Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie in The Tourist

After his very first feature film, the small-budget political thriller The Lives of Others, won the 2007 Academy Award for best foreign-language film, German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was besieged with offers of work. A new talent had announced itself, and there was much curiosity about what he would choose to follow his bleak examination of betrayal and moral corruption in East Germany. In the end, von Donnersmarck surprised many, including himself.

The Tourist is the polar opposite of The Lives of Others: a big-budget studio extravaganza, shot mostly in Venice, that is a traditional caper, starring two of Hollywood’s biggest names, Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. “You know how people always say that you have to step outside your comfort zone?” von Donnersmarck, 37, said. “Well, I live outside my comfort zone always.”

Much is riding on his choice. Hollywood has a long tradition of welcoming German-speaking directors that dates back to Eric von Stroheim, Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder. But more recent arrivals have either disappointed, like Tom Tykwer (who directed The International after Run Lola Run), or have gone native and gravitated toward commercial fare of dubious quality, an accusation often levelled at Roland Emmerich. And Hollywood has not proved particularly hospitable to other foreigners either.

“It’s very rare that a director in a foreign language crosses over and succeeds in making a big studio picture,” said Michael Barker, a co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which distributed The Lives of Others. “Maybe it has something to do with language. I don’t know. But other than Roman Polanski with Chinatown and Milos Forman with One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, not that many have done it.”

In a way The Tourist is a reprise of the situation von Donnersmarck faced when he wrote, filmed and tried to market The Lives of Others. Then too he was seen as a novice and outsider. “Oh yes, we were all very curious to see how he was going to do,” said the German actor Sebastian Koch, who played the lead character in that film, a playwright under surveillance of the Stasi, the East German political police. “Some of the others, they didn’t take him so seriously in the beginning because he was a newcomer. But he surprised them. He knew exactly what he wanted, but he was open enough to take ideas from others if he thought it was good for the project.”

One of von Donnersmarck’s characteristics as a director, those who have worked with him said, is his meticulous attention to detail. “I don’t know how he did it, but on The Lives of Others he was so specific about accuracy that he found the actual tape recording machines that the Stasi used,” Barker said. In The Tourist von Donnersmarck applies that same approach, though to a much different end.

Rather than evoke the claustrophobic atmosphere of a totalitarian state, his task is to make Jolie, who plays the lover of a shady British financier, look as regal and elegant as possible. “We spent a few days just doing camera tests on different types of lipstick and white silk to be sure we could find the right combination and see how it would translate onto film,” von Donnersmarck recalled. “Spending so much time on that was bizarre. But the way this film had to be told seemed to demand that, the material beauty was just so important.”

Jolie said that after meeting von Donnersmarck she felt in very safe hands. The film needed “somebody very sophisticated” to direct it, she said, adding, “I knew that he had a sense of culture — the way that he was raised, he speaks so many different languages.” As von Donnersmarck, who stands a commanding 6’8” and has a gently aristocratic bearing, explained it, the opportunity to direct The Tourist offered “a respite” from some of the pressures and changes the Oscar success brought. “It takes a while to get used to that change, which doesn’t contribute to the kind of balance you need when you direct a film. So I knew I couldn’t go straight into the next project.” Instead, he spent about a year reading five screenplays or more a week and meeting with studio heads and actors. “This is just taking up too much of my creative energy,” he concluded. “And so I said ‘OK, I’m just going to write now.’”

The result was a script about suicide, which he still plans to film in English for a studio, beginning next year, and which was nearly complete when the British producer Graham King (The Departed) sent him a draft of The Tourist. “In a way it felt like something incredibly light and relaxing, and even to hear about it in that very rough form I saw the potential,” von Donnersmarck said. “When I read it, I thought, ‘Maybe this is what I need to recharge my batteries.’”

‘We have an inner window’ But as he acknowledged, “blissfully unpretentious” is not his default artistic mode. His background is intellectual and cosmopolitan. His father, a member of the German nobility who lost his fortune following World War II, was a Lufthansa executive who moved around the world. Von Donnersmarck even lived as a child for a while in New York, where he went to school on Roosevelt Island and at the age of four saw his first movie at the Museum of Modern Art. He expected to see Doctor Doolittle but was exposed instead to the German melodrama Variete. He cites this experience as the start of his interest in film. Later he studied in the Soviet Union in its final days — “I went to sleep one night in Leningrad and woke up the next morning in St Petersburg,” he said — and was certified to teach Russian there. He then enrolled at Oxford, where he earned a graduate degree in philosophy, politics and economics, all the while wondering how he could get into the film business and interest a global audience in his ideas and his belief in the redeeming power of art.

“We have an inner window through which we can see the world,” he said, “and though it gets cloudy in life, it’s our job to wipe it clean and see things as they really are.” Koch said: “He’d never make a film just for intellectuals, just an arthouse film. He always wants to reach the masses, the crowd, and that’s probably why he is in Hollywood, because it offers the largest possibility.”

Yet it is not clear exactly what von Donnersmarck himself wants. “I don’t think that I’ll ever make a film like this (The Tourist) again, because it helped me see how much better it feels for me to work in my default position,” he said. “But at the same time I know that if I had never done what I perceive to be a real Hollywood film, I would always have regretted it.” He paused and added: “If after a few films here you see a risk of me going in that direction, you’ll warn me, OK?”

director’s cut

Jolie with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

◘ Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck graduated from Oxford University with a degree in philosophy.

◘ He wrote and directed The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007.

◘ The Lives of Others had started out as von Donnersmarck’s graduation film (at the School of Television and Film in Munich) but eventually took five years to complete. He also broke the student record for the number of short film awards won at festivals.

◘ Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck stands imposingly tall at 6’8”. Angelina Jolie said after meeting von Donnersmarck she felt in very safe hands. The film needed “somebody very sophisticated” to direct it, she said, adding, “I knew that he had a sense of culture — the way that he was raised, he speaks so many different languages.”