Give Us Your Visionary . . .

When movie-makers from around the world converge on the Cannes Film Festival this month, the city on the French Riviera will be, for many, merely a stopover on the way to Hollywood. Now, more than ever, the American studios, big and small, are scouting the globe for new non-American talent, and Cannes is the great bazaar of buzz where the next Renny Harlins and Alfonso Araus are likely to be taking meetings.

Foreign directors have been finding their way to Hollywood since the silent era, but recently the wave of immigration has been tidal, reflecting both the ever-rising internationalism of film culture and Hollywood’s eagerness to exploit it. Hard not to notice that Hong Kong action director John Woo was at the helm of the John Travolta hit “Broken Arrow” for 20th Century Fox; that MGM’s “Chinatown” homage, “Mulholland Falls,” was directed by a New Zealander, Lee Tamahori; that an upcoming Bruce Willis film, “The Fifth Element,” will be directed by Frenchman Luc Besson (“La Femme Nikita”). Or that up to 60% of a Hollywood film’s box-office total now comes from abroad.

This is good, say those who see a certain multicultural progress being made as the studios recruit storytellers from overseas to reinterpret America’s great art form for Americans and others. On the other hand, the question arises as to which will be--or has already been--greater: the world’s impact on Hollywood or Hollywood’s impact on the world? The body-strewn thriller “La Femme Nikita,” after all, though a hit, was seen by some as the perfect Hollywood audition for its director and labeled famously in the New Yorker “the end of French cinema as we know it.”

Is the day coming when no corner of the Earth will be left whose cultural styles and idiosyncrasies have not been colonized and plundered by the forces that bring you the Academy Awards each March?

While it’s true that the 15-year ascent of independent films in America has brought audiences a wider choice of movies on Saturday night, at the same time the art-house market in the U.S. for foreign language films has steadily declined (see story, page 31). In addition, scores of first-rank directors--the Australians Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir and Gillian Armstrong foremost among them--have left the film companies of their homelands behind to work in America where the budgets are biggest and worldwide distribution assured.

“The strength of the American film industry is that it has always been open to new talent, going back to the ‘30s and ‘40s,” says Polish-born Agnieszka Holland (“Europa Europa”), who made the “The Secret Garden” for Warner Bros. and is about to direct an adaptation of Henry James’ “Washington Square” for Disney. “It’s easy to come here, but they don’t necessarily let you preserve your identity. I’ve had a pretty good experience so far, but I had neutral ground with a children’s classic. It will be harder with other subjects.”

“Yes, there is an increasing interest in importing European directors,” says Lasse Hallstrom, whose acclaimed film “My Life as a Dog” in 1985 brought him here from Sweden to make such movies with American stars as “Once Around” and “Something to Talk About.” “After the American success of ‘My Life as a Dog’ doors were opened wide to me in America, and I found the American movie business to be a candy store I could not resist. I just had to stay for a while and lick a candy or two. I was intrigued and amused by the industry side of it, learning about ‘greenlights’ and ‘pay or play’ and ‘first-look deals.’

“I ended up learning a bit too much about waiting and ‘pulling the plug,’ companies going ‘belly-up.’ I went back and forth for two years without getting to an actual shoot, but when I finally got started I enjoyed it immensely. I hope to continue it as long as I can and also go back home to make Swedish movies now and then.”

Czech director Milos Forman’s Oscar-winning commercial success with Ken Kesey’s rage-against-the-asylum story “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1975 is seen as a signpost pointing west for Europeans in the modern era, but Ernst Lubitsch and Erich von Stroheim had proven themselves in Hollywood decades before. And there is the shining example of Vienna-born Billy Wilder, who, in flight from the Nazis, arrived in Hollywood in the late ‘30s, speaking no English and went on to make some of the most stylish American comedies ever.

Is it a straight or a crooked line from Billy Wilder to Holland’s Jan De Bont, who made “Speed”? Or to that other Dutchman Paul Verhoeven, who made “RoboCop,” “Basic Instinct” and “Showgirls”?

“There have been times before, in the ‘30s and ‘40s, when a lot of foreign directors came to work here,” says Tom Rothman, president of production at 20th Century Fox, “and I think we are in another one of those periods. But it’s coming not just from Hollywood, but from the globalization of the film business.”

Rothman labels as “absurd” the notion that Hollywood is robbing the rest of the world of its filmmakers. “Countries lose people geographically but many also return to their countries to make pictures,” he says. He cites two Fox-sponsored examples: England’s Stephen Frears, who is directing the third installment of the Roddy Doyle trilogy “The Van,” filmed in Dublin; and Bruce Beresford, who has returned to Australia to film the prisoner-of-war picture “Paradise Road” about the fall of Singapore in World War II.

Nevertheless, Lee Tamahori, whose next picture will be done for Fox (David Mamet’s script “Bookworm”), observes: “I look at Australia and New Zealand and everybody’s left. They’ve been plundered. I myself am not going to stay in Hollywood. I want to drift between the independents and the bigger projects. There’s something I love about the spirit of independent film.”

Tamahori’s low-budget succes d’estime at Cannes in 1994, “Once Were Warriors,” about brutal class conflicts in his native New Zealand, attracted the attention of a couple of ICM agents and then Hollywood executives, including MGM vice president Elizabeth Seldes. Seldes brought him to the studio to direct the star-studded film noir “Mulholland Falls,” set in Los Angeles of the 1950s.

