145;Breaking into Hollywood is difficult146;

You were first Indian to make it big in Hollywood. What challenges would a new Indian filmmaker face to break into Hollywood?
Hollywood is a small club and breaking into it is difficult. It took me 10 years to do so. For someone brand new going from here to there, you need to study their style of filmmaking as their audiences are different from ours. Hollywood is a bigger canvas. You can come up with a great story and show your talent in its execution.

Since you8217;ve voted for the Academy Award8217;s Foreign Language Film category, tell us about the selection process. Can lobbying and big spending nudge a nomination in favour of a biggie?
A group of around 500 people watch about 50-plus entries divided into three groups 8211; red, blue and green. You can only watch the films in the Academy or an Academy approved theatre. You must watch at least two-thirds of the movie and a minimum of 75 per cent of the movies in your group to qualify to vote. So in the end, only 300 end up voting. And nobody ever knows who the voters or theatre people are so you can8217;t buy their votes. The Oscars have one of the fairest voting systems in the world. My only complaint, which we are already internally trying to change in the Academy, is that most of its members are over the age of 60. Can they comprehend terms such as digital use and visual effects?nbsp;

Why haven8217;t Indian actors made a mark in Hollywood the way other foreign actors like Antonio Banderas and Anjelina Jolie have?
You cannot compare Mexican and Indian talents because the Latino audience in America is large enough to make a movie rake in 20 million at the box office. So, actors like Antonio Banderas, Gael Garcia Bernal and Eva Mendes have crossed over and eventually won over even the non-Latino audience. They have also spent 10 years banging their heads against the wall, whether it8217;s Antonio doing his own thing or Van Damme working as a limo driver. But I haven8217;t seen or am aware of any actor from India willing to go there and do that. Aishwarya is giving it a good shot though.
The Chinese have garnered greater Hollywood acceptance and international star status for their actors like Chow Yun-Fat or a Gong Li without necessarily going cross-cultural.
The Chinese have done a hell of a job of breaking in, starting with Jackie Chan and Jet Lee to Chow Yun-Fat, John Woo, Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li. The only reason I could give is that there is an audience in America for martial arts. For Americans who grew up watching Bruce Lee, the Chinese have given them Crouching Tiger8230; and Hero. But you don8217;t necessarily have an audience there for an Indian song. If one has to put it in perspective, what we do in cinema in songs, China does in martial arts. nbsp;

So what8217;s the way in for an Indian filmmaker?
The West isn8217;t interested in a story about an Indian family with Indian problems and traditions. That8217;s for the NRIs. The way in for a Western audience is about how they can identify with a movie. Why will a guy in Texas sit through a film on an Indian family only because they are speaking in English? A cross-cultural film should bridge cultures. If you take some of their culture and some from our and put the two together, they get a way in into your movie. I have done it in a tiny way in our latest film The Other End Of The Line. It was written there, directed by an American, its lead actor is an American played by Jesse Metcalfe of Desperate Housewives fame, who comes to India and then an Indian girl Shriya Saran of Shivaji goes to San Francisco. nbsp;

Having made nearly 100 films and worked with international stars like Bruce Willis, Susan Sarandon, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Antonio Banderas, do you look back and regret a film like Tropical Heat and the Night Eyes series that you made in your early years?
I have made 25 such films. In my first five years in Hollywood, I didn8217;t get to make a movie. So, when I made Fear in a Handful of Dust in 1984 for half-a-million dollars, I thought I had arrived. I was on the Arizona desert with a 8216;white 8216;director, a bunch of 8216;white8217; actors and was making a Hollywood movie 8211; what more could ask for? Though it was a small movie, I enjoyed making it. Then, I moved on to make million dollar movies. As regards their adult content, would you term a Basic Instinct or Body Heat as porn? A couple of Fellini and Bertolucci are much more risqueacute; than mine. Frankly, I couldn8217;t care less about what people would say. Those films took me on the journey that I needed to get on to.

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