PATHBREAKER: Merchant is the original success

Imagine three of the hottest stars in Young Hollywood: Heath Ledger, Wes Bentley and Kate Hudson. Imagine them dropping all other films to star in a movie, Four Feathers, based on a 1939 war epic remade four times. The director has to be special, right? Well, in the case of Shekhar Kapur, who in 1998 was hot off the success of Elizabeth, he is.

Paramount is finally releasing the epic in September after postponing it by about a year. The lavish production shot in Morocco is being eagerly awaited by Hollywood and not only because everyone wants to see how Ledger has performed in the role that was allotted to Jude Law-who dropped it to star in Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence.

CROSSOVER: Kapur prefers Hollywood

Kapur, who has also been one of the prime movers of Bombay Dreams, the West End musical presented by Andrew Lloyd Webber, is the Real McCoy, the one who actually crossed over from Bollywood to Hollywood, via a brief stopover in England with Bandit Queen.

But much before Kapur was even a gleam in Hollywood's eye, Ismail Merchant had winged his way to the US. With a combination of his own panache, his talented partner Jim Ivory's fine directorial eye and the very sensitive Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's writing, Merchant has managed to create an enduring moveable studio.

His latest directorial venture, after the disastrous Cotton Mary, has been fairly well-received. After all, it is the first film ever to be based on a V.S. Naipaul book. Starring Aasif Mandvi, The Mystic Masseur has been released in a year which has seen the trio win the British Academy of Film and Television fellowship for lifetime achievement.

DREAMING BIG: Kapadia, winner of Sutherland Trophy, puts his roots to good use

"Merchant achieves a universality that transcends the cultural specifics ... the movie is compelling for its savvy performances." Hollywood Reviewer, on The Mystic Masseur

According to Hollywood Reporter's review of The Mystic Masseur, "Merchant achieves a universality that transcends the cultural specifics, and what makes the movie so compelling are the hilarious, savvy performances by a veteran cast. Mandvi marvellously transforms himself into the mystic." Yet, when author Tariq Ali proposed to make a series on Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas, the idea was shot down by BBC because it didn't see any commercial viability as all the characters were Asian. The series could not be slotted on prime time.

But then Merchant has never been one to let such things come in his way. Even now, as The Mystic Masseur is released commercially in the US and UK, Merchant and Ivory are already shooting their new film, Le Divorce, featuring Kate Hudson (again), the sensational Naomi Watts from David Lynch's Mullholand Drive and the inestimable Glenn Close.

Merchant's mantra, as always: high profile, low budget. And if you can't pay, you can always feed them, and while doing churn out a profitable side venture as a writer of cookbooks.

While Merchant is truly a Spice Boy when he wears his chef's hat, there are others who are so in attitude. Take Tarsem Singh, the boy wonder of REM's Losing My Religion video and the Smirnoff commercial, who rode to fame on the brilliant visual imagery of The Cell, starring Jennifer Lopez.

Or even Asif Kapadia, who last year won the Sutherland Trophy for the most imaginative first feature at the London Film Festival. His film, The Warrior, has just been bought by Miramax, the studio which has a golden touch at the Oscars.

Kapadia, who'd been to India just once before he shot his award-winning student film, The Sheep Thief, has discovered that his multiculturalism is an asset in a crowded marketplace. Having stumbled upon the stark landscape of Rajasthan in his 23-minute film, he returned to it for his first feature after graduating from the Royal College of Art.

Kapadia wanted to make a film for which he was willing to go to any lengths. "I was in the middle of a desert with a crew of 250 and horses, camels, buffaloes, scorpions, armed warriors filling a 500-year-old fort. I looked around me and that was it, my first film," remembers this Hackney boy with a sense of wonder.

There are others like him who've cashed in on the exotic India. Like Digvijay Singh, a 28-year-old who gave up working in television in Mumbai to study film production at UCLA. He ended up making Maya, a film on child abuse in an upper middle class home. Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, the film is set in Andhra Pradesh but the characters speak in Hindi. He believes his real subject is in Bombay, Boston, Beverly Hills and Bosnia. The issue, touchy as it is, got him more than his 15 minutes of fame in Toronto.

One filmmaker whose fame has lasted longer is Pondicherry-born and now Philadelphia-based Manoj Night Shyamalan. His first big feature film, The Sixth Sense, made an astounding $700 million at the box office while his second, Unbreakable, also starring Bruce Willis, did $250 million. Everyone's now looking for signs of success from his third supernatural thriller about mysterious crop circles which trouble a farming family in Signs. The film stars Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix.

Shyamalan is a Hollywood player even though he stays studiously away from it. Ashok Amritraj, who has produced well-received movies such as Bandits and all-time failures like Battlefield Earth, is very much part of the Hollywood set and is an influential member of the Indian community there.

There's another Indian who works the moneyline like Amritraj. Deepak Nayyar has just had a major success on his hands by co-producing Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham, but he's better known for the work he's done with Wim Wenders (The End of Violence and The Million Dollar Hotel) and David Lynch (The Lost Highway and Twin Peaks). Nayyar, who also lives in Los Angeles, hasn't had as much success in India. The film he produced back home was The Bhopal Express and its reception here, says the one-time Delhi boy, was "disappointing".

It was the same story for Amritraj who managed to notch up a disaster in the spectacularly-made but badly-conceived bilingual, Jeans. Nevertheless, it's a measure of his status that the film got nominated as India's entry to the Oscars.

So if this year has been a big one for the Indian Spice Girls of international cinema, the boys have not been slouches either. The Warrior's safely in Miramax's kitty, Paramount's counting on Four Feathers, and Disney's holding its breath for Signs. Now if only Bollywood were to deliver that one elusive crossover hit. The threshold would have been forever crossed.

-with Anil Padmanabhan