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Of course, because "U-571" is a World War II survival saga that pays tribute to American fighting men, it's more often linked to Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan." But "U-571" has none of that movie's air of self-importance. Mostow wanted to create a sub experience that was "real" without punishing the audience for its participation. Like Spielberg at his least pretentious, Mostow uses contemporary savvy to revive old modes of entertainment -- in this case, the patriotic yet wised-up military adventure that reached its apogee with "The Great Escape."

A surprising number of prominent directors have sported Harvard degrees -- they range from Michael Ritchie and Michael Crichton to James Toback and Ed Zwick. But Mostow is one of the few to emerge from that university's visual studies program, which has long been linked with avant-garde and documentary filmmaking and structuralist criticism.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

When I spoke to Mostow on the phone from his Los Angeles office last week, he explained that he was part of a cluster of entertainment-minded Viz Stud tyros -- including Reginald Hudlin of "House Party" fame -- who managed to graduate in the early '80s without ever learning the meaning of "semiotics." He did do documentaries in college, but his senior thesis was a horror film with an exploding eyeball.

Growing up in Woodbridge, Conn., a small town outside New Haven, in a family of "academics, mostly in the sciences, and classical musicians," Mostow never considered making movies for a living. Even after Harvard, he went to Los Angeles with low expectations: "I thought I'd get a job as a parking lot attendant, and that would be the way to meet people." He sent out letters, and won a meeting with Michael Eisner when Eisner was running Paramount.

He showed Eisner his 11-minute movie and tried to convince the executive that he should be "a story editor or something" -- that seemed "much more doable" to Mostow than becoming a director. Eisner asked, "Why don't you want to be a filmmaker?" It took a while for Mostow to convince himself that calling the shots on a set would come as naturally to him as sitting behind a desk in a suit.

"What I love about Hollywood," says Mostow, "is that there's a great equalizer at work here. No one gave me a break because I had an Ivy League diploma. What people care about is: Do you have a script that I can buy, or an idea for a movie that makes sense? That to me is very American; it's just that, instead of inventing something in your workshop, you're sitting in your kitchen with a typewriter writing a screenplay. And you can go from obscurity to an Academy Award in one shot."

Mostow spent about eight years "outside the business trying to be inside the business," he says. "I taught, I wrote business plans for people in start-up companies, I did any kind of freelance gig where I could control the hours and really be at home writing a screenplay or trying to direct a music video. I did direct a couple of music videos, and worked briefly for Roger Corman, and did some industrial films. Like so many people, I bounced along the bottom of Hollywood, living at or below the poverty line. For a while I fell into being the SAT coach to the kids of the stars.

"The way that I defined success in show business was if you could make a living inside of it, as opposed to driving a taxi to support your presence on the margins of it. Anything after that was gravy. The fact that I could pay my $300-a-month rent by earning a living through using my mind -- to come up with story ideas, or whatever in particular I was doing at the time -- that really, for me, was what it meant to be successful in show business."

In 1989, Mostow made a straight-to-video horror comedy called "Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers." The next year he directed the first feature-length work that he'll own up to: "Flight of Black Angel," an independent production that premiered on the cable channel Showtime. Like "Breakdown," about a lone Easterner fighting for his wife in Southwestern badlands, and "U-571," about a U.S. Navy sub crew pulling off a risky operation in German disguise, it was, he says, "essentially a thriller. A lot of what my movies are about is rhythm and pace."

Mostow describes "Flight of Black Angel" as a "cross between 'Taxi Driver' and 'Top Gun,'" centering on a mentally unstable Air Force pilot. "It was done for $1 million, and it got a lot of attention inside Hollywood because it looked like it cost 15 times more than it did. It had these giant aerial dogfight sequences. From that movie I got an agent. I was meeting with studios and being offered projects, but I just wasn't interested in what the studios were making. So after a year of reading scripts I developed my own project, 'The Game,' which ultimately David Fincher made with Michael Douglas." (Mostow wound up with an executive producer credit.)

"Ironically, that's how 'U-571' came up. I decided to shoot 'The Game' in San Francisco, and when I was scouting locations for it I saw a sign, down near Fisherman's Wharf, reading, 'World War II Submarine Tours, $2.' I went on board and was fascinated by the subject."

How did "The Game" pass out of your hands?

That was an expensive lesson to me, especially in terms of time, about how difficult it is to get a movie together if you're looking for big movie stars and you don't have enough credibility. That picture was at MGM when the studio was in disarray. No star wants to do a movie at a studio that's going through all sorts of problems -- they know the distribution will be questionable. On top of that, nobody had ever heard of me. "The Game" was a movie that required a big star to take a creative risk. In the hands of a successful director, he might want to take that risk, but not in the hands of a person he'd never heard of who'd done one movie for a million dollars. I spent about three years thinking, "Somebody will say yes." Nobody said yes. I did get close to getting Kurt Russell, and that encounter with Kurt later proved helpful in getting him to do "Breakdown."

But that's the only good thing that came out of the process. When you don't do anything for that length of time, your agent will pitch you for jobs, and what you'll hear is, "We liked that low-budget 'Flight of Black Angel' movie he did. But he hasn't done a movie in three or four years. What's the matter with him?"

When "The Game" stalled out, I thought, "Now I'm going to write a movie." I remembered going on that World War II submarine in San Francisco and wondering whether there was a movie there. Of course there was, but it was a big World War II picture set on water -- which was truly a stupid thing to write, because if I couldn't get "The Game" off the ground, how could I set up a really expensive World War II movie? At the time -- 1992, 1993, 1994 -- World War II was not a commercial genre. And the studios swore off movies set on water after "Waterworld."

So as a reaction against that, I thought, "Let me write the cheapest movie I could think of, one that has no sets. We'll shoot it out on the desert, without location permits, and just use available sunlight." That script was "Breakdown." So in a sense all these projects came out of one another. [Mostow co-wrote both "Breakdown" and "U-571" with Sam Montgomery; David Ayer, a former U.S. Navy sonar man, shares the screenplay credit with them on the sub movie.]

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