Film-makers have embraced the cinematic possibilities of comic strips since the 1930s and 1940s, but what is a film maker to do when men in tights don't thrill us any more?

Film Writer Steve Pratt talks to director Ang Lee about his latest blockbuster, The Hulk.

JAWS dropped in astonishment both inside and outside the international film-making community at the news that Ang Lee was to direct the much-delayed, eagerly-anticipated movie based on the comic strip character The Incredible Hulk. The surprise wouldn't have been greater if he'd been named as making a new Carry On comedy. What was the studio thinking putting an art house director in charge of a 120m dollar summer blockbuster?

And yet, on reflection, getting the US-based Taiwanese director, who'd previously adapted Jane Austen for the screen and made an international hit of a martial arts movie made in Manadrin Chinese, was an inspired choice.

If anyone could breathe fresh life into the art of transferring comic strips from printed page to sound stage, it was him.

This was the method in their madness. He could make The Hulk - who lost his incredible tag somewhere along the line - different to the other superheroes who pulled on colourful skin-tight costumes and utilised special powers to help them defeat evil.

Audiences were getting fed up with men in tights. The makers of the Batman and Superman franchises are only too aware of this, which accounts for the difficulty they're encountering in reviving the lucrative franchises. They need to make them different. But they can't afford to forget about them because, as well as being big box-office, comic book superheroes are capable of making lots of extra cash with merchandising and other spin-offs.

What Oscar-winner Lee has made is an art film masquerading as a comic strip blockbuster, a sort of Greek tragedy in which the green mean machine's problems can be traced back to his father. As Lee himself has noted, he's made another of his father and son dramas.

He also points out that The Hulk is no do-gooder saving the world, more an angry young man who destroys rather than saves when he's in a temper. Bruce Banner is a scientist whose failure to control himself stems from being exposed to a nasty dose of gamma rays. He has more in common with Frankenstein's monster than with the phone booth quick changes of Clark Kent.

Lee, whose quietly-spoken manner is the opposite of rage-filled Banner, thinks taking on the challenge of the Hulk "kind of makes sense from what I've already done". He's continuing to dig into what he calls the "hidden dragon" - a reminder that he directed Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon as well as the screen version of Austen's Sense And Sensibility and American Civic War drama Ride With The Devil.

"I find there is something hidden that's quite interesting," he says, adding that comic books and martial art fiction were banned by his parents and school when he was a child, so he always associates them with hidden pleasures.

"When I was proposed for this project, I thought I had the chance to do a psychodrama based on the original story. This is a franchise movie so I don't have to tailor to particular movie stars, and the comic art allows me to experiment with cinematic language. It felt like it was time for me to approach a big movie, make it in Hollywood but still be personal.

"The Hulk is different - it's a monster movie. He doesn't have a good cause and come out to save the world. He's not a superhero. He can only come out and make a mess."

Film-makers have embraced the cinematic possibilities of comic strips since the 1930s and 1940s with cliff-hanging serials such as Flash Gordon and Captain Marvel. But television seemed more adept at exploiting the possibilities with Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman among those successfully transferred to the small screen.

With ever-improving special effects at their disposal, the 1978 Superman showed just how profitable superheroes could be at the cinema box-office. Tim Burton's somewhat darker take on Batman also demonstrated that such characters didn't all have to be the same. It was only a matter of time before The Hulk, who first appeared in Marvel Comics in 1962, made the move after fans demanded more of the unjolly green giant after the TV series ended a five year run in 1982.

But Banner and his alter ego needed to stand out from the crowd - not difficult, you might think, for a 15ft green man with a very angry expression - but just look at the logjam of superheroes crowding into the marketplace this year. Daredevil (blind lawyer righting wrongs) kicked off the season in February, followed by X-Men 2 (a whole school of mutants with special powers), and with The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (characters from fiction fight a 19th century literary villain) still to come.

Comic strip characters appeal to film-makers because anything goes. There are no rules and, thanks to computer generated wizardy, no limits. Once again, Lee has chosen a different course to others. Not for him bodybuilders in green suits or a mix of live action and animation to create the raging bull named Banner. His Hulk is totally computer generated, the result of months of work with the CGI people closely monitored by Lee.

Out of what he calls desperation, he became the model for the Hulk. "I was quite innocent to the CGI world," he admits. "I had never done more than replacing skies or removing wires, low tech stuff. I wanted to shoot The Hulk like an actor, not a cartoon performance. Usually animators look in a mirror or use a cam-recorder. I had to show them what I wanted. They put me in the suit and I turned into the Hulk, and had some therapeutic sessions. That went on for five months."

Lee is unlikely to get angry if you don't like his movie, although he admits that his anger management failed on the set. He believes everyone has a Hulk side, so scary and violent that people have to cover it up when it threatens to emerge at times of fear, stress or paranoia. "To me, I only get the experience through making movies. In life, I am a shy person. But, as a director, I will turn nasty to get results. When I was nervous about the outcome, I would go as far as kicking the set. I did it a couple of times, and don't usually do that. Maybe size does matter, it's a bigger movie".

* There are advance screenings of The Hulk (12A) today, Sunday and Thursday in selected cinemas, with the film going on general release on July 18.

* Indestructible: The Hulk Story is on five tomorrow at 7.15pm and Ang Lee is the subject of The South Bank Show, also tomorrow (ITV1, 10.45pm).