Hollywood renews its long-standing affection for foreign filmmakers
in an era when international box office is crucial.

By Rachel Abramowitz, Times Staff Writer


On May 1, Alejandro González Iñárritu skipped out on the final mix
of his film "Babel" to take his family to the immigration rallies in
downtown L.A. While his absence might have given heartburn to the
production staff hurtling to get the Brad Pitt-Cate Blanchett film
ready for the Cannes Film Festival, to González Iñárritu, it was
worth it.

"It was like Simón Bolívar's dream — people from all over Latin
America," says the 42-year-old Mexican director. "I didn't feel any
rage or any anger. It just felt like 'Hey, you depend on us. We
depend on you. We have to work together.' "

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Talent is the one universal passport, and Hollywood has always had a
place for immigrants — from German maestro Fritz Lang, who headed
west when Hitler's minister of propaganda pressured him to take over
Germany's top studio, to Polish Roman Polanski, who directed Los
Angeles' definitive film noir, "Chinatown," and Taiwan-born Ang Lee,
who became the first nonwhite to win an Academy Award for directing
for "Brokeback Mountain," his reinvention of the western.

As Hollywood tries to stave off commercial stasis, the industry has
been undergoing another chapter in its love affair with foreign
writers and directors, particularly those from the Far East and
Latin America. The international box office now accounts for more
than 60% of a film's box office gross, boosting the street cred of
such players as Lee and Brazil's Walter Salles, whose respective
foreign-language films "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "The
Motorcycle Diaries" were international hits. Although the studios
still tend to Hoover up foreign directors and turn them into the
purveyors of such glossy fare as "Mission Impossible
2," "Independence Day" and "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of
Azkaban," the indie divisions at least want the auteurs to retain
the individuality that made them attractive in the first place.

Of course, in this age of globalization, it's unclear what it even
means to be a Hollywood immigrant anymore. "It doesn't matter where
you live," says Paramount Classics chief John Lesher. "We all talk
on the phone. We see each other at film festivals. You can edit a
movie in Brazil, and your editor can be in London, and you can put
it together seamlessly in perfect time."

González Iñárritu, whose riveting first film, "Amores Perros"
(2000), was nominated for a foreign language Oscar, moved here five
years ago as he began working on "21 Grams." He thinks in Spanish
and writes with his longtime collaborator, Guillermo Arriaga, in
Spanish, which is then translated into English. He says he moved for
practical reasons: "I have two small children. Traveling would have
been harder on them. I'm a director in exile."

Conversely, Arriaga stays home in Mexico City, except when he's
filming. "Hollywood is very tempting," says Arriaga, who also wrote
Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut, "The Three Burials of Melquiades
Estrada." "It's tempting in the sense that you can be meeting
interesting persons all the time. Living in Mexico allows me to be
more down to earth, to see regular people, life itself bubbling."

Like the independent film movement, which was initially fostered by
actors like Harvey Keitel who were willing to work in small,
surprising films, the recent boomlet in foreign directors has been
led by actors willing to work for directors for whom English is not
a native language, and often for a fraction of their studio
prices. "Thank God for the actors," says Lesher.

From its genesis, Hollywood has thrived on creative outsiders.
Almost all the studios were founded by immigrants, from the Russian
Louis B. Mayer to the Hungarians William Fox and Adolph Zukor. In
the '20s, their nascent businesses lured F.W. Murnau and Ernst
Lubitsch, already stars of the European cinema. In the '30s came
many Jews fleeing Hitler.

With the affectionate but detached perspective of the newly arrived,
the immigrants famously reimagined America, from Otto Preminger's
definitive courtroom drama "Anatomy of a Murder" to Fred Zinnemann's
paeans to Americana, "High Noon" and "Oklahoma!," to Billy Wilder's
witty deconstructions of Hollywood ("Sunset Boulevard") and the
media ("Ace in the Hole").

The next generation of European cinéastes — Godard, Truffaut,
Herzog, Fassbinder, Bergman and Fellini — pointedly stayed away from
America, disgusted by the strictures of the studio machine. And then
came the Reagan generation — the Paul Verhoevens and Wolfgang
Petersens of the world — who embraced the Hollywood ethos and the
competition for blockbusters.

