Success and failure can cross Hollywood border

ONE of the jokes going around Hollywood last week was that foreign movie talent earned so much Oscar attention that CNN’s Lou Dobbs wants to build a 20-foot-high fence around the Kodak Theatre to keep them out. From the best director and screenplay categories to score, cinematography and costume design, the Oscars were a giant billboard for the ascendancy of international film artists.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Babel” received seven nominations while Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” earned six, just two signs of how foreign filmmakers have brought a new wave of energy and creativity to the business. Of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, the most common reaction to “The Lives of Others” director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar acceptance speech was: “Hey, didya hear how good his English was?” Translation: Let’s offer him a Nic Cage thriller right away.

As buoyed as I am by the industry’s growing interest in foreign filmmakers, now would be a good time to offer a few words of caution. While Hollywood history is full of outsider success stories, from Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder to Ang Lee and Alfonso Cuaron, it is also littered with failures and flame-outs, though the disasters rarely get as much attention as the triumphs.

In fact, a number of gifted foreign directors have struggled trying to make the transition to Hollywood. One recent example is Oliver Hirschbiegel, a German director whose “Downfall” received rave reviews and was nominated for best foreign film. Hirschbiegel was hired by Warner Bros. to direct “The Invasion,” a Nicole Kidman-starring thriller based on Don Siegel’s classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Hirschbiegel shot the movie at the end of 2005, but the studio was so unhappy with the results that it brought in “Matrix” creators Andy and Larry Wachowski to do rewrites and then hired James McTeigue, who directed “V for Vendetta” for the studio last year, to do nearly $10 million in reshoots earlier this year.

Sony Pictures is about to release “Premonition,” a Sandra Bullock-starring thriller directed by Mennan Yapo, a Turkish-German filmmaker who got a host of Hollywood offers after making one little-known feature in Germany. He’s also had a rocky ride. After he delivered his first cut last summer, he was taken off the movie, while a new editor and the film’s writer came in to do a new cut of the picture. Yapo was brought back to work on the picture, but only after lots of internal squabbling.

Alejandro Agresti had a hit last year with “The Lake House,” a film starring Bullock and Keanu Reeves. But he was also taken off the movie in post-production.

DEALING with the power politics of studios and movie stars can leave scars. Mike Van Diem, a Dutch director who won the best foreign film Oscar in 1997 for “Character,” was wooed all over Hollywood. He landed a job making “Spy Game” with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt. But after spending two years on the project, he was abruptly fired and replaced by Tony Scott. He hasn’t worked since.

Some directors have blossomed in Hollywood, be it Del Toro, who did “Hellboy” for Revolution, or Gabriele Muccino, the Italian director who made “The Pursuit of Happyness” at Sony. But many have struggled. Ang Lee’s biggest failures have been his most studio-centric films, “Ride With the Devil” and “The Hulk.”

The biggest eye-opener for foreign directors is the realization that they are not actually in control of their movie. In Europe and Latin America, the director is the auteur of the film -- or, as our president would put it, they are the decider. In Hollywood, power is far more diffuse, often in the hands of the film’s star, the studio or a powerful producer. Unaccustomed to sharing authority, many foreign directors find themselves being labeled un-collaborative as they struggle for creative control.

“In Europe and Mexico, you have a creative pyramid with the director at the top,” says Del Toro. “In Hollywood, there’s a packaging mentality where the director is just another element that makes the package attractive. On ‘Mimic,’ I ended up working with five different writers, and I always felt that I was a replaceable commodity. That’s a fundamental difference. In Europe, it would be a huge scandal to replace the director. Here it’s an everyday occurrence.”

Movie stars carry a big stick. But for every Redford, who lost faith in Van Diem, there is a Bullock, a big supporter of Yapo, and a Will Smith, who was responsible for Muccino getting the gig on “Happyness.” “It was 100% Will’s idea,” says Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal. “I saw one of Gabriele’s Italian movies and loved it. But then I met him and he didn’t even speak English! So sure, I gulped. But Will believed he would get a great performance out of him, and he was right.”

Hirschbiegel’s experience on “Invasion” is more complicated. The studio had issues with the movie, one being that it didn’t have enough action. Though the director wouldn’t speak to me, his agents contend the action deficit wasn’t his fault because many of the action scenes were cut due to budget constraints. “It’s not such a big deal,” says Warners chief Alan Horn. “We needed to do reshoots, as is often the case, and Oliver wasn’t available, so we used someone else. I think we’ve had a great track record working with foreign directors -- just look at the great work Alfonso Cuaron did on his ‘Harry Potter’ film -- so I’m not so sure these kind of problems have anything to do with nationality or culture.”

STILL, cultural differences abound. I’ve heard German and Dutch directors described as overbearing, Italians as emotional and Japanese as inscrutable. During the making of “Brokeback Mountain,” Lee was criticized for being uncommunicative, but perhaps that’s just the way quiet confidence appears to an industry accustomed to a roomful of brash hustlers. There’s an unspoken language in Hollywood that is often more difficult to master than English, the unspoken idiom involving whether filmmakers can patiently listen to invasive studio notes or movie star anxieties.

Many things about Hollywood don’t easily translate into other languages, starting with the art of kissing tush. Making movies in Hollywood can be a confounding experience. Foreign directors usually have far more relaxed post-production schedules than in Hollywood. The sheer size of a studio production can be daunting for someone who’s worked with a much smaller crew. Directors say the loss of creative intimacy is especially daunting.

Sony Pictures Classics co-chief Michael Barker, who has dealt with innumerable foreign directors over the years, recalls Louis Malle chafing on his first Hollywood film. “For him, a studio set felt gargantuan. He did his best work when he got to make more intimate Hollywood films, like ‘Pretty Baby.’ ”

It’s bad enough that Hollywood has a bad habit of falling in love with foreign directors simply because they’re the flavor of the month. But instead of offering them ambitious material, studios often put them on meat-and-potatoes thrillers, hoping their freshness or visual style will, to use studio lingo, elevate the material. In perhaps the worst example of directorial miscasting, after Antonia Bird had an indie hit with “Priest,” a wildly controversial film about incest and homosexuality in the Catholic Church, Disney hired her to make “Mad Love,” a ditzy Drew Barrymore picture about teen lovers on the lam that was madly unwatchable.

WHEN trouble occurs, it’s often hard to tell who’s at fault, the studio for hiring a provocative artist and then treating him like a glorified cinematographer or the filmmaker for being naive or opportunistic. After all, with many national cinemas on the upswing, no one is forced to come to Hollywood. But once you’re here, you need a heavy hitter in your corner. It’s no coincidence that two of Cuaron’s best Hollywood films saw him working with a supportive producer, Mark Johnson on “A Little Princess” and Marc Abraham on “Children of Men.”

“You have to choose your producer carefully, because it’s like a marriage -- you need someone who believes in you,” says Del Toro. “When foreign directors come to me for advice, I remind them that the one word most languages have in common, but rarely use, is ‘no.’ It’s a very powerful word and in Hollywood, if you want to avoid doing a lot of bad things that will hurt your movie, you have to be willing to use it.”

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patrick.goldstein@latimes.com

“The Big Picture” runs each Tuesday in Calendar.