Some Foreign Directors Love Hollywood More From Afar

John Woo almost single-handedly reinvented the modern-day action movie with his bravura 1980s Hong Kong movies, but his introduction to Hollywood filmmaking was a near fiasco. “In Hong Kong, everything was very simple,” the soft-spoken director recalled the other day, sitting in his Santa Monica offices. “The filmmakers had full control. We’d have one meeting with the studio, just to let them know the idea for the movie, and then we’d be on our own.” Woo’s eyes twinkled. “I think often I wrote and directed the film at the same time.”

The director had a rude awakening on his first studio film, a 1993 Jean-Claude Van Damme action vehicle from Universal called “Hard Target.” Woo went weeks over schedule and had a disastrous test screening where an American audience, unfamiliar at that point with Woo’s hyperkinetic style, tittered at his ballet-like action scenes and heart-on-his-sleeve storytelling.

“Things eventually turned out OK, but at the time it was something of a catastrophe,” recalls veteran producer Jim Jacks, a longtime Woo fan who made the movie. “It was a real cultural education for all of us. American audiences didn’t understand the Chinese style of drama. And John had to adjust to American actors. He was used to Chow Yun-Fat, who was respectful and would always defer to his director. But that wasn’t the case at all with Jean-Claude.”

Since that rocky start, Woo has emerged as one of Hollywood’s most bankable action directors, making such hits as “Face/Off” and “Mission: Impossible 2.” His flamboyant style of directing has influenced a wide spectrum of filmmakers, from Quentin Tarantino to the Wachowski brothers. Woo is so well established that he’ll survive the drubbing he’s taken on “Windtalkers,” the $115-million film that will be a huge money-loser for MGM.

Still, even his biggest fans--count me as one of them--believe that most of Woo’s Hollywood movies pale in comparison to his work in Hong Kong on such films as “A Better Tomorrow” and “Hard-Boiled.” As Dave Kehr wrote recently in the New York Times: “In much of his American work, Woo has seemed more concerned with satisfying expectations than he has with exploring new directions or trying to grow as an artist.” Woo is hardly alone. There are many emigre directors, from Holland’s Paul Verhoeven to Mexico’s Luis Mandoki, whose American films haven’t matched the artistry of the films they made in their native countries.

All too many foreign directors have suffered severe culture shock.

Alain Berliner, the Belgian director of “Ma Vie En Rose,” had a disastrous experience making “Passion of Mind” with Demi Moore, who walked away from the movie. Chen Kaige, the Chinese director of “Farewell My Concubine,” made “Killing Me Softly,” starring Heather Graham and Joseph Fiennes, a movie that still sits on the shelf unreleased. Talented directors like Alfonso Cuaron (Mexico), Jean-Pierre Jeunet (France) and Mira Nair (India) returned to their native countries to rejuvenate their careers after floundering in Hollywood.

The bottom line: Hollywood hires foreign filmmakers for their artistic cachet, then often wastes their gifts on hackneyed material. It’s that classic combination of the American thirst for the exotic and insistence on the familiar. I laughed out loud when I heard the elegant French director Jean-Jacques Annaud referred to at his American talent agency as “J.J.”

Successes and Struggles

Foreign directors have a long, rich history in Hollywood, from Josef von Sternberg and Billy Wilder to Fritz Lang and Fred Zinnemann, and more recently directors like Czech-born Milos Forman have flourished in America. But many have suffered, including Ireland’s Neil Jordan, who bombed trying to make broad comedies here, and the late Louis Malle, who returned to France embittered by his studio experience. Even directors like Wolfgang Petersen and Lasse Hallstrom, who’ve enjoyed great success, struggled for years trying to marry their European sensibility with American material.

For foreign filmmakers, Hollywood can be a wilderness populated by willful movie stars and meddling studio executives. “It’s a very insecure business,” says Woo, who learned English by watching TV news and became a U.S. citizen five years ago. “Everyone wants to get involved and change things, which creates a lot of confusion. I can never get used to all of the meetings and politics. You can spend eight months just in meetings--it wastes so much time and energy.”

Many foreign directors have work habits that would be considered outlandish by Hollywood standards. People who visit the sets of Tsui Hark, the brilliant Hong Kong director of such films as “Peking Opera Blues” and “Once Upon a Time in China,” say he often goes without sleep for days on end, sometimes working with an IV-fluid drip in his arm to keep him going.

When filming in Hong Kong, Woo and Hark thought nothing of stopping a film for weeks at a time--and releasing their crew--while they rewrote the script or dreamed up a better action sequence. In Hollywood, where crews are unionized, such improvisation would be unthinkable.

“It’s a big adjustment for filmmakers to come here and see a street filled with big trailers for movie stars,” says Theo van de Sande, a Dutch-born cinematographer who has shot many Hollywood films (“Blade,” “Volcano”) since moving here in 1987. “In Europe, directors are storytellers. Here you tell a story and then you have a test screening to ask the audience if they liked it or not.”

A Loss of Control

Much of the culture clash comes from issues of control. In Hollywood, it’s the $20-million movie star who wields the power. But in Europe and Asia, it’s the director who is king. “A lot of my friends have rushed to America to make a Hollywood movie, only to learn that if you are hired to make a movie developed by the studio, the movie is not yours,” says Annaud, director of “The Name of the Rose” and “Seven Years in Tibet.”

The studios have often steered filmmakers into misguided projects--”Amelie’s” Jean-Pierre Jeunet was oh-so-wrong for “Alien: Resurrection”--but directors are hardly unwilling participants. Verhoeven seemed startled when I once asked him why he’d abandoned the vividly personal movies he made in Holland. When he was young, he said, “all I wanted to do was come to Hollywood and make war movies.”

Hark was so eager to work in America that he was willing to make his debut making a film starring Van Damme, Mickey Rourke and Dennis Rodman--you’d need a couple of IVs to survive that one.

“Let’s face it, everyone wants to come here so you have to learn to play by Hollywood’s rules,” says Ashok Amritraj, the Indian-born producer of American films including “Bandits.” “It can be overwhelming. It took me 10 years to get to know the right players and shake the right hands.”

Cultural connections don’t come easy. Amritraj says he has shied away from making American teenage movies, saying “it would be very hard to do it well for someone who didn’t grow up here.” After “Hard Target,” Woo spent two years traveling in America, getting to know the country before he made another movie. But it’s also crucial to learn the culture of Hollywood, where everyone, qualified or not, gets to have an opinion about the finished product.

“It’s hard for filmmakers who’ve always listened to their own voice to suddenly have to take in all these points of view and discern what’s valuable and what’s not,” says ICM’s Robert Newman, an agent who represents a host of A-list directors.

Although directors like Woo have often been saddled with clunky scripts here, their stylistic flourishes have begun to alter the square-jawed look of Hollywood films. In Hong Kong movies, actors are free with laughter and tears. So when Woo made “Face/Off,” he pestered Nicolas Cage to be more emotionally expressive. “American actors think that the hero never cries,” he explains. “Nick would always say, ‘Are you sure I can do that?’ ”

Having an outsider’s perspective has breathed extra life into such quintessentially American films as Forman’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas.”

“When you’re an immigrant, you make films with an accent just as you talk with one,” says Annaud. “You shouldn’t try to hide it. It’s the accent that gives you a special flavor.”

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“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.