AMERICAN cinema’s debt to its foreign-born directors is like sea travel’s debt to the starry night. From Fritz Lang to Ang Lee, filmmakers have come fleeing political oppression, limited opportunity, even bad taste. Far fewer have been driven from their native shores by overwhelming success and the feeling that they had nowhere to go but down.

 

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Left, the Danish director Niels Arden Oplev with Noomi Rapace, who plays Lisbeth in Mr. Oplev’s adaptation of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the international best seller.

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 Trailer: 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'

Music Box Films

Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist in Niels Arden Oplev's film “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” The movie, a huge hit in Europe, arrives at theaters in the United States on Friday.

But after the European release of something like “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the Danish director Niels Arden Oplev said, you can’t go home again. Not professionally, anyway.

“We sold three million tickets,” he said of what was the most successful European film of 2009 and one that arrives in the United States on Friday surfing the publishing tsunami of the late Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson’s series of crime novels known as the Millennium Trilogy. “If you add all of Europe, the sales are more like eight million tickets. So I just felt, I don’t want to be in Scandinavia right now. If I make a Scandinavian film, and it sells 100,000 tickets, which would still be good, then that’s a major failure for me.”

And, he said, “I’ve always had this dream of doing an English-language film.”

Before “Dragon Tattoo” even completed production in Sweden, Mr. Oplev had moved his wife, Florence Tone, and their four children from outside Copenhagen to Cranbury, N.J. “It was crazy,” he said. “Literally, the coffee cups were standing on the kitchen table in the house in Denmark. We packed two suitcases each and left the furniture. It’s typical of Florence and I to do something like that.”

Their choice of Cranbury (Ms. Tone was raised in suburban New Jersey) was based on a criterion familiar to parents everywhere: good schools. But the move also put Mr. Oplev in better proximity to his dream. Which, by the way, does not include an American remake of his own film, the rights to which have been acquired by the producer Scott Rudinand Sony Pictures. Mr. Oplev has had earlier skirmishes with Hollywood; an original project called “The Last Born” was in development withJames Cameron’s production company several years ago, but the theme of doomed biology and the appearance of the similarly themed “Children of Men” scuttled its chances.

“The fact that ‘Children of Men’ didn’t do that well didn’t help either,” Mr. Oplev said with a laugh.

Robert Lazar, an agent at International Creative Management sought out the director after seeing his film at Cannes last year. “I‘m always looking for talent that can transition to an American market,” Mr. Lazar said. “Niels made his film brilliantly, and it stands on its own in any language.”

The plot centers on Mikael Blomkvist, a publicly disgraced investigative journalist (Michael Nyqvist) who is hired to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of the niece of a Swedish mogul. The research assistant Mikael recruits, Lisbeth Salander, is a bisexual, tattooed motorcyclist and computer genius (the newcomer Noomi Rapace) with a saddlebag’s worth of personal issues. The American release of the film is being eagerly anticipated, not the least by Alfred A. Knopf, which currently has “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and its sequel, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” out in paperback; “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” arrives in May. (Mr. Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004 and left no will, prompting an inheritance dispute between his father and brother on one side, and his longtime partner, Eva Gabrielsson, on the other, over a fourth manuscript and synopses of a fifth and sixth, which remain on Mr. Larsson’s laptop.)

“I don’t know how widely the film will be seen,” said Knopf’s editor in chief, Sonny Mehta. “I hope widely, because it’s a good film and wonderful for the book. They are building exponentially, and the anticipation for the third volume is really quite acute, because everyone knows it’s available in England. People are getting a little bit irascible about it. So the timing of the film could not be better.”

The film’s distributor is cautiously optimistic. “It’s not a phenomenon yet,” said Ed Arentz, managing director of Music Box Films, which released the top-grossing foreign film of 2008, the French thriller “Tell No One.” “It’s a presumptive phenomenon, I’ll go with that. If we didn’t have a lot of expectations, a small company like ours, we wouldn’t be putting 100 prints into the marketplace.”

Mr. Oplev, who grew up in the very north of Denmark, made his initial splash with the 1996 goth-punk drama “Portland” and had a huge television hit back home with the police drama “Unit 1.” He credits the runaway success of his latest film and the books to the fact that they’re unabashedly entertaining.

“It’s so Agatha Christie,” he said. “An old family, rich, really dark secrets in the closet, and on an island where communication was interrupted while the crime occurred. In comes this classic character, the investigative journalist. But where Stieg hit a home run is with Lisbeth’s character. She brings it all up to another level.”

Ms. Rapace, a striking beauty of Swedish-Spanish heritage, said much of her time preparing for her role as the ferocious, multiply pierced Lisbeth, was spent “training and driving a lot and exercising and fighting with Niels about the script.”

One change involved a monologue in which Lisbeth uncharacteristically explained herself.

“He admitted I was right,” Ms. Rapace said, smiling.

“She feels she won,” Mr. Oplev said.

Generally Mr. Oplev is a determined fellow. His coming projects, some of which he said were too premature to discuss, include an adaptation of the Jennifer Egan novel “The Keep,” set to shoot in late summer and produced by Daniel Bobker, who said his interest in Mr. Oplev was two-fold. “ ‘Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ is a $100 million European film, and it hasn’t even opened everywhere in Europe yet,” he said. “But besides that, you can see in Niels’s work that he has the authority and control to bring everything up a notch.”

Mr. Oplev has also optioned a new political book that he declined to identify, a story he said he can develop while on other projects. And over which he can exercise total control. “I don’t want someone telling me, ‘You have to make it this way,’ ” he said. “It’s tough for me, because when I work in Scandinavia, I’m the king. Here it’s a little bit different.” He laughed. “And that’s what I have to get used to.”