It wasn't so long ago that Tarsem Singh was one of thousands of new immigrants to Los Angeles. He arrived here in 1983 from a remote Indian village in the Himalayas armed only with the fantasy of one day becoming a movie director.
Every day, he took a bus to Los Angeles City College with the "Guide to Film Schools in America" tucked under his arm and lunch in a paper bag: a thin sandwich and a tea bag. In the evenings he bused tables at a chic Beverly Hills restaurant, cleaning the plates of industry types.
"I was an exceptionally dumb kid. I had no idea what a wide shot was or anything behind the camera," he recalled. "I was the unhippest person you could know. I had the worst clothes, and nobody wanted to sit at the table with me because I always brought my own lunch."
Those days are long gone. As one of the highest paid and celebrated commercial and music video directors, Tarsem (he goes by one name professionally) has burst into Hollywood with his first feature-length movie, a $40-million thriller starring one of the hottest stars of the moment, Jennifer Lopez.
"The Cell," released by New Line Cinema, meshed perfectly with the 39-year-old director's wild imagination, over-the-top drama, love of color and visual daring.
"When I saw the script I thought, this is the perfect jumping ground for me," he said, relaxing in his room at the Chateau Marmont listening to Indian music featured in the film.
"What interested me was the blank canvas of going into the mind. . . . I wanted to go into the mind and play it like an opera, like theater."
The movie, which opened Friday, deeply divided critics. Roger Ebert called it an "astonishing debut" and "one of the best films of the year" and Times critic Kenneth Turan assailed it as "creepy and horrific," a film that "puts viewers through as much misery as the people on the screen."
The story is about a psychologist (Lopez) who enters the mind of a serial killer (Vincent D'Onofrio) through experimental technology. Lopez and an FBI investigator (Vince Vaughn) are trying to find where the killer is hiding his latest victim, who is still alive.
Tarsem said he took on the project precisely because it was a chance to play on his visuals; the story line, he said, was more in the background. From the very beginning he saw the film as an opera, in which costumes, visuals, body language and music play a more central role than dialogue or character development.
