed it.”

Still, there were no drugs involved. “We made sure of that!”