Success and failure can cross Hollywood border

ONE of the jokes going around Hollywood last week was that foreign movie talent earned so much Oscar attention that CNN's Lou Dobbs wants to build a 20-foot-high fence around the Kodak Theatre to keep them out. From the best director and screenplay categories to score, cinematography and costume design, the Oscars were a giant billboard for the ascendancy of international film artists.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's "Babel" received seven nominations while Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" earned six, just two signs of how foreign filmmakers have brought a new wave of energy and creativity to the business. Of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, the most common reaction to "The Lives of Others" director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Oscar acceptance speech was: "Hey, didya hear how good his English was?" Translation: Let's offer him a Nic Cage thriller right away.

As buoyed as I am by the industry's growing interest in foreign filmmakers, now would be a good time to offer a few words of caution. While Hollywood history is full of outsider success stories, from Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder to Ang Lee and Alfonso Cuaron, it is also littered with failures and flame-outs, though the disasters rarely get as much attention as the triumphs.

In fact, a number of gifted foreign directors have struggled trying to make the transition to Hollywood. One recent example is Oliver Hirschbiegel, a German director whose "Downfall" received rave reviews and was nominated for best foreign film. Hirschbiegel was hired by Warner Bros. to direct "The Invasion," a Nicole Kidman-starring thriller based on Don Siegel's classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

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 $10 million in reshoots earlier this year.

Sony Pictures is about to release "Premonition," a Sandra Bullock-starring thriller directed by Mennan Yapo, a Turkish-German filmmaker who got a host of Hollywood offers after making one little-known feature in Germany. He's also had a rocky ride. 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. Yapo was brought back to work on the picture, but only after lots of internal squabbling.