Deadlines are a bummer. By the time you read this, you’ll know which (if any) Oscars Ang Lee picked up for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But from where (or rather, when) I sit, I can’t use any of those sexy qualifiers like ‘Oscar-winning’ or ‘scandalously overlooked’. All I’m left with is ‘unpredictable’.

And I don’t mean that sarcastically: look at Lee’s career over the past decade or so. It has encompassed New York art-house (The Wedding Banquet), Taiwanese art-house (Eat Drink Man Woman), Eng lit (Sense and Sensibility), American lit (The Ice Storm), American history (Ride With the Devil) and superior chop-socky (Crouching Tiger). So what next? Well, here the word is less ‘unpredictable’ than ‘downright unexpected’. Even allowing for the fact that a successful director’s name is always attached to a slew of projects, word on what Lee will do next is a little off-the-wall.

Let’s start with the most unlikely: The Incredible Hulk movie, which Universal has had on its books for a while. Gale Anne Hurd will produce, working with Marvel’s Avi Arad. The script has been through a number of drafts, the most recent of which is by David Hayter, who did X-Men. And, if everything goes according to plan, the movie will be made some time next year for release in the summer of 2003. Of course, things rarely do go according to plan in the world of comic-book adaptations: think Super-man (with Nicolas Cage), Batman (the new, revamped, er, darker, version), Spider-Man…

In case you’ve forgotten, the Hulk is a large green person who used to be a mild-mannered research scientist called Bruce Banner until Bruce got caught in a nuclear explosion (don’t you hate it when that happens?). Now, every time something riles him, Bruce’s shirt bursts, he develops huge green pecs and becomes the personification of his own rage. A TV series ran in the eighties, starring the late Bill Bixby as Banner and former footballer Lou Ferrigno as his green alter ego. Perhaps moving from flying swordspersons to angry green giants isn’t such a shift. And anyway, it’s going to be a long time before the Hulk movie goes into production. So how about something a little gentler? Like a musical, maybe.

Lee and his regular producer/writer partner, James Schamus (whose New York indie outfit, Good Machine, has been boosted into the major league along with Lee), are said to be working on a New York-set adaptation of Alain Resnais’ 1997 French hit, On connait la chanson (Same Old Song).

A slightly sour romantic comedy, it featured characters whose dialogue would repeatedly slide into this or that popular French song, like they did in British playwright Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven. Resnais was a big Potter fan, and his film was a sizeable hit in France. But it did a lot less well elsewhere, for the simple reason that the songs the characters burst into weren’t popular with, or even known to, audiences outside France. Redoing the movie with American show tunes is, therefore, a an inspired idea.

Finally, Lee is also attached to the Houdini biopic, which started life as a Paul Verhoeven project. According to informed sources, Lee’s batting order is likely to be Houdini, Song, Hulk. But, since no one reportedly knows anything in the movie business, I wouldn’t set too much store by that.