Waking from American Dreams

On a blustery morning a few days before last Christmas, 39-year-old Ukrainian-born director Vadim Perelman sat down at a cafe on Larchmont Boulevard to talk about his art. But first, he had to talk about his life.

So burning through many cigarettes and cups of coffee, he recalled the turbulent voyage that yanked him at an early age from his hometown of Kiev, dragged him through the gutters of Rome, Italy, Edmonton, Canada and Los Angeles, and finally deposited him at the helm of a major-studio Hollywood picture.

The timing somehow seemed right to reminisce: Perelman had just finished shooting “House of Sand and Fog,” the first feature film of his career, based on a script he had adapted from a 1999 bestseller by American writer Andre Dubus III. The cast of the drama includes two Academy Award winners, Sir Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly, as the main protagonists. The DreamWorks film, which opens Dec. 26, elegantly weaves strands of the American DNA -- immigration, individualism, materialism, capitalism -- into a narrative propelled by force of Sophoclean circumstances, which Perelman passionately believes to be “a summation of life at its rawest.”

DreamWorks not only financed the project but is already giving it a full-court Oscar press similar to the one given by the studio to 1999’s “American Beauty” (though “House of Sand and Fog” is a far bleaker film than the darkly comic “Beauty”), including showing the film early to influential critics and film writers. (Because of the ban this year on Oscar DVD and tape screeners, DreamWorks will be screening the picture for academy members at the Music Hall theater in Beverly Hills from Nov. 14 through Dec. 11.) The early buzz on the project has been strong, with praise for the boldness of its vision and the power of its performances.

All of the above are auspicious circumstances for any filmmaking debut, and last winter, though the film had yet to be patched together in the editing room, the director knew he’d finally wrenched some kind of victory from the jaws of fate.

For Perelman the conclusion of the shoot felt like arriving at a train station after a long journey. It was the culmination of an improbable odyssey that pulled together a novice director with the kind of unsettling source material that generally scares away studios.

And the crazy thing was, all of it seemed to have unfolded for Perelman as if in preparation for this first project: his bittersweet Soviet-era childhood, his tragically romantic adolescence, interrupted by prolonged stints spent hustling on the street; finally, his newfound sense of purpose bestowed by maturity.

Even in the midst of quiet, verdant Hancock Park, where Perelman now lives with his second wife and a 4-year-old son, the drift of his former life was suddenly and palpably present. At times there were tears in his eyes. “I want you to tell my story,” he told me.

But in fact he has already done so himself. “House of Sand” is his story as much as it is anybody’s.

A NEW LIFE

Born in the Ukrainian city of Kiev, Perelman grew up in an old apartment building where his extended family -- parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles -- shared the bathroom and the kitchen with a dozen neighbors. When he turned 9, Perelman’s grandfather had the first of a series of heart attacks. On the eve of his last, fatal one, the ailing man spied his chance and pulled the boy aside. “Let me tell you a secret,” he said. “I’m going to die today.”

And so he did, his wife following him shortly. The next blow came when Perelman’s father died in a horrific car crash. Then the aunts and uncles moved away and the Perelmans fell on truly wretched times. With nothing left to lose -- or so they thought --they escaped from the Soviet Union in search of a better destiny. Embarking on a westbound train with about 40 suitcases in which they had packed their life was “like the Holocaust,” Perelman recalled.

It is a feeling that certainly echoes those of Kingsley’s character in “House of Sand and Fog.” Forced by the 1979 Islamic Revolution to abandon what had been a happy, prosperous life in Iran, Kingsley’s Col. Behrani, an esteemed higher-up in the shah’s air force, escapes to California where his new immigrant life turns out to be one humbling defeat after another. The proud colonel, who once stood at the side of kings, is now a mender of roads and a gas-station clerk, a man who secretively slaves to protect his beloved family from the embarrassment of poverty.

Until, that is, the chance to reclaim a shard of former good fortune comes along as a piece of real estate; a seized home, auctioned off and bought by the Behranis for a pittance. To them, it is an investment they hope will pay off; to the erstwhile owner, Connelly’s troubled Kathy Nicolo, all she has left in the world. So in the book, and in its faithful cinematic adaptation, the single woman and the immigrant family get locked in a ruinous conflict over a house.

Judged by its $15-million budget, “House of Sand” is a small movie. Judged by its themes, it is ambitious, epic -- the kind of sweeping social realism rarely seen in Hollywood movies. “The issues are not cerebral, indie-style issues, they are visceral. It’s a big movie masquerading as an indie movie,” said one of the producers of the film, Michael London, a former L.A. Times film writer.

The film’s background details -- the sadness of neon-lit suburbia, the majesty of nature are exactingly Californian. But the arias of disillusionment, hope, bitterness and despair in the narrative are spelled out in a distinctly Slavic syntax. Perelman’s touch is unsentimental but has its own built-in allure. His shots of Northern California nature -- pine trees enshrouded in mist, sheets of rolling fog, sunset shadows lapping at a morose Pacific -- punctuate the story with a Russian sense of spaciousness and doom.

