In the catbird seat

Unable to prevent his cellphone from endlessly chirping the other afternoon, Marcus Nispel gave it the evil eye, as if he were about to heave it out the window. “All these phones are so complicated these days,” he complained. “I really wish they would go back to making phones that just had a simple on-and-off switch.”

In the movie world, when you’ve directed a hit, your phone gets a good workout. As director of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” a $9.5-million horror film that has grossed $73.4 million as of Sunday, making it one of the year’s biggest moneymakers, Nispel is in the catbird seat. “All of a sudden I need to clone myself,” he explained the other day, nibbling on a plate of sushi at his Hollywood Hills hideaway.

Padding around in sandals, dressed all in orange -- he’s a devotee of the controversial Indian master Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose photo hangs in a pendant around his neck -- the shaved-headed director looks like a cross between an elfish yoga instructor and an inmate on roadside cleanup detail. He’s definitely in demand: He’s met with Dustin Hoffman, has a thriller with Diane Lane and spent a recent evening with Mike Medavoy, a longtime hero, watching a movie in the producer’s home screening room.

It’s a fair bet that his new fans won’t be putting Nispel’s blood-soaked version of the 1974 horror classic on their Oscar ballots. The reviews have been withering. As the New York Times put it: “This bilious film ... is about as much fun as sitting in on an autopsy.” But when you hit pay dirt, it’s easy to brush aside a little critical censure -- everybody loves a winner no matter what form it takes. After years out of sight and out of mind, Roman Polanski is an icon again, thanks to last year’s Oscar for best director.

“In Hollywood, the currency of heat is more important than money or reality,” says director Rob Cohen, who suddenly found himself in demand after years of knocking on closed doors when he had a hit in 2001 with “The Fast and the Furious.” “I’d always conducted myself admirably and had a lot of friends, but when I had a hit, the people who liked me were relieved. Now they could like me and send me a script too.”

At 40, Nispel is no wunderkind. The disarmingly frank German-born director has been a top video and commercial filmmaker for years, directing, by his count, more than 1,000 videos and commercials selling everything from Coca-Cola, Nike and Marlboros to Mariah Carey, Puff Daddy and Janet Jackson. What makes Nispel’s ascension so intriguing is that he’s hit pay dirt despite missteps and blunders that might have sunk a person with a less formidable will.

In 1998, set to make his feature debut directing a $100-million Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, “End of Days,” Nispel walked off the project, citing budgetary differences with the film’s producers. To add insult to injury, while he was in preproduction, a 64-page document Nispel and his assistant wrote for his ad clients, known as his “Manifesto,” was faxed around town, prompting a sarcastic story in Variety. Excerpts included such directives as: “Marcus doesn’t do client dinners, explain that he has a superstition.... Talent should be asked to remain quiet and not talk to Marcus unless he needs to talk to them.... Marcus never has baggage.”

In 2000, Nispel was one of three people forced to resign from Tony and Ridley Scott’s commercial film company after it ran a widely denounced ad mocking striking actors, showing a bare-breasted elderly black woman, with the copy: “In South Africa, this is what SAG means.”

The Manifesto, Nispel says, was not the work of a diva, but a workaholic who runs a tight ship. “I was trying to not waste my time or anyone else’s,” he says. “But because of the way it came out, it ruined my career for years. It wasn’t like I was Ivana Trump in a rush to shop on Rodeo Drive. It was about time management.” He holds up his phone, which has mysteriously gone silent. “When I’m not home on time, my wife hangs up on me, like she just did.”

He says the Screen Actors Guild ad was designed as satire -- and wasn’t his idea. “But it was in bad taste and I wasn’t adamant enough in my criticism,” he acknowledges. “I don’t like strikes because I like to work and I don’t like procrastination, which is why I always get in trouble.”

