Paul Weitz, All-'American' Director

With the movie "American Dreamz," Paul Weitz set out to satirize the culture of fear in post-9/11 America. But before he could even finish the screenplay -- which pokes fun at terrorists, the Bush administration and "American Idol" -- he nearly scared himself right out of tackling the project.

"I was kind of afraid of making it because I thought it was ill-advised," the 40-year-old filmmaker confesses from a sofa at Georgetown's Ritz-Carlton, where he is doing interviews to promote "Dreamz" (see review on Page 35), which he also directed. "And then a friend said, 'Well, you've got a lot of clout right now.' . . . So after thinking about it for a while, I wrote it in three weeks and sent it to the actors. And once they agreed to do it, there was no turning back."

Anxiety seems to be part of Weitz's DNA. He confesses that he works a lot right before one of his movies comes out, primarily to distract himself. "I get very nervous because it's a feeling of utter lack of control," he says. (Right now he's pursuing a couple of screenplay ideas.)

Yet this native New Yorker -- son of actress Susan Kohner and the late fashion designer John Weitz -- doesn't come across as anal-retentive or particularly preoccupied. Dressed casually in a black zip-up sweater and blue jeans, and sporting a graying head of hair that vaguely resembles Hugh Grant's 'do circa "Four Weddings and a Funeral," his attitude conveys low-key. You could easily walk by him on, say, M Street, and never suspect he's the same director behind the sleeper hit about a kid who gets intimate with a homemade pastry.

Indeed, it was "American Pie" -- which, along with "About a Boy," he co-directed with brother Chris Weitz -- that first gave the filmmaker the clout his friend referred to; the teen sex comedy became one of the most talked-about flicks of the summer in 1999 and earned more than $235 million worldwide at the box office. In a way, Weitz sees "American Dreamz," which traffics more in silliness than in blistering satire, as a return to his debut movie's sensibilities.

"It is using the vernacular of lowbrow comedy to discuss relatively highbrow issues," he says of his latest project, which explores "the idea of everybody in America having a dream and that being such a sanctified thing."

"American Dreamz" features a large ensemble cast (including Grant, Dennis Quaid, Mandy Moore and Willem Dafoe) and a sprawling storyline involving an inept terrorist-in-training (Sam Golzari), a scheming contestant on an "American Idol"-style television show and a clueless president (Quaid) who becomes a guest judge on the popular program to boost his approval ratings. Weitz takes plenty of comedic liberties with his subject matter; the aforementioned terrorist, for example, uses his spare time at training camp to rehearse his version of "One" from "A Chorus Line."

The actors seemed to appreciate the chance to revel in the ripped-from-the-headlines ridiculousness. Dafoe, who plays a chief of staff who looks suspiciously like Vice President Cheney, agreed to star in the picture after an unconventional appeal from Weitz and his team.

"When we were thinking of Willem, we made a computer morph of Willem's face with the top of Dick Cheney's head and e-mailed it to him," the director recalls. "I think that's partly why he wanted to do the movie."

When discussing public affairs, Weitz is calm and rational. The guy responsible for busting on Bush on more than 1,000 cineplex screens across the country actually sounds . . . open-minded.

"I'm not a conspiracy theorist," he says. "People from the left who talk about the war having been begun to fatten the coffers of Halliburton, that makes no sense to me. I don't think things work that way. I do think that the administration had a dream that they would go into the Middle East and form a democracy and that everybody would be delighted and join in. And clearly things are so much less simple than that.

"The weird thing about this film is someone could walk into this just wanting to, you know, laugh at a parody of 'American Idol,' and then they'll be exposed to all sorts of questions about what the ramifications are of power in the world."