Italian director Gabriele Muccino was hoping for more box office glory on Friday as his debut Hollywood film starring Will Smith opened in cinemas across Italy.
Muccino's drama The Pursuit of Happyness, featuring Smith and his seven-year-old son Jaden Smith, will be showing in 430 movie houses this weekend.
The film has raked in more than $130 million in the US since its release three weeks ago, and is still going strong there.
The success has overwhelmed 39-year-old Muccino, whose previous four films were all relatively small-budget Italian ones.
At a press conference on Thursday ahead of the Rome premiere, the Roman-born director explained that Smith had picked him to helm the movie after seeing his 2001 hit L'Ultimo Bacio (The Last Kiss).
"He got in touch with me and sent me the script. I couldn't believe it and thought it was a waste of time. But then I met Will and realised he was a big fan of my work," Muccino said.
He said producers initially balked at the idea of him directing the movie because he was relatively unknown in the US but that Smith fought for him and brought them round.
The film's success in the States has proved Smith right, representing an unprecedented triumph for an Italian director.
Shot in San Francisco, the 60-million-dollar picture revolves around the true-life story of Chris Gardner, a struggling salesman who dragged himself and his child out of poverty to become a hugely wealthy stockbroker.
Muccino, who has won a string of awards for his past work including Italy's equivalent of the Oscar, said his approach to the all-American tale was largely inspired by Italian neorealist cinema.
A postwar movement which aimed at the realistic depiction of the poorer classes, neorealism is synonymous with the name of directing legend Vittorio De Sica.
Muccino said he had taken much from De Sica's two most poignant masterpieces, Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves, 1948) and Umberto D. (1952), which he got Smith to watch.
"The characters in these movies face their misery and difficulties with the same dignity and rectitude displayed by Chris Gardner," Muccino said.
He said the neorealist influence, as well as his European background, had allowed him to portray the precariousness of the American social system in ways which a home-born director might have overlooked or been immune to.
"It's a cynical and punitive society. Losing your job can mean losing everything, your social status, home and family - you can fall into a nightmare of desperate poverty," he said.
The Pursuit of Happyness is set in the early 1980s and tells the story of Chris, a self-employed medical scanning machine salesman who barely manages to make ends meet. Chris's situation deteriorates rapidly after his wife walks out, leaving him as the sole carer for their five-year-old boy.
He takes on a job as an internee at a brokerage firm, seeing it as his last shot at a better life. The only problem is that the six-month internship is unpaid work and the prospects of being hired at the end are very slim.
As Chris fights to shine at his job while selling his remaining scanners, he and his child are thrown out of their home and end up trailing from one homeless shelter to the next, at one point reduced to sleeping in a public lavatory.
Nonetheless Chris keeps going and is rewarded at the end of the six months when his firm picks him as the one internee worthy of a job.
Smith, who was in Rome for the premiere, told reporters that he was surprised by the extent of the film's success.
"I don't know why people have responded so well but perhaps it's because this film is also about the universal, primitive need to protect one's children in a difficult world," said the star, one of America's top grossing actors.
Smith is eyeing an Oscar with his role and has already won a Golden Globe nomination.
But Smith's son could steal the show with a debut which has won the public's heart.
Muccino said he was particularly pleased with the way he had managed to develop the father-son relationship on screen, stressing that the result was very moving and far removed from the script he was originally given to work with.
Gardner, whose best-selling autobiography provided the basis for the film's script, was also in Rome for the film's presentation.
"When I saw the finished film I was overcome. Gabriele Muccino captured the essence of my experience and the drama of the context," the multi-millionaire broker said.
Muccino's biggest success to date has been The Last Kiss, a bitter portrayal of today's responsibility-shy thirty-somethings.
A smash hit, the sleekly shot movie clinched Muccino an Italian Oscar for best direction and went on to win the Audience Award at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.
The film was so popular that it was recently the subject of an American remake directed by Tony Goldwyn.
As for Muccino's future, the director said that although he missed Italy, he had "adapted well" in America and was set to make more films there.
"Given how well this last film went, I'd like to make another, unless they send me packing beforehand," he said.
