A new Asian flowering

Takashi Shimizu barely speaks a word of English, and Sarah Michelle Gellar is hardly fluent in Japanese. So whenever Shimizu directed his star on the Tokyo set of “The Grudge,” the conversations between the Japanese filmmaker and the American actress were conducted through an interpreter.

But whatever obstacle Shimizu may face in moviemaking communication is surpassed by his mastery of a more important Hollywood vocabulary: the ability to make scary movies. In the wake of “The Matrix” and “The Ring,” American audiences are about to be exposed to a new flood of Asian-influenced cinema, highlighted by the region’s signature terrifying frights and elaborately choreographed action scenes. Convinced that Eastern filmmakers offer one of the most attractive storytelling salvations since comic books, studio executives are falling over themselves to re-create Chinese and Japanese cinema on these shores.

In October, Columbia Pictures will present “The Grudge” starring Gellar in an American remake of Shimizu’s horror film “Ju-On.” Two more adaptations of Japanese fright franchises are due for release next spring -- DreamWorks’ “Ring 2” starring Naomi Watts (and made by original “Ringu” director Hideo Nakata) and Disney’s “Dark Water,” featuring Jennifer Connelly.

The pipeline is packed with similar remake efforts, with more than a dozen spawns in development, some involving heavyweight talent. Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio are attached to a Boston-inflected version of Hong Kong’s police thriller hit “Infernal Affairs” renamed “The Departed,” with no less than Martin Scorsese at the helm. Yet another remake is under Tom Cruise’s production banner, a U.S. take on the Thai horror story “The Eye.”

All this activity comes in addition to the openings of at least 10 films from Asia here in the next four months, movies that are not American remakes but the original deal. These releases reflect the continent’s tradition-laden past, including elaborate martial arts movies from China and breathtaking, contemporary thrillers from Hong Kong and South Korea.

Yet trends die almost as fast as they travel, and American film audiences haven’t been broadly excited by international films in a long time. Even if there are no guarantees the new Asian flowering will survive, this heightened cultural exchange is nonetheless striking.

“I think what we’re experiencing is something like what happened with French, Italian and European cinema of the ‘60s and ‘70s,” says Roger Garcia, programmer of Asian films for the San Francisco International Film Festival and sometime film producer. “There were waves of quality filmmaking from Europe -- directors like Antonioni, Truffaut and Godard who made interesting and well-made films. We’re experiencing something similar in Asian cinema right now -- not just chopsocky, straight-to-video stuff, but really well-made, well-shot and well-acted films.”

This year’s Cannes Film Festival was a prescient cultural barometer of this new Asian cinema. While veteran filmmakers like Wong Kar-wai (with his new film “2046”), Zhang Yimou (“House of Flying Daggers”) and Mamoru Oshii (“Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence”) were there, the newcomers ended up reaping most of the critical acclaim. Korea’s Park Chan-wook and his breathtakingly cinematic thriller “Old Boy” won the second prize, the Grand Jury Prize, and word was that he would have cinched the Palme d’Or had pervasive anti-Iraq-war sentiments not tipped the jury in favor of “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Japanese child actor Yuya Yagira picked up best actor for his role in “Nobody Knows,” and Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung nabbed best actress for a Canadian European co-production, “Clean.” The Jury Prize, a kind of special mention, went to Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul for “Tropical Malady,” an art film par excellence.

The sources of this new wave are varied. Production values have soared -- boasting crisp and daring cinematography, lighting, sound and editing. Computer-generated effects are deftly deployed, since investors are increasingly willing to put money into films they can see going international, with the bigger box office that promises. Effects are used for the sake of high aesthetics in the ultra-slo-mo duel-in-the-rain that highlights Zhang’s “Hero,” opening Friday, as well as for the sake of sheer scare in Japanese horror films.

Conveniently, special effects houses can be found in the vicinity -- Hong Kong has them, Australia and New Zealand have them (Zhang went to Australia for his film), and Singapore is aching to set itself up as the high-tech hub of Asia. This year the Singapore government announced initiatives to attract film business to the island nation -- promoting itself as a shooting location and as a future center of post-production facilities and digital distribution. And George Lucas recently announced plans to build an animation facility there.

Growing sophistication

On the software side, there’s a significant shift in the types of Asian films gaining notice, from what might be called those with deliberate historical and cultural baggage to gritty character studies from the urban jungle. Consider that a decade ago the attention was on films from China as audiences craved a glimpse behind the Bamboo Curtain. They ate up stories about Old Society repressions in such films as Zhang’s “Raise the Red Lantern” or the more recent repressions of the Cultural Revolution.

The crowning of this trend took place in 1993, when the Palme d’Or at Cannes was given to Chen Kaige and his film “Farewell My Concubine,” a sweeping epic that traced China’s turbulent modern history through the lives of two Peking opera actors. It offered everything -- a love triangle, the color and drama of Chinese opera, successive backdrops of the Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese civil war, the rise of communism and the Cultural Revolution. (The top prize was shared that year with Jane Campion for “The Piano.”) Backed by the punch of Miramax distribution, the film became a must-see in the United States for anybody interested in the larger world.

This year’s Cannes sensation “Old Boy” could not be more different. “Old Boy,” which likely will open here at the end of the year, takes place in modern Seoul and tells of two men racked by personal revenge so deep they become monsters. No Big History Narrative is implicated. One can see the story unfolding in almost any city, and Universal executives did, snatching the rights for an American remake.

