House of Sand and Fog Director Drew on Own Refugee Past

Stefan Lovgren in Los Angeles
for National Geographic News

December 24, 2003

As soon as Vadim Perelman read House of Sand and Fog, a
complicated 1999 best-seller about the American dream gone awry, he knew
he had to make the film.

But first the unproven director, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, had to buy the movie rights.

In a phone pitch to Andre Dubus III, the book's author, Perelman didn't mince his words.

If you give your novel to any other director, Perelman recalled telling the stunned Dubus, "they're gonna chain your baby to the radiator, rape, and kill it."

Perelman got the rights.

At first glance, Perelman seems an unlikely choice for director of House of Sand and Fog, a tragic tale of two desperate people—Massoud Amir Behrani, an exiled Iranian colonel who flees to the United States where he's reduced to doing menial jobs, and Kathy Nicolo, a recovering drug addict—and their battle for ownership of a California house.

But Perelman, who spent his childhood as a poverty-stricken refugee, says he can relate very personally to the immigrant experience depicted in House of Sand and Fog.

"The movie parallels what happened to me in my life," Perelman said in an interview in Los Angeles. "It's a story about loneliness and of being cast out, about being an immigrant in a new country—and feeling like an immigrant in your own country."

House of Sand and Fog is already playing in New York and Los Angeles, and opens elsewhere in North America on December 26.

A Refugee's Life

Born in 1963 in Kiev in the former Soviet Union, Perelman grew up as an only child. But his parents were poor, and he remembers having to share a room with ten people. When he was nine years old, his father was killed in a car crash.

Five years later, he and his mother were granted permission to leave Kiev. They packed suitcases full of souvenirs to sell—hand-painted Russian dolls—and headed to Europe. In Vienna and Rome, Perelman survived as a virtual street urchin as he and his mother waited for a visa to go to Canada.

Things didn't get much better once they got to Edmonton, Canada, where they moved into the basement of his aunt, who lived on welfare. After his mother got re-married, Vadim felt betrayed and left home, soon drifting into a life of crime.

Finally, Perelman shaped up. He earned his high school diploma equivalence, and went to the University of Alberta. In a film appreciation class, he watched a documentary on the making of Fiddler on the Roof, and was hooked.

"I walked out into the snow, and thought, 'This is what I want to do, I want to make movies,'" Perelman recalled. "For the first time in my life I had direction."

He got into film school in Toronto by telling the admissions board that his father had been a famous director in the Soviet Union, and he was going to film school to complete the last movie that his father had been working on.

Fleeing the Revolution

Later, Perelman directed music videos and public service announcements—among them "anti-smoking" and "stay-in-school" campaigns—before moving to Los Angeles, where he became a successful director of commercials.

Looking for a chance to direct his first feature film, he turned down standard Hollywood fare before discovering House of Sand and Fog.

"I cried reading the book," he said. "I knew I needed to tell the story. I've been one of those people—trying to find a little piece of the world that you can call your own."

But Perelman was not the only one involved with the film who could relate to the immigrant experience.

Colonel Behrani's wife, Nadi, is played by Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who fled Iran during its Islamic revolution in 1978.

"We traveled by road to Turkey, and it was snowing in the mountains," said Aghdashloo. "It was very dangerous. I felt like I was going to die."

She eventually landed in the United States, where she's performed in many Farsi-speaking plays, and featured in American television series, such as Columbo and Matlock.

A Metaphor for War

The book House of Sand and Fog was inspired in part by a newspaper story about a woman who lost her house and in part by the author's long-term involvement with an Iranian woman whose father had been a colonel in the Shah's air force.

(Sir Ben Kingsley, who portrays Colonel Behrani in the film, developed his Iranian accent from listening to audio tapes of speeches by the deposed Shah of Iran.)

"The story is really about war," said Dubus, who sees his story as a metaphor for larger conflicts, like the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. "Everyone is capable of terrible acts."

Perelman, meanwhile, is next set to direct The Talisman, a fantasy adventure to be produced by Steven Spielberg.

Not bad for a kid who once used to read his books by whatever street light he could come by.