Last week we looked at several foreign filmmakers and the experiences they had working on their first American projects. While their films and working styles ran the gamut from success to failure, one thing was certain, to keep a career afloat in Hollywood, new directors have to learn quickly how to handle the pressures of working in the studio system.

In search of example, they may look to a group of foreign directors who have made their way to Hollywood and found success by making the studio system work for them. In the process, the studios have discovered that, when allowed, these directors can bring in both box office and critical hits.

Guillermo del Toro is a director whose Hollywood career almost ended before it started. His debut feature, Cronos, an offbeat vampire film produced in his native Mexico, was a critical hit that found him being courted by the American studios. His first American feature, Mimic, was a rough experience for him. Accustomed to having free rein, del Toro found himself constantly clashing with his producer Bob Weinstein with the result that del Toro was released with a different director brought aboard to shoot new material and supervise the edit.

“ I just didn’t want to go back to the Hollywood system without having experienced a breath of fresh air,” del Toro told the A.V. Club in a January 2007 interview.

He found his fresh air and a happy medium by employing a system of going back and forth, doing studio projects balanced by more personal foreign films. This allowed him to stave off burn-out and hold to the creative control that eludes many filmmakers. The result has been a string of critically praised and financially solid movies like The Devil’s Backbone, Blade 2, Hellboy and last year’s major foreign hit, Pan’s Labyrinth. Not only was Pan’s a critical smash, winning four Oscars, it turned in a domestic gross of $37.6 million, an astonishing figure for a subtitled movie.

Ang Lee is a legend among the art-house crowd. His filmography shows a number of critically acclaimed films with a clutch of Oscar nominations and a few wins. It would be easy to get lost in talking about films like Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Ice Storm and of course, Brokeback Mountain. But to only look at his triumphs, we would miss his impressive rebound from one of the biggest Hollywood misfires.

“After I had done the Hulk, I wasn’t going to do a movie for a very long time. I even thought about retirement some nights,” Lee confessed in a December 2005 interview with Aboutfilm.com.

Even before one frame of film was shot, Hulk had a number of things against it. Studio executives had astronomical expectations for the film on the heels of other comic book adaptations like Spider-Man and X-Men. The special effects used to animate the Hulk were not advanced enough to pull off a believable character. Then there was the massive budget that was sunk into what was meant to be a summer “popcorn movie.”

Despite the fact that it ended up a profitable film, including worldwide gross and ancillary markets, it’s still considered a major flop that left audiences and critics scratching their heads. It could have been the death of Lee’s career.

Wisely, Lee retreated from the studio system. He kept a low profile for two years and reemerged with the multi-award winning Brokeback Mountain before returning to his native Taiwan for this year’s controversial Lust, Caution. With this successful return to the cinema of his home country and his indie-roots, Lee has nearly made everyone forget about the big green guy that tried to smash his career.

Alfonso Cuaron was a virtual unknown quantity in Hollywood when he took the 1995 helm of the children’s film, A Little Princess. Despite this lack of familiarity, he was an experienced filmmaker, working for over a decade in Mexico, directing for television with a feature comedy under his belt. Still, even with this knowledge, he would have seemed an unlikely candidate to bring a children’s book to the big screen.

Following a difficult shoot on his follow-up, Great Expectations, over which he clashed with producers about budget and schedule overruns, Cuaron withdrew from Hollywood. He reappeared in 2002 with the Mexican art-house hit, Y Tu Mama Tambien. A funny and sexy coming-of-age story, it was a critical and financial success that caught attention from Hollywood and, more importantly, the producers of the Harry Potter films.

Cuaron directed the third HP: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. While he was able to put some of his visual flair into the film, the need to stick to an established story handcuffed him a bit. But what that one mega-hit did for his career allowed him to follow up with Children of Men. While considered a financial disappointment, it’s arguably his best film to date.

When we look at the circumstances in which each of these filmmakers found themselves, a pattern emerges.

► Each had a difficult experience in Hollywood that led to disappointing films.
► Each stepped back and returned to what brought them to Hollywood in the first place - their foreign and indie roots.
► They all used the critical and financial success of their original roots as leverage in their continuing Hollywood careers.

Filmmakers new to Hollywood can benefit from the mistakes and solutions of these foreign directors who came to America’s studios and worked the system. Directors like del Toro, Lee, and Cuaron have proven that the needs of art and commerce can be balanced to make the studio system work for them, and that, occasionally, the journey to success leads back to where they started.