In the film’s opening scene, Behrani recalls nostalgically the cedars he had once cut off to clear up a vista in front of his vacation manor on the Persian shore of the Caspian Sea. Shortly thereafter “our life,” he says in the film, “went the way of the trees.”

And so it was for Perelman’s family.

ROME TENEMENT

After their traumatic exit from Eastern Europe, the Perelmans settled in Rome in a rank basement tenement in the suburb of Ostia. The only money they had came from selling knickknacks.

His mother, too embarrassed to help, would instead “walk around Rome, visiting museums and churches.” In an eerily similar manner, in Dubus’ book, Behrani notes of his wife that “... my dear Nadereh could not and cannot bear to let other families know we have next to nothing left from the manner in which we used to live.” The young Perelman, who by now had turned 15, took to the streets.

The vagabond life was beastly. He constantly got into fights with Italian and Russian street kids, competitors stalking the same territory. “There was no solidarity among us. It was everybody for himself,” Perelman recalled. “We were like wild animals, completely savage and mean.”

It is partly because of this background that the director said he takes the enterprise of moviemaking in stride today, knowing better than to stress about going over budget or fret over his actors’ tantrums. “Now, no matter what life throws at times, it doesn’t scare me,” Perelman said.

He lived on the streets of Rome for about a year, until finally an aunt agreed to sponsor him and his mother to immigrate to Canada. They arrived in Edmonton, Alberta with $28 to their names, “my last gas-station money.”

Family life was rife with emotional turmoil and discontent. His mother married a Russian emigre, who became Perelman’s stepfather. “I hated him,” he said. So Perelman dropped out of school and hit the skids again. He hooked up with another gang of young delinquents, stealing and unloading goods for cash.

Books were his only connection with the world, reading his only faith. “My gods,” he said, “were Dostoevsky, Charles Bukowski, Ralph Ellison and Rimbaud. I guess it was a pretty romantic life for a teenager.” The romance lasted for four years, but eventually the law caught up with him. Perelman’s gang was rounded up and he ended up spending a night in jail. The experience shook him up. “I decided to straighten myself out,” he said.

He took a job on the oil rigs, enrolled in evening classes, got his GED and was soon college-bound. It was in a film appreciation class there that he saw a documentary about Norman Jewison making “Fiddler on the Roof.” “I walked out of there with an epiphany,” he said. “I went outside -- it was snowing and these huge snowflakes were coming down -- and I spread my arms wide and shouted: ‘Yes! I know what I want to do with my life!’ ”

He hastily applied to Toronto’s Ryerson University, home to one of Canada’s most prestigious film production programs.

But he felt too grown-up and weary to fit in there. The righteousness of his classmates, their naive left-wing ideology, irked him. “I was so disgusted with my peers,” he said. “They were like young kids, and I felt like I had lived so much, that I had seen it all. I have a line in my script, where Behrani says, ‘Americans have the eyes of small children.’ That’s how I felt at the time.”

Eventually he made a name for himself by cutting music videos, got married, and in 1992 came to Los Angeles to break into film.

A NOVEL CLICKS

If storytelling is meant to restore the mythical dimension of life, Perelman suddenly saw his existence memorialized in a novel he picked up by chance a couple of years ago. He read Dubus’ “House of Sand” on a plane in 2001, and making it into a film became an obsession.

He wrote the script in a fever that lasted 15 days. Something clicked: The characters felt as if they were part of him. “My mother is Nadi,” he said. “My stepfather is Behrani. My first wife is Kathy. And I used to be Esmail [Behrani and Nadi’s son], although a less innocent Esmail.”

The book’s themes he understood all too well: The immigrant family marooned on foreign land outside the bounds of respectable society, the telling of lies designed to keep up appearances for the benefit of neighbors. The many ways in which the Land of Milk and Honey can crush a newcomer’s spirit -- the flip side of the American Dream.

But when the aspiring filmmaker, by now a successful commercial director, contacted Dubus’ agent, he found that many others were in assiduous pursuit of the film rights for the story. “This book had a lot of interest in it,” Dubus said. “I had over a hundred calls in three years, from all sorts of impressive people. But Perelman was the first one I spoke to whom I really believed was not going to mutilate the story.”

The two bonded. It helped that they both had paid in wages of hardship for whatever artistic success they had achieved. Like Perelman, Dubus came to his vocation later in life, even though his father, Andre Dubus, was a well-respected writer who, incidentally, wrote the story on which the 2001 Oscar-nominated “In the Bedroom” is based.

Before “House of Sand and Fog” made Oprah’s Book Club, Dubus had spent a couple of decades working as an actor, private investigator, college instructor, bartender and bounty hunter but mostly as a carpenter in the shipbuilding town of Newburyport, Mass. The writer picked Perelman out of almost a hundred solicitants who wanted to adapt his work to the screen. He says he was impressed that in distilling the book into script form, the filmmaker had demonstrated an intuitive grasp for the layered complexity of the material.

