In a global production environment some directors are able to extract the best out of the opportunities offered anywhere while others don't. It is a combination of personal and professional attributes what makes a director more prone to work globally. Having to arrive on the set and face an entire crew that is speaking an unknown language and has never worked with you before is undoubtedly intimidating. Even if most of crew members around the World speak English and are used to work with American and European directors, shooting with them requires a certain doses of flexibility and adaptability.

The personality and the attitude of the directors is a key factor when shooting abroad. Some directors, for example, can work only in their environment and therefore are incapable of shooting overseas facing a different culture, new teams, and even eat different food. Some directors can be very creative when shooting in studio in Burbank but they cannot travel to Istanbul without getting sick the first day as soon as a drop of water from the shower falls into their mouths.
Some directors, have the tendency to work with the same crew: if they have to fly to the antipodes to shoot a commercial, they take with them the key persons like the DP, the production designer, the assistant director, and so forth.

It could make sense to fly an art director to Thailand if you need to reproduce there an American look (why are you going to Thailand to shoot a Chicago apartment anyway?) but, if you are looking for a South East Asia look, you should certainly use a Thai professional.

When shooting overseas you have to expect different ways of making things happen. A director should fully understand that and respect the work of his foreign crew: if he doesn't, the situation becomes immediