Hardships present opportunities to directors

By Alex Ben Block and Stephen Galloway

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Wandering around the crowded Shrine Auditorium party after "Slumdog Millionaire" had won the top prize at the SAG awards last month, its director Danny Boyle seemed especially giddy.

His elation was understandable. Only months earlier he was trapped in a London editing suite when a call came telling him that Warner Bros. was shuttering "Slumdog's" backer, Warner Independent Pictures -- meaning that the film would almost certainly go straight to video.

"It looked like suicide was now the only option," Boyle jokes. "Seriously, you think you might as well kill yourself."

Today, rescued by Fox Searchlight, buoyant as his movie heads toward the $100 million mark in worldwide box office, Boyle is one of the five nominees for the best director Oscar at the 81st annual Academy Awards on February 22. Like his colleagues Stephen Daldry ("The Reader"), David Fincher ("The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"), Ron Howard ("Frost/Nixon") and Gus Van Sant ("Milk"), he has endured crises and confrontations that would have compromised the aspirations of many helmers.

None seemed as great as the Warner Independent debacle last summer.

"(WIP's) Polly Cohen and Paul Federbush had given us enormous support -- 40 percent of the budget," Boyle recalls. "Our budget was 7 million pounds" (roughly $10 million today, but closer to $14 million when the movie was made).

That relative generosity, ironically, made it harder for the studio to offload the film. Who would want to pay so much for an obscure indie release? Then "something extraordinary happened. Somehow (Warners') Jeff Robinov and Kevin McCormick showed it to (Searchlight's) Peter Rice. This was a couple of weeks before Telluride (the film festival)."

By the time the movie opened at Telluride (in September), Rice and Warners had a handshake deal, though it would be weeks before they concluded an agreement that Searchlight would handle the film's release and the companies would split revenues 50-50, including India.

"It was extraordinary the way it worked out," Boyle recalls.

Ron Howard was equally lucky that Universal agreed to front the roughly $29 million budget for "Frost/Nixon," his movie version of Peter Morgan's play -- though to get it made, he had to work for scale.

With a projected 40-day shoot, "I had to devise a visual style that I felt would stimulate that kind of speed," Howard explains. "The cinematographer (Salvatore Totino) and I sat down and talked about very naturalistic lighting that was not set-up specific but a little more documentary-like."

Howard had to make other sacrifices to meet the restraints of his ultra-tight budget.

"I wanted to shoot at the real Casa Pacifica, Nixon's western White House in San Clemente, and that is outside the Report-To Zone," he says, referring to the geographical limit outside Los Angeles beyond which union workers cannot go without being housed overnight. "We looked at our budget, and we couldn't afford it."

But Howard was adamant. "Ultimately, I combined two sets into one and dropped one day from the schedule. We then stayed over only one night."

He got what he wanted: a day and a quarter in Nixon's own home.