Ugly duckling projects

He may be a prickly perfectionist, but Nispel is a formidable talent as anyone who has seen his commercial reel will attest. Hearing him talk about his career ambitions, he sounds a lot like one of the raging bulls from the 1970s -- say Billy Friedkin or Peter Bogdanovich -- who often came off as arrogant brats. When he and his family moved into their other house in Malibu, Nispel was delighted to discover that it once had been the home of Julia Phillips, a ‘70s producer and tell-all bomb-thrower.

“I’m a man out of time,” he says. “I really identify with the ‘70s filmmakers. I guess I have a lot of chutzpah, so I’m proud to carry the torch.”

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Nispel came to America in 1984 on a Fulbright scholarship. He worked in advertising, ending up at a company that did feature film promotions. Or as he explains: “I went from Chiquita bananas to working with Spielberg and Coppola. It was very enlightening, because you saw these immortal demigods at their most desperate, chewing on their fingernails, worrying about the ad campaigns that might make or break their movies.”

Nispel soon was directing himself, getting his break on a series of C&C; Music Factory videos. Hollywood came calling in the early 1990s, when his hip-hop videos were all over MTV. Saying he didn’t want to be typecast doing a rap-based film, the German director asked to see only scripts in which he could contribute something from his culture. “So,” he says, “they sent me a script about Adolf Hitler.”

It probably was inevitable that Nispel would end up doing a movie like “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” because the horror genre relies heavily on visual storytelling, lightning-fast cutting and lots of visceral kicks. Untold generations of filmmakers have gotten their start doing horror movies, including such luminaries as James Cameron, John Carpenter, John Sayles, Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson.

After all, Nispel was the director of a classic 1999 Burger King ad in which, to sell the idea that the company’s new double cheeseburger was a great drive-through choice because it wouldn’t drip in your lap, Nispel strapped a burger to a crash-test dummy and sent a car smashing into a brick wall. The burger survived, the car didn’t.

“My biggest successes, whether in music videos or with my first movie, have always been ugly duckling projects,” says Nispel. “But I have to be in a situation where I can be inventive. With ‘End of Days,’ I had all the money in the world, but I couldn’t do anything with it. With ‘Chainsaw,’ I had very little money, but I could do anything with it.”

“Massacre” has a complicated history, but it owes most of its success to Platinum Dunes, Michael Bay’s low-budget film production wing that is run by Brad Fuller and Andrew Form. Having joined forces with Radar Pictures, they took the project to New Line, which put up $7 million for domestic rights to the film. It made it easier to take a chance on Nispel with Bay aboard, who saw Nispel as something of a kindred spirit because he also started his career in the advertising world.

“I knew Marcus had a rough go of it in the feature world, but I had final cut on the movie, so we didn’t have to deal with a lot of the studio-by-committee stuff,” says Bay. “Marcus and I were just on the same wavelength creatively. And having seen his reel and knowing his experience shooting commercials, we knew he could make his days and come in on schedule.”

Bay told Nispel not to look at his reviews, but Nispel read them all, even the Roger Ebert tirade that called “Massacre” a “contemptible film: vile, ugly and brutal.” Nispel took solace in the fact that Tobe Hooper’s original film was largely excoriated as well, but now is considered a classic. “I was much more scared by Tobe’s opinion than Roger Ebert’s,” says Nispel. “Ebert was so angry that I felt like a school kid who’d gotten away with a great prank. He said our movie looked so real, and I thought, ‘Is that a bad review or a good review?’ We wanted it to look real.”

Impressed as I was by Nispel’s abilities, I still found it difficult to reconcile “Massacre’s” embrace of severed limbs and gruesome deeds with his orange-clad spirituality. Couldn’t he see a wee bit of contradiction?

“I’m very spiritual, but I don’t deny the animal in me,” he says. Nispel recounts a story his master, Rajneesh, often would tell about a man who had two wolves fighting in his heart, one representing love, the other fear. “Someone asked him who wins,” Nispel recalls. “And he said, ‘Whoever feeds them the most.’ ”

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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.