Filmmakers find funds and artistic inspiration outside home bases

Robert Altman did it. John Sayles and Werner Herzog did as well. Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has turned it into an art form. Richard Linklater squeezed it in between studio movies. Woody Allen is still doing it.
In the past few years, all of these auteurs have left home to shoot their films. With favorable exchange rates and/or tax incentives abroad, some of this travel has been about following the money. But it's also about small-world syndrome, and a need for new horizons and the expansive vision they often bring.

Judging from films such as "Match Point," "Gosford Park," "Grizzly Man," "Before Sunset" and others, it's working. How and why it's working is another matter entirely.

Since he first arrived in America in 1985, Paul Verhoeven hasn't shot anything besides big studio movies and, excluding a short trip across the border to Mexico, hasn't left America to make any of them. This year, he returned to his native Holland to shoot the indie "Black Book," a Holocaust survivors' story that he's been developing for over 20 years.

"It's the first European co-production of my life," says the helmer. "L.A. is the greatest film resource in the world. In Holland, film isn't even an industry, it's more like an expensive hobby. That's certainly different from what I'm used to."

One of the perks of shooting outside Hollywood is being able to screen test the best actors in Europe, says Verhoeven. "A Brad Pitt or a Julia Roberts won't even read the script until there's a deal on the table."

While access to the cream of European thesps can be seen as a bonus, it's also something of a requirement, given the foreign financing that's bankrolling "Black Book." A number of Euro countries are backing the film with subsidies, pre-sales and other kinds of investments (Dutch, English and German financing with distribution deals in place in Italy, Germany, France and the U.K.).

Adds Verhoeven, "I have access to German funds, the result of which is that I have to spend a certain portion of that money in Germany." The same holds true for other countries. As a result, the helmer has cameras from Belgium, stages in Germany and plans to do post in England.

For John Sayles, going abroad to shoot films like "Casa de Los Babies," "Men With Guns" and "The Secret of Roan Inish" was the only way those films were going to be made. The filmmaker, by his own admission, makes low-budget epics, which means when he shoots abroad he incorporates location scouting into the writing process. He builds his script around discoveries made rather than vice versa.

"For 'Casa de Los Babies' I found an old Spanish fort in Acapulco. It was an incredible location and I set a great scene there and got to shoot that scene for a nominal fee rather than trying to build a fort from scratch," he says.

Since the fort is normally open to the public, Sayles kept it that way. He posted a sign that let visitors know they were welcome, but they could end up in his film. "It was instant extras, with no additional monies," he notes.

Sayles shot much of "Men With Guns" deep in Chiapas. While he speaks Spanish fluently, he cast native Indians who were fluent only in rare tongues no script supervisor would be expected to know. "One-fifth of that movie was in languages I didn't speak," he says, "which meant I had to detach from the script completely and direct completely based on emotion."

The universality of emotion is one thing that allows some dramas to be shot in any country, says scribe Guillermo Arriaga ("Amores perros," "21 Grams," "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada"). While "21 Grams" was originally written for Mexico City, when director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu got a chance to shoot in the U.S., there was very little that required rewriting. " '21 Grams' was a nightmare that could have taken place anywhere."

The same idea is driving their newest project, "Babel," where four interwoven stories are set in four countries (Morocco, Mexico, Japan and Tunisia) all being driven forward by the same broad emotional themes -- primarily love and how people deal with it -- and all unfolding in a 36-hour period.

"I've never been to Japan or to Morocco," says Arriaga, "but when you write about loyalty and betrayal and love and hate it doesn't matter. I can draw on my own experience, knowing that the emotion behind that experience is found everywhere."

Werner Herzog who left home repeatedly in earlier years ("Fitzcarraldo," "Aguirre: The Wrath of God") hit the road again for documentary "Grizzly Man" (Alaska) and his current project, "Rescue Dawn" (Thailand).

While Herzog shapes unknown terrain to fit his needs, he sometimes looks to indigenous peoples to help shape his films. For "Rescue," the story of a U.S. fighter pilot shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War, he's expanding the role of a Thai actor because he feels that exotic world views in his cast can deepen the impact of his stories -- and the deeper the impact, the wider the audience.

"That's what I'm most interested in now, leaving my unpaved road for the highway of larger audiences," says Herzog. "I think shooting abroad is helping me do that."