“We are all very lucky we were able to make movies with an actor of that caliber.”

Seventeen years on, Ang Lee is still amazed by the quiet genius of Heath Ledger.

The director paid tribute to the late actor, who died of an accidental overdose in 2008, and the poignant solitude and wisdom that he brought to the set of Lee’s 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. Ledger starred as Ennis Del Mar in the Western, a somber, no-nonsense cowboy who falls in love with Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) after they spend a summer together herding sheep.

“Brokeback Mountain has the elegiac mood of a Western and an inner-twisted repression — Ennis is a very repressed character, macho but gay, gay but homophobic — and often there is no vocabulary to express his feelings. So Heath’s aura powers the whole story,” Lee told Empire. “He did a lot of preparation, mostly on his own. And he often surprised me with what he brought to his work.”

Now, Lee says it’s the “quieter moments” of Ledger’s performance that resonate with him most, like the scene in which Ennis runs into his ex Cassie Cartwright (Linda Cardellini) in a local diner.

“Ennis is alone, eating a slice of apple pie. Linda is acting her heart out, she’s in tears, confronting Ennis: ‘Why did you do this?’ But she doesn’t get a word from him. Throughout the whole scene, Heath does nothing: he just eats the apple pie. But watching the dailies, the crew were all crying too, saying, ‘Just leave the guy alone!'” Lee recalled. “I both understood, and cherished, Heath’s quietness, the subtlety of the moment, and how he carried himself in that scene. We are all very lucky we were able to make movies with an actor of that caliber. He had a God-given gift.”

“In his heart, I think Heath knew the character of Ennis deeply,” Lee continued. “On a technical level, he took direction very well, but worked alone. He’s not someone you really needed to talk to a lot, because he was very independent. For me, if the result is right, then I’m happy. If it’s not, I could tell him, and he would work something else out.”

It was also a gift, Lee said, to watch the relationship dynamic between Ledger and Gyllenhaal’s characters slowly develop both on and offscreen — even if the two actors butted heads at times.

“When it came to Jake, Heath had a very different attitude towards their work. Sometimes there was friction — not quarreling, but a clash of styles,” he explained. “Sometimes I would mediate that, but they were both good in different ways. They would always make the effort to find a way through.”

Lee noted that both Ledger and Gyllenhaal were required to attend “cowboy camp,” but that the Australia native hardly needed it. “He was a natural,” he said. “He was so good with animals, too. When he sat on that horse, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind. He was a cowboy.”