'Golden Compass' Director Seeks True North

Weitz will not read these reviews, or any others. "If they're favorable, I dismiss the review as something I already knew," he says. "If it's negative, it's something I hadn't realized and they're absolutely right."

You'd recognize Weitz if you ever saw "Chuck and Buck," a terrifically creepy indie film from 2000 in which he is stalked by a gay childhood friend. He pulled off leading-man good looks in that movie, and seven years later, at the age of 38, he's like a harried update of that same guy -- with two days of beard growth and a swirl of dark hair that screams "bed head." Not to mention a wife and a baby, both sitting nearby. When the cappuccino comes and he warms up, Weitz takes off his sweater, revealing a red T-shirt that in yellow letters says "Keep Calm and Carry On."

"It's a phrase from British propaganda posters during World War II," he says. "It apparently was all over the place. I saw it and loved it, so I bought about 14 of them and sent them to everyone doing postproduction."

Weitz grew up on the Upper East Side but has a slight British accent, something he acquired during 10 years at a boarding school in London. It was an idea of his father's, who had landed in London as a 10-year-old after fleeing Germany in 1933 as Hitler came to power. The younger Weitz went to Cambridge, where he studied 17th-century literature and authors like Milton and Donne. That background helped when he pitched himself as the writer and director of "The Golden Compass," but that is hardly the first time that his British education helped him in Hollywood.

"What that system teaches you is how to be strident and absolutely assured of something you don't really know anything about," he says. "It's a great skill for Hollywood. They want you to tell them that you know how to do things, so that they can feel better about the fact that nobody knows what they're doing."

As a serious fan of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, Weitz says he'd be a little wary, too, if he heard that the dude from "American Pie" would direct "The Golden Compass." In fact, when his name first surfaced on fan sites, he barely beat out "nobody at all" in a poll of candidates for the director's job. He lobbied for it anyway.

"He brought in this 30-page manifesto of how he saw the movie, the characters, what's important about the movie, where you need to deviate from the book," says Mark Ordesky, a New Line executive producer. "That manifesto got him in the room. Then we met him. And he's incredibly book-smart, as you can tell, but a lot of incredibly smart artists can't tell stories. We had the sense that he could tell an ambitious story smartly but with some humanism."

Weitz, the son of a Jewish dad and a half-Jewish, half-Catholic mother, describes his own religion as "lapsed Catholic crypto-Buddhist." He has faith in some kind of supernatural explanation for the universe, which he says gives him an affinity for religion in general. Yes, he snipped out some of the more aggressively anti-religious elements of "The Golden Compass," most notably any mention of "church" in connection with the villains. He didn't want to offend churchgoers. And the more people who read a trilogy he calls "a masterpiece," the better.

Are there plans yet for a sequel?

"I'm supposed to be bullish," he says, contemplating the field of rivals for holiday movie dollars, "and I am. On December 7th, I suppose there'll be some guy somewhere with an adding machine who'll figure that out. We've got vampires [in 'I Am Legend'] and chipmunks in 'Alvin and the Chipmunks' attacking us, and they're going to eat into our box office. We'll see what kind of damage they do."