Open to Interpretation

Cameron Crowe makes no bones about it: His next movie, “Vanilla Sky,” is a remake of a 1997 Spanish-import hit “Abre los ojos” (“Open Your Eyes”).

“A lot of people will remake a film and then scurry to find a way to sound like they didn’t,” said Crowe, who is putting the finishing touches on the Dec. 14 release from Paramount Pictures. “I say, let’s honor this film in remaking it, but by using new elements, with the idea that you could watch both and have fun with the larger questions.”

Casting about for a metaphor, the onetime rock critic hit on one: “This is like a song our band can play. Somebody else wrote it and now we’re playing their song, with the elements that our band brings to it. It’s our interpretation. I’m not tampering with the original, as much as I’m doing a cover version that honors the work.”

Written and directed by Alejandro Amenabar (“The Others”), “Abre los ojos” was a 1997 what-is-reality thriller about a handsome young playboy who is disfigured in a car accident but subsequently has plastic surgery to restore his beauty. Or does he?

Like such films as “The Matrix,” “The Thirteenth Floor” and the current “Waking Life” and “Mulholland Dr.,” “Abre los ojos” holds out the possibility that what you’ve just seen is a dream, from which the central character is only just awakening. Or is he?

Crowe has his own ideas, but he hasn’t discussed them with Amenabar, whose blessing he received to remake the film.

“I had this dream that he and I would sit and talk about what he meant with his film,” Crowe said. “Sometime it would be fun to sit down with him. But I didn’t want to talk about it before I had finished the whole movie.”

Crowe went so far as to cast Penelope Cruz, who played the principal love interest in Amenabar’s version, in the same role in “Vanilla Sky,” with Tom Cruise in the lead. Her voice, whispering, “Abre los ojos,” will open Crowe’s movie in the same way it did the original film.

“She said if anybody did a remake and didn’t cast her, she’d come after them with an Uzi,” Crowe said. “So, obviously, she was someone I wanted to talk to. I loved that aspect of it: It felt like sampling part of the original.”

Crowe is aware of the pitfalls of trying to remake any film. “I cringe when anybody brings up the idea of remaking ‘The Apartment,”’ said Crowe, who wrote a book about the director of that movie, Billy Wilder.

It becomes doubly hard when the original material was a foreign-language hit: The more particular the material is to the nationality of its home country, the more a Hollywood filmmaker is likely to screw it up in trying to give it an American accent.

“I was offered ‘Shall We Dance?’ and said no because it was such a specific story to that culture,” Crowe said. “There was something about the repressed spirit of this early-middle-aged Japanese man that was very specific, that we don’t have here. Whereas this film was very global in its themes. There was nothing intrinsically Spanish, other than the locales. I felt like it would travel well.”

But as we’ve learned from history, when foreign hits are retooled to fit American sensibilities, something gets lost in the translation. Things often end unfortunately, both on the screen and at the box office.

Consider just a handful of examples from the past decade:

* Luc Besson’s rock-video approach to flashy secret-agent nihilism, “La Femme Nikita” (1990), was translated into a mechanical and hard-to-swallow Hollywood action-thriller, “Point of No Return” (1993), in which Bridget Fonda, looking very much like an escapee from the Great Plains, was expected to be an acceptable substitute for Anne Parillaud as an international woman of mystery.

* “Diabolique,” Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1955 primer on generating psychological thrills, was transformed into a 1996 pose-off between Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani. It was just one of several Euro-American clonings-gone-wrong in which Hollywood mandated a happy ending to counter all that postwar European gloom.

* The same problem--an ending far too dark for the mainstream mall audience Hollywood so assiduously courts--was the final nail in the coffin of “The Vanishing,” a 1993 American remake of a 1988 Dutch horror hit (“Spoorloos”). This movie was directed by the same person who made the original film, George Sluizer (whose accent actor Jeff Bridges admitted to mimicking for his performance as the remake’s villain).

And those are just some of the most obvious examples in a list that includes “Under Suspicion,” a 2000 remake of the French “Garde a vu” (1981); “Sommersby” (a 1993 remake of “The Return of Martin Guerre,” from 1982); and “City of Angels” (a 1998 remake of “Wings of Desire,” from 1987).