“Farewell” and “Old Boy” are also worlds apart in style and tone. Most of “Farewell” was presented as a linear narrative, with intense sobriety. “Old Boy” makes use of replays, time juxtapositions, extreme angles and clever wipes that dissolve time and space -- making the audience nearly as disoriented as the main character, who has been locked up for 15 years by an anonymous nemesis. Amid the chases, the fistfights, the shattering glass, there are also moments of wicked hilarity, a la Quentin Tarantino.

Critical choices can often differ from popular choices. Film festivals select and lavish praise on films for political as well as aesthetic reasons that have nothing to do with mass taste. When Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” was shown at Cannes in 2000, it was in the official selection but out of competition -- deemed too pop to merit a prize from that august body. Yet it went on to become a worldwide hit, grossing more than $200 million and opening up the pockets of producers hoping, with mixed results, to emulate its success.

For example, respected Thai producer Adirek Watleela was in town recently to promote the opening of the well-regarded period war epic “Bang Rajan.” He is a founder of Film Bangkok, producer of such art-house favorites as “Tears of the Black Tiger” and “Bangkok Dangerous.” “The art-film business hasn’t been doing too well in Thailand,” he laments. Film Bangkok has tried more commercial fare but, he sighs, “We’re on the verge of shutting down at the end of the year.”

However, American screens soon will feature Asian films that come with track records of both critical and commercial success. From China there’s Zhang’s “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers” and He Ping’s “Warriors of Heaven and Earth”; from Hong Kong there’s Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s “Infernal Affairs”; and from Japan there’s Oshii’s “Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.” But more surprisingly, five from Korea -- Kang Je-gyu’s “Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War,” Kim Ji-Woon’s “Tale of Two Sisters,” Kim Ui-Seok’s “Sword in the Moon,” and two films from Park, “Old Boy” and “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” already a cult favorite from video and DVD distribution.

Most fit into two genres -- action and horror. Many are made by younger directors with edgier contemporary sensibilities, directors willing to show more sex and more violence in liberalized environments. “Smarter” and “more sophisticated” is how Bob Myerson of Tartan Films terms it. His company will be distributing Park’s films in theaters, as well as a number of other Korean and Japanese films on their “Asian Extreme” video-DVD label, which will feature movies that may be “extreme” in violence or sexual content, sometimes both, and “Old Boy.”

Less formulaic would be another strength. While “Infernal Affairs” and “Old Boy” incorporate plenty of bashing and smashing they are also densely plotted, with a heavy dose of psychological complexity thrown in.

The hits redux

Then there are the remakes. Not only are American studios lifting plots and high concepts, sometimes they are lifting the original directors and settings too. Columbia’s hired Shimizu to remake “The Grudge,” which started as a video and spawned two features. DreamWorks’ “Ring 2” is a continuation of the hit “Ring,” which also starred Watts, except this time around it’s hired Nakata. Why this particular fascination with the Japanese horror film?

Robert Tapert, a producer of “The Grudge,” remembers sitting in a screening of “Ju-On” with producing partner Sam Raimi. “When we came out we thought, ‘We have no idea what that was about, but that was really scary,’ ” he recalls. “Part of what was scary was the lack of special effects, the lack of pyrotechnics. They don’t have the resources of Hollywood movies, so they rely more on filmmaking techniques and storytelling.”

They bought the rights through Roy Lee, who has brokered more than a dozen sales of Asian properties to American studios. Not only did they decide to hire Shimizu, they wanted to set the film in Japan, in the house featured in the original, while introducing an American protagonist in the form of Gellar. The new script ties up loose ends left dangling in the Japanese version because, Tapert says, “American audiences demand a logic that the Japanese audiences don’t.”

Walter Parkes, a producer for “Ring” and “Ring 2,” suggests that this very subtlety makes the audience shudder in their seats. “One thing we tried to be very careful about was to make the necessary explanations but not lose the elusiveness,” he says. When Gore Verbinski, who directed the first “Ring,” wasn’t available, he says they naturally turned to Nakata, whom he characterizes as “a brilliant director.”

It’s no accident that action and horror films are favored for remakes -- they are seen to travel more easily across borders. “Dramas and comedies are very culturally based, so they don’t translate well,” says Lee, who is increasingly involved in remaking films and just signed a “first look” deal with Universal, “whereas what’s scary to people in Asia will be scary to people everywhere.”

But Americans should hardly think they are being colonized by “foreign” ideas. After all, early Shaw brothers films in Hong Kong copied Hollywood romances and musicals. “Hero” director Zhang was inspired by pulp fiction he read as a teenager and used a 2,000-year-old legend as a springboard for his story and “Rashomon” by Japan’s Akira Kurosawa as a model for multiple-point-of-view storytelling. In the new film, there are three versions of how two great heroes were felled by “Nameless,” played by Jet Li.

Even the great Kurosawa was not above cross-cultural borrowing. He lifted the plots of two of his finest films from Shakespeare, a man who lived a continent and centuries away. “Throne of Blood” was an adaptation of “Macbeth,” and “Ran” was taken from “King Lear.” And in fact Korean director Park took the startling premise of “Old Boy” from a Japanese graphic novel by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi.

The truism goes that a good story is worth telling more than once. These days we find that they’re worth telling more than once -- and in more than one language.

Staff writer John Horn contributed to this story. Contact Scarlet Cheng at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.