"You have to choose your producer carefully, because it's like a marriage - you need someone who believes in you," Del Toro says. It's no coincidence that two of Cuaron's best Hollywood films saw him working with a supportive producer, Mark Johnson on A Little Princess and Marc Abraham on Children of Men. But once you're here, you need a heavy hitter in your corner. After all, with many national cinema industries on the upswing, no one is forced to come to Hollywood. When trouble occurs, it's often hard to tell who's at fault - the studio for hiring a provocative artist and then treating him like a glorified cinematographer, or the film-maker for being naive or opportunistic. "He did his best work when he got to make more intimate Hollywood films, like Pretty Baby." "For him, a studio set felt gargantuan," Barker says. Michael Barker, co-chief of Sony Pictures Classics, who has dealt with innumerable foreign directors, recalls Louis Malle chafing on his first Hollywood film. There's an unspoken language in Hollywood that is often more difficult to master than English - the idiom in which film-makers are expected to patiently listen to invasive studio notes or movie star anxieties. During the making of Brokeback Mountain, Lee was criticised for being uncommunicative, but perhaps that's just the way quiet confidence appears to an industry accustomed to a roomful of brash hustlers. But Will believed he would get a great performance out of him, and he was right." But then I met him and he didn't even speak English. "I saw one of Gabriele's Italian movies and loved it. "It was 100% Will's idea," says Amy Pascal, chairman of Sony Pictures. But for every Redford (who lost faith in van Diem), there is a Bullock, a big supporter of Yapo, and a Will Smith, who was responsible for Muccino getting the gig on Happyness. In Europe, it would be a huge scandal to replace the director. On Mimic, I ended up working with five different writers, and I always felt that I was a replaceable commodity. "In Hollywood, there's a packaging mentality where the director is just another element that makes the package attractive. "In Europe and Mexico, you have a creative pyramid with the director at the top," Del Toro says. Unaccustomed to sharing authority, many foreign directors find themselves being labelled uncollaborative as they struggle for creative control. The biggest eye-opener for foreign directors is the realisation that they are not actually in control of their movie. Ang Lee's biggest failures have been his most studio-centric films, Ride With the Devil and The Hulk. However, some directors have blossomed in Hollywood, be it Del Toro, who did Hellboy for Revolution studio, or Gabriele Muccino, the Italian director who made The Pursuit of Happyness at Sony. But after two years on the project, he was abruptly fired and replaced by Tony Scott. He landed a job making Spy Game with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt. Mike van Diem, the Dutch director who won the best foreign film Oscar in 1997 for Character, was wooed all over Hollywood. And Alejandro Agresti had a hit last year with The Lake House, starring Bullock and Keanu Reeves, but he was also taken off the movie in post-production.ĭealing with the power politics of studios and movie stars can leave scars. Yapo was brought back to work on Premonition, but only after lots of internal squabbling. After he delivered his first cut last summer, he was taken off the movie while a new editor and the film's writer came in to do a new cut of the picture. Sony Pictures has just released Premonition, starring Sandra Bullock and directed by Mennan Yapo, a Turkish-German film-maker who got a host of Hollywood offers after making one little-known feature in Germany. Hirschbiegel shot the movie at the end of 2005, but the studio was so unhappy with the results that it brought in Matrix creators Andy and Larry Wachowski to do rewrites and then hired James McTeigue, who directed V for Vendetta for the studio last year, to do nearly $10m in re-shoots earlier this year. Hirschbiegel was hired by Warner Bros to direct The Invasion, a thriller starring Nicole Kidman based on Don Siegel's classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. One recent example is Oliver Hirschbiegel, the German director whose film Downfall was nominated for best foreign film. In fact, a number of gifted foreign directors have struggled trying to make the transition to Hollywood. While Hollywood history is full of outsider success stories, from Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder to Ang Lee and Alfonso Cuarón, it is also littered with failures and flame-outs. As buoyed as I am by the industry's growing interest in foreign film-makers, now would be a good time to offer a few words of caution.
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