“With him,” Dubus said, “I just felt as if he understood the subtle resonances. In my story, I tried to go as deeply and widely inside these people as I could. But I found no real answers, I just got into deeper questions. And I felt that Vadim Perelman -- in a way that others did not -- seized the deeper questions.”

The deeper questions, of course, have to do with the way the text explores the patterns of human behavior under duress but also include a realistic acknowledgment of social disturbances such as racism, xenophobia, addiction and poverty. And the project somehow reads as a manifesto for California and its discontents: the immigrants with their spirits broken, not resurrected, by the Golden State; the residents enslaved by the terror of unemployment and high real estate prices.

“The book is a great stew,” producer London said last year while the shoot was underway. “So much of this story is topical. We hope to avoid the trappings of big movies and retain the integrity of the story. You can’t pander to the public too much.”

Writer Dubus added: “I feel optimistic about this. Maybe I shouldn’t be, because most movies are garbage. But I am -- because of the script. Because Perelman understands. He’s just treating the Behrani family with such love and compassion, and he’s really giving them screen time together as a family.”

The very idea of presenting Iranian Americans on screen, their conjugal moments, embarrassments and victories unsullied by sentimentality, is itself a novelty in mainstream cinema, especially because the film aims to steer away from reductionist impulses -- the kind of folkloric theater in which cultural differences are milked for laughs and an exotic ethnicity is treated as a fascinating curio.

A sense of authenticity is also lent by the cast: Behrani’s teenage son Esmail is played by Jonathan Ahdout, a first-generation Iranian American from Brentwood who has never acted before. Behrani’s wife is played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, a major film and stage star in her native Iran at the time she fled -- like her fictional character -- the Islamic Revolution. And Ron Eldard brings a sense of realistic ambivalence to the character of Deputy Sheriff Burdon, the enforcer of the law whose love for Kathy Nicolo launches him into a lawless pursuit of her cause.

The director contributed images of his own to further illuminate the narrative. The story may be an American tragedy, but the production “is a Russian movie,” Perelman said. “It has operatic qualities, romance. It’s a heightened reality; I’m not being subtle.” The richly dark score by James Horner suggests the sweep of Prokofiev and likewise establishes the scale and expansive mood of the piece. “The important thing was not to be over the top -- yet to keep the emotion, not to be minimalist,” the director said. “I didn’t want the film to have that indie, claustrophobic feel -- this was a way for me to open it up, to get some air in it.”

It was also a way to emphasize, as the epilogue of Greek tragedy traditionally does, that no matter how great the upheavals of man, universal order will inevitably reassert itself in the end. “Life goes on, you know?” is how Perelman summed it up. “And we are smaller than that. And even though our problems may seem incredibly heart-wrenching to us, that fog and that mountain and those trees will always be there.”

IN THE BIG TIME

Though a novice film director, Perelman earned the respect of his stars. “When [his] screenplay arrived, I thought it was exquisite,” said Kingsley, who won an Oscar for portraying Gandhi (1982) and whose Behrani feels so fiercely real it’s as if he were fashioned out of his own rib.

The actor said that in meeting Perelman, he found him to be “an equal. I have had lots of talk with first-time directors, which was just blah-blah-blah. But you know a man who can get the best out of you when you see one. I knew that I could not be lazy in his presence and do the old tricks that I’d done before.”

Still, Kingsley added that the filmmaker gave him free rein to interpret the pivotal character. “He did not tell me too much about [his personal history], because he didn’t want to intrude on my performance with his own agenda, which I thought was very intelligent and restrained of him,” Kingsley said. “He let me tell my Behrani story, even though he knew he had his own Behrani story. He never interrupted mine with his.”

At the end of the day, beyond topicality, marketing stratagems and whatever critical and commercial fate it might have, the film strives to give the gift of a big, passionate story in which audiences can deeply invest themselves.

Behrani’s path in particular is bound to strike a chord with many. “I think the journey of the man is a dramatic, poetic journey. It has beauty and its beauty lies in its scale,” Kingsley said. “He went through a series of astonishing losses -- the loss of his king, the shah; the loss of his kingdom, Iran; the loss of his dignity and standing in society.

“But he still kept the determination to be a patriarch, be a father, and a husband; the determination to educate his son, to marry his daughter well, to live in a decent home and be part of a beautiful and optimistic and aspiring new society. And there are sides to the man that are closed, irritating, dogmatic and backward, but there are sides to the man that are extremely noble and brave.”

Of his protagonists, as is his way, Perelman spoke with proprietary ardor.

“My people are holy,” he said. “They have noble goals. They’re Shakespearean. They want good, but they end up getting nothing but bad. It’s a very nihilistic way of looking at life, and by the end of the movie, sure, you have a big lump in your chest, but ....”

His sentence trailed off, but the implied end is the personal creed he has mentioned again and again: catharsis for his audience. “I just want to move as many people as I can,” he said. “That’s all I ever wanted to do -- move people.”