Seeking a Fright to the Finish

Alejandro Amenabar doesn’t believe in ghosts.

Ask the 29-year-old Spanish director if he’s ever encountered an apparition in a creepy old house and he’ll respond with a hearty laugh.

“I’m not really terrified by the possibility of seeing a ghost,” he says. “It is human beings--and the things they’re capable of--that really scare me.”

The question does not come out of the blue; after all, Amenabar’s latest film, “The Others,” the follow-up to his 1997 cult sensation “Open Your Eyes,” is a stylish ghost story. “The Others” harks back to atmospheric genre classics such as the 1963 Robert Wise-directed version of “The Haunting” and “The Innocents,” the 1961 adaptation of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw.”

“The Others,” which opens Friday, is Amenabar’s first English-language movie (“Open Your Eyes” is in Spanish). It was produced by Cruise/Wagner Productions, the company owned by Tom Cruise, and it stars Cruise’s ex-wife Nicole Kidman. Unlike “Open Your Eyes,” which was made in Spain for less than $2 million, “The Others’ enjoyed a relatively plush budget of about $20 million.

Amenabar’s pop sensibility, as well as his sly manipulation of genre conventions, makes him a perfect candidate for Hollywood success. In fact, Cameron Crowe’s upcoming “Vanilla Sky” is a remake of “Open Your Eyes” (it even co-stars the original’s lead actress, Penelope Cruz, along with her dating partner Cruise). An English version of Amenabar’s first film, 1995’s “Tesis,” is also in the works.

Fans of “Open Your Eyes” will remember the film’s surprise ending; the device is something of an Amenabar trademark. “The Others” boasts a number of riveting plot twists and a remarkable resolution, its final, cathartic moments provoking shock, dread and disbelief. Sitting in the balcony of a Beverly Hills hotel room recently, Amenabar smiles when asked if any of his friends were able to guess the film’s ending. He proudly announces that he was able to fool them all--adding that as a spectator himself, he loves those movies that manage to surprise him in an intelligent way.

“Eventually I’d love to free myself from surprise endings,” he admits. “Hitchcock didn’t like them. He avoided them as much as he could. But I can’t seem to shake them off. A big discovery at the end of the picture helps me guide my protagonist to the culmination of the journey, to the lesson that’s waiting to be learned.”

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“The Others” tells the story of Grace (Nicole Kidman), a stern, repressed Englishwoman who spends her days locked with her two children inside a mansion on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands between Britain and France, at the end of World War II. Grace is eagerly awaiting the return of her husband from the front, even though she is starting to suspect he might have died in combat. Because they suffer a rare disease that makes them extremely sensitive to light, the children must be kept away from the sun at all times.

When three servants arrive at the secluded mansion, after the previous batch of hired help unexpectedly deserted the household, a series of deliciously unsettling events begins to happen, suggesting that the house might be haunted.

From the moment he started writing the movie three years ago, Amenabar knew that he wanted its opening sequence to be the image of a woman screaming inside an old, spooky mansion. He was also infatuated with the idea of children who cannot be exposed to the light of day.

“I saw it as a metaphor on knowledge and also on the ways that we use to educate our children, ways which sometimes I think are simply monstrous,” Amenabar says.

Metaphors are central to Amenabar’s work. The character of Grace, for instance, an oppressive mother who dominates her children in spite of her love for them, is a potent representation of the contradictions inherent in families.

“You could say the entire story functions as a complete transgression on what a family is supposed to be,” Amenabar says. “I love the idea of hidden ghosts in family relations. [Grace’s] biggest contradiction is that, although she is a castrating mother, she loves her children madly.”

“It wasn’t a simple character,” agrees Kidman, speaking by phone from New York. “This is a woman whose whole life revolves around protecting her children. This [particular element] was very important to me. I wanted the audience to feel for her.”

Ambiguity, then, is an important part of Amenabar’s reinterpretation of the suspense genre.

“All the haunted houses stories that I had read or seen always ended in this very linear fashion, mainly with a confrontation between good and evil,” he says. “My intention was to use the same narrative elements but end up with the exact opposite moral conclusion. At the end of my story, Grace comes to realize that she knows absolutely nothing, that she has no concrete answers or solutions for her life.”