“We were looking for fresh, undiscovered talent to make ‘Mulholland Falls,’ ” Seldes says, “and here was a guy who had done a million-dollar movie and done it with a show of force.” Tamahori was able to shave millions from the budget of his first Hollywood picture and shoot it in an economical 53 days. As far as understanding American culture: “He said he was an American crime-movie buff,” Seldes recalls, “and at our first meeting he proceeded to wax poetic on the subject for 30 minutes, describing what he liked about this movie and that. We were assured we were on the same page.”

“How does a guy from New Zealand understand American culture?” Tamahori asks. “Remember, it’s film culture, it’s all an illusion anyway.”

Another New Zealand director, Peter Jackson, has just finished the supernatural thriller “The Frighteners” for Universal, starring Michael J. Fox. “I’ve never particularly wanted to work here,” says Jackson, who made his reputation on the controversial “Heavenly Creatures,” based on the true story of two teenage girls who plotted the murder of one of their mothers in New Zealand.

“It’s just a pattern that every New Zealand director who’s ever been successful has left the country. It’s understandable why people leave--the biggest budgets there are $2 [million]-$3 million--but the impact on the film industry is that we are in a perpetual adolescence. Every year our films are being made by first-timers. We don’t have people making their sixth or seventh movie.”

Like Tamahori, Jackson plans to do something about this. Not only did he convince the powers at Universal to let him shoot “The Frighteners,” set in Northern California, in New Zealand, but he has won approval to do his next Universal picture there as well--a remake of “King Kong.”

Cassian Elwes, a British-born William Morris agent who represents the celebrated Mexican director Alfonso Arau (“Like Water for Chocolate”) and has been attending Cannes for 18 years, says: “The more world cinema that we see, we realize that talent can come from anywhere. I just saw a Moroccan picture that was great and there’s no question in the world that if the director had the right script. . . .”

“You still have to match the right storyteller to the right story,” Fox’s Rothman says. “Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Analyzing what Hollywood is looking for abroad, Elwes says, “a director who can make a $40-million movie for $20 million.” And maybe a change of pace or point of view. “Think about a Schwarzenegger movie that’s all action, put a European art-house filmmaker in there and you might end up with an action movie that has an intellectual twist to it.”

“More and more we see that the studios are relying on someone with a new vision,” says Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, the studio’s art film unit, and a regular at Cannes, where he first encountered Dutch films by Paul Verhoeven 13 years ago. “If you had seen ‘The Fourth Man’ or ‘Spetters,’ you knew this was a really talented guy.”

“In talking to other filmmakers about this,” Tamahori says, “there’s the general feeling that Hollywood is always looking for the next Wilder, the next Polanski, the next innovator. But it will take that innovator and put a bridle on them. There’s actually not much wrong with that, except it sets up a creative conflict from the start. And someone like Werner Herzog is not going to come over and make an American movie.”

Indeed, the French New Wave of the ‘50s was a reaction in part to the conventionality, however skillful, of films then coming from Hollywood. But none of the leading New Wave auteurists--Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Goddard and Eric Rohmer among them--traded their European success for a chance to work at Warner’s or Columbia. Nor is it likely the studios would have wanted their comparatively languorous and untidy storytelling styles.

The world and the world of film have changed in the 40 years since Cahiers du Cinema, the French magazine dedicated to the New Wave, was a big deal. This spring, while on a lecture tour of the United States, French director Bertrand Tavernier (“ ‘Round Midnight”) talked about the increasing difficulty and challenge, brought on by market pressures, to continue to make films in French about the French.

Spain’s Pedro Almodovar, whose “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and other films have brought him an international reputation, has thus far resisted the tug of Hollywood. “The scripts that have come in for him have not thrilled him,” says Michel Ruben, who oversees Almodovar’s Madrid-based company. “But more importantly, he feels that the U.S. production system would not suit him. In Europe, the director is king. For Pedro, not to have final cut would be inconceivable.”

There is Paul Verhoeven, now pulling down $6 million a picture, and then there is Hector Babenco, the Brazilian director whose first American movie, the independently financed “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” won him an Oscar nomination in 1986 but who retreated to Brazil after his third, “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” a few years later. Babenco, a box-office agnostic, may not have appeared to be ideal Hollywood material when he expressed his philosophy in this not-yet-ready-for-Jay-Leno remark: “Doing a movie is part of our resurrection from death.”

After acknowledging he has enjoyed his American movie experiences, Lasse Hallstrom adds that he has also missed “the family atmosphere of a Swedish crew,” usually only 20 to 25 people, plus the notion that the director is the ultimate boss. “In America, there is a shocking creative involvement from the money and the producers, and if you don’t deal with it or fight it, you run the risk of losing your voice, your fingerprints.”

Hallstrom has some advice for those directors still to come.

“I think there have always been directors who ‘audition’ for Hollywood, but they often do it by imitating the American style at its worst, when it’s slick and sentimental, overly efficient storytelling that can sacrifice character for plot. For me, if you can get attention in America by making movies that stick with your local world and culture, if you can tell a story that engages the world in a personal voice, then great. Just don’t forget to bring that voice when you are offered ‘the American adventure.’ ”