Director's Choice

France may be the proud birthplace of cinema, but many of its directors are looking to the U.S. as the place to ply their trade. Michel Gondry isn't alone in choosing Hollywood. Mathieu Kassovitz made his English-language debut earlier this year at the helm of Gothika, starring Halle Berry. The singly named Pitof, best known for his work in computer graphics, will put the cinematic claws into another Berry film, this summer's Catwoman. And Coline Serreau is in preproduction for a much-anticipated English-language remake of her own 2001 thriller Chaos that will star Meryl Streep and Aishwarya Rai.

In search of more artistic diversity, these directors are being drawn by the chance to reach out to global audiences and into deeper U.S. pockets. "In France, we make movies for the art of it," Kassovitz says. "It's only art movies that come out." Not so in the U.S., where the box office rules. France's priciest production ever, Jean-Jacques Annaud's just-released Two Brothers, about two tiger cubs separated at birth, cost about 360 million — a little more than the average U.S. film. Even a quirky, just-off-mainstream U.S. project like Gondry's Eternal Sunshine got a generous budget of about $35 million.

Kassovitz speaks for many of his colleagues when he says: "I want to be able to do my movies that come from my mind, and at the same time to make movies that please crowds because of the subject, the way it's done, and ideas that are 'popular' in the noble sense of the term." In other words, the best of both worlds — in Hollywood.