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With a star topping its cast and its “Sixth Sense”-like supernatural thriller feel, “The Others” is clearly a more mainstream proposition than Amenabar’s earlier work. Still, it’s a pretty risky venture for everyone involved, including Dimension Films, the company that’s distributing it.

“The risk is quite evident,” says Amenabar. “The Miramax people [Dimension is an arm of Miramax] are pushing hard for the movie because they really like it and believe in it. Tom Cruise loved it too. But I know that it’s a weird film--it’s definitely not your typical Hollywood movie. On the other hand, it toys with a number of traditional genre elements.”

Amenabar, who composes the music to all of his films using keyboards, computers and orchestration software, emphasizes that in the film, “we did almost the opposite of what Hollywood is doing these days” in terms of sound design. “Some of the mixers on those [mainstream] films are forced to wear earplugs at work,” he says. “My movie gives a lot of importance to silence. It forces the viewer to be quiet, to pay attention to what the characters are saying, to what you think is being heard at a specific moment, but maybe it isn’t.”

Still, the most problematic aspect of the movie in terms of its box-office potential could be its dogged reliance on traditional suspense. There’s not a single computer-generated image in the entire picture. Will the subtleties of Amenabar’s movie be appreciated by the crowds used to a steady diet of loud, effects-driven popcorn movies offered by the major studios every week during the summer with an assembly-line like efficiency?

“I think [the film] has enough elements to sustain the interest of the less demanding viewers,” Amenabar says. “It would really frustrate me to think that someone was bored by my movie”

Notes Kidman, who’s coming off another risky (if much higher-budget) movie, “Moulin Rouge”: “I think it’s dangerous once you start to be ruled by the commercial aspect of films. Particularly as an actor. [You have to] do what you believe in, do what you think is interesting and support the director’s vision. The films will speak for themselves.”

Paula Wagner, Cruise’s producing partner, believes the movie has commercial appeal. “It’s a good thriller with plenty of scary moments, and there’s a universal theme to it,” she says. “Is it intelligent? Yes, and that’s OK, too.”

The making of “The Others” involved an additional risk for Amenabar: the much-publicized split between Kidman and Cruise, which could have placed the production in jeopardy.

The director was in the process of editing the movie when the news became official. Cruise had met with him in Spain before the beginning of the production, but he never visited the set (after looking for scores of houses in England, the director found the perfect house on the Spanish coast).

Amenabar stresses the fact that the couple’s split didn’t affect the film’s creative process. “I was worried, I guess,” he admits with a nervous laugh. “But both of them, whether together or separate, were always devoted to the movie.”

The breakup of the marriage didn’t affect the movie, according to Wagner. “Nicole is an extraordinary actress. Tom and I were quite involved as the production team because we loved this project. And Alejandro is a very professional director. So, we all focused on the work.”

For her part, Kidman stresses that it was her admiration for Amenabar’s offbeat filmmaking sensibility that drew her to the project. She loved the script the moment she read it, she says, but was originally hesitant about accepting the part.

“At one point, I was even trying to come up with a list of actresses to replace me,” she recalls. “That’s how desperate I was not to do it. I’d just come off doing ‘Moulin Rouge,’ where I got to sing and fall in love, and suddenly I was going to step into this very dark world. But [Amenabar] really encouraged me to do it.”

Now that the film is about to be released, Amenabar doesn’t appear to be excessively preoccupied with its fate in this country. Instead of capitalizing on his current status as cool young filmmaker and loading his plate with a slew of upcoming projects, he has yet to decide what his next film will be about or whether it will be in English or Spanish.

Unlike many of his European peers, Amenabar doesn’t dream of a permanent career in Hollywood. He has no plans of moving to Los Angeles and hasn’t even enlisted the services of an agent to represent him.

“I’ve been really careful about it,” he says. “I have a lot of respect for Hollywood. I see it as the kind of extravagant amusement park every director falls in love with. But if you let yourself be blinded by its luxury and its many stars, you can get into a lot of trouble. I’ve seen too many directors come here to make the movie of their dreams, and end up with a nightmare in their hands.”