Today, Hollywood still remains a kind of Faustian bargain — money
for your individuality. Or at least, with the money, comes the
bureaucratic headache of all those studio executives trying to help
you achieve your vision. But now, many of the studios' indie
divisions seem keen to help the auteurs retain their distinctive
points of view.

But the beast is what the beast is. Writer-director Alejandro
Agresti, who's made films in his native Argentina and Europe, is now
living in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel finishing up his first
film, "The Lake House," for Warner Bros. It's a total global mash-
up, a remake of a popular Korean film, written by an American,
reworked by an Argentine (Agresti) and starring two spanking
American movie stars: Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves.

"It's nice to work with great actors, to use all the technical
facilities you can get here, to do the dream shots. When you come
from a country like Argentina, where your lawyers have to count the
money, this is great. You really feel like you're in paradise," says
Agresti. "People tell crazy stories about Hollywood, but I have to
say they gave me the freedom I needed to make the film."

Still, it took some adaptation. "What I found difficult is to
concentrate with so many people around," says Agresti. "You have to
adapt yourself to the process here where you have an infinite number
of executives and people giving an opinion. If you start to try to
please 12 people, you forget what it is you wanted to do. You can
become completely crazy." Still, Agresti is planning to move to the
U.S. when the film is completed.

As is Yam Laranas, a 37-year-old Filipino director and
documentarian, whose small horror film, "The Echo," is being remade
here with producer Roy Lee and writer Stephen Susco, who last worked
together on the highly profitable remake of "The Grudge," part of a
wave of Asian horror films that have been reformulated for Americans.

Laranas, who will be directing, had publicized his film through
blogs, which is how Lee heard about it. Laranas admits that when Lee
first approached him, he thought it was a joke. "If you look at the
globe, from L.A. to Manila, it's like the moon to Mars. Thank God
for e-mail and my Mac."

Unlike the German refugees from World War II, the latest immigrant
directors know they can go home again physically and cinematically —
and they exercise that option. Indeed, many use a cinematic journey
to their native regions to revitalize their creativity. After the
disappointment of "Ride With the Devil," Ang Lee returned to East
Asia to make his first Chinese-language film in years, "Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Alfonso Cuarón suffered through the making of
the modern update of "Great Expectations," returned to Mexico to
make the gritty "Y Tu Mamá También" before directing the third
successful installment of the "Harry Potter" franchise. He now
maintains two companies, one to make English-language films with
Warner Bros., the other to make Spanish-language and independent
films.

Salles, whose 1998 film "Central Station" was nominated for a
foreign film Oscar, has bounced back and forth from his native South
America to the United States. He's slated next to make "On the
Road," Jack Kerouac's ode to the road trip. "The independent arena
is where I come from and intend to stay," says Salles. "But this
doesn't prevent me from also investigating other territories. It's
as if you're leaving home for a short while to visit a foreign
country. But you should always come back to your roots."

González Iñárritu says his latest film was influenced by his own
experience of being "a Third World citizen living in a First World
country." Specifically, the Mexican woman who cleans González
Iñárritu's house inspired one of the stories in "Babel," but such is
the way of the artist that he and his screenwriter subvert the
audience's expectations. His character, a Mexican nanny, gets
perilously stuck in the desert, stealing back into Mexico with her
two American charges in tow. "Conventionally, the film is about
borders and immigrants, but it's really about how fragile and
vulnerable human beings are, what little animals we are," he
explains. "We tend to talk about borders as a difficult space — but
the real most dangerous frontiers are within ourselves. That's what
is happening around the world. The otherness creates a potential
threat."

Although "Babel" boasts major Hollywood movie stars, González
Iñárritu says it's not just another American movie. He notes that
his seven key collaborators are all Mexican. "I consider ["Babel"]
Mexican. Beyond the words, the brains and soul are Mexican."

Rachel Abramowitz, author of "Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?: The
Truth About Women and Power in Hollywood," writes about film for
Calendar.