Vanilla Sky is the remaking of a foreign film. Why does Hollywood always steal other people's ideas

A.� The latest Tom Cruise blockbuster, Vanilla Sky, is an attempt by Hollywood to remake a foreign-language hit, Alejandro Amenabar's Spanish puzzle picture Open Your Eyes, made in 1997, for an American audience.

Hollywood has stolen from European films for years and has refashioned forgotten movies into star vehicles. As long ago as 1939, Kleine Mutti became Bachelor Mother with Ginger Rogers. It has also made scene-by-scene remakes, such as Algiers (1938), based on the French thriller Pepe le Moko. Euopean hits have helped fashion careers too, Intermezzo starring Ingrid Bergman was a remake in 1939 of the Swedish film she appared in in 1936.

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Q.� I thought Hollywood was initially keen to promote the American industry

A.� Hollywood was American as it could be during the Second World War. In the 1950s, the threat of television and Jospeh McCarthy helped focus its mind on homegrown talent. But the successful reworking of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai into the western The Magnificent Seven in 1960 led to other movies, including Rashomon which became The Outrage with Paul Newman; Sergio Leone redid Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars; and The Hidden Fortress and other works fed into Star Wars.

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Q.� Which recent films have started out in a foreign land

A.� Box-ofice hits such as The Woman In Red is actually a remake of Pardon Mon Affaire, Victor/Victoire, and The Birdcage was originally La Cage aux Folles.

Diabolique, the 1996 Sharon Stone remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 thriller is another example of plundering by LA executives. Terry Gilliam built Twelve Monkeys out of the short film, La Jetee.

Francois Veber, wrier of some of France's most popular comedies, has seen many of his films - Pure Luck, Three Fugitives, Father's Day - get the transatlantic treatment.

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Q.� Doesn't the meaning change with translation

A.� Some films do have difficulties. Movies that have made it in France - Buddy, Buddy, The Man with One Red Shoe - have suffered at the box office, critics claim because of the translation. Amenabar originally wrote his haunted house movie The Others in Spanish and planned to set it in Chile. Tom Cruise was brought in as producer, and the film ended up with an English script, a wartime Jersey setting and Nicole Kidman as the star. Amenabar's first film, Thesis, about a student who discovers snuff movies being made in her university basement, is also being developed an an English-language version.

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by Katharine MacColl