Not even the holiest icons of the foreign canon are immune from plundering, although the classics sometimes inspire some of Hollywood’s better work. Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” (1954) got solid western treatment in “The Magnificent Seven” (1960), while Fellini’s “I Vitelloni” (1953) is credited, variously, as the inspiration for both “American Graffiti” (1973) and “Diner” (1982).

More often, however, American directors stumble while trying to put their own imprimatur on, for example, Francois Truffaut. Paul Mazursky’s “Willie and Phil” (1980) was a half-baked retread of “Jules and Jim” (1961); in Blake Edwards’ “The Man Who Loved Women” (1983), pretty-boy Burt Reynolds replaced craggy-faced Frenchman Charles Denner in the 1977 original of the same title. (In the remake, all the women looked like Hollywood starlets instead of real people--who wouldn’t love them?). Fellini’s “81/2” (1963) has proved irresistible, if inimitable, whether to Mazursky (1970’s “Alex in Wonderland”) or Woody Allen (1980’s “Stardust Memories”).

If there is a single foreign writer-director whose work has suffered the most in repeated attempts at the transatlantic leap, however, it has to be Francis Veber, the writer-director of some of the most popular comedies ever at the French box office.

Veber has had hits that crossed over to America both as a screenwriter (including “The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe,” “The Toy” and “La Cage aux Folles”) and as a writer-director. Almost everything he has created has been a hit in France--and been remade in America .

But, until “The Birdcage” (1994), Mike Nichols’ Americanized version of “La Cage,” there wasn’t a single remake he could stomach. That’s particularly true of a series of comedy hits Veber wrote and directed that teamed Gerard Depardieu and Pierre Richard in the 1980s--all of which were mangled when remade with American stars.

“Le Chevre” became “Pure Luck” (1989, with Danny Glover and Martin Short). “Les Comperes” emerged as “Fathers’ Day” (1996, with Billy Crystal and Robin Williams). And “Les Fugitifs” became “Three Fugitives” (1989, with Nick Nolte and Martin Short).

The problem, Veber says, begins when an American producer buys the rights to one of his film because of its high-concept premise (such as his recent “The Closet”: a clerk pretends to be gay to avoid losing his job). But, in the process of watching it over and over to explain to writers how to Americanize it, the producer grows tired of the film without realizing it.

“So he asks the writer to add things to it to ‘make it richer,”’ Veber says. “Often, it’s like what would happen if you had goose liver and put marmalade on it. Those two things are good by themselves--but when you mix them, they become not good.”

There’s also the cultural factor: French humor about marriage and infidelity, for example, is more matter-of-fact and less moralistic than Hollywood humor. The time-honored French notion of extramarital relationships tends to become a plot fulcrum in the American version, rather than just another element of the story, upsetting the comic balance.

“I can’t write the Hollywood version of my films,” Veber said. “There are cultural differences I don’t know. Watching the remakes teaches me the differences.”

Still, Veber keeps making films in France that are catnip to Hollywood producers. His hit of the past summer, “The Closet,” seems tailor-made for any of several American comedy stars who would probably be wrong for it. (Robin Williams? Jim Carrey?)

According to the Internet Movie Database, his 1999 comedy “The Dinner Game” is slated for an American remake titled “Dinner for Shmucks,” something about which Veber professes ignorance.

“But I might direct it,” he added, “as a way of protecting my baby. I’ve had so many made where the director was not appropriate.”

“Comedy,” Crowe observed, “is a gossamer thing and lot of it is about a specific culture. Comedy is like catching lightning in a bottle. And there’s that bad karma thing of remaking a movie when someone thousands of miles away tries to take the lightning out of one bottle and tries to put it in another bottle, but with bigger stars and better production values.”

Crowe hopes to avoid that negative karma with “Vanilla Sky” because, as he noted, “it’s kind of an open-ended story to start with. And I don’t think this film was that personal a statement for Amenabar.”

Comparisons are invidious, which is why Crowe prefers to think that his movie remake is not intended as a copy of the original, but a variation on a theme. He’s not even sure that he and Amenabar reached the same conclusions as to what is and isn’t real in the story--and hopes that the differences will drive audiences to view the films as companion pieces.

“What I’d like is a dialogue between the two movies,” Crowe said. “Let’s do the movie and, maybe, people will talk about the original as well. When people say, ‘I didn’t see the first one,’ I say they should go see it. It’s part of the whole game of the movie. It’s a modern fable and there are many ways of telling it.”