On Favorite Films and Modest Budgets

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 14th annual Foreign Language Film Award Symposium, held Saturday morning in the jam-packed Samuel Goldwyn Theater in the academy headquarters in Beverly Hills, featured all five directors of this year’s nominated films.

Introduced by Foreign Language committee chair Fay Kanin and hosted by director George Schaefer, the event went smoothly and informatively. The real fun, however, was at the luncheon afterward at Le Dome, where the visiting directors were joined by 15 veteran Hollywood directors for one of the most memorable of these private gatherings.

Once again, the foreign directors impressed audiences with how they managed to make such quality films on such modest budgets. Fabio Barreto revealed that he brought in “O Quatrilho,” an endearing, unconventional romantic comedy set in the frontier of Southern Brazil between 1910 and 1930, at a mere $1.8 million; he said that $1 million is the usual cost for Brazilian pictures. Veteran Swedish director Bo Widerberg regretted he had to admit his “All Things Fair,” a World War II-era love story involving a high school student, played by the director’s son Johan, and his English literature teacher, cost $4.4 million.

“That is too much,” he said, “but there were post-production problems that were not my fault.” Widerberg went on to praise Mike Figgis for having made “Leaving Las Vegas” so inexpensively because now it might be possible for more foreign filmmakers to make the kind of films they wanted to make here. “I have three or four I’d like to do here,” said Widerberg, who assured anyone interested that he could also make Norman Mailer’s McCarthy-era Hollywood novel “Deer Park” for $4.4 million.

Sharing the dais with Schaefer, Widerberg and Barreto were the Netherlands’ Marleen Gorris, whose “Antonia’s Line” is a witty saga of three generations of Dutch women; Algeria’s Rachid Bouchareb, whose stark “Dust of Life” chronicles the fate of Vietnamese children sired by American soldiers; and Italy’s Giuseppe Tornatore, whose “The Star Maker,” is a darker companion film to his Oscar-winning “Cinema Paradiso.” In “Star Maker,” a con man tours Sicily, getting the poor and the naive to pay for phony screen tests.

Traditionally, Schaefer asks his luncheon guests to introduce themselves, but this time he asked the visiting directors to name their two favorite American films and the Hollywood directors to name their two favorite foreign films. Marcel Carne’s “Children of Paradise” was most mentioned, and the directors most frequently named were, not surprisingly, Fellini, Kurosawa, Welles and Ford. Barbet Schroeder passionately cited Roberto Rossellini’s “Europa ‘51” and “Germany Year Zero” as the “great cathedrals of the 20th century.” George Sidney was divided between Julien Duvivier’s “Poil de Carotte” (“Carrot Top”), a classic film of childhood, and Jacques Tati’s “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” or his friend Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ten Days That Shook the World” and Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North.”

Ronald Neame recalled going to France as a child with his mother, Ivy Close, when Abel Gance cast her in his landmark “La Roue” (1923), the story of an ill-fated railroad engineer. He did not, however, get to see this remarkable film--understandably, his first choice--until the Nuart screened it in 1981.

Director Paul Mazursky, one of Hollywood’s best raconteurs, recalled the first such luncheon, held nearly 30 years ago in the home of director George Cukor, who instructed him firmly to water down John Ford’s wine. He also told of his hilarious--and successful--ploys in snaring Fellini for an appearance in his “Alex in Wonderland.” Tornatore then revealed that none other than Fellini was his first choice to play the projectionist in his much-loved “Cinema Paradiso,” subsequently played unforgettably by Philippe Noiret. “He refused, saying ‘Everybody will be distracted by me. You need somebody nobody knows or cares about--You could do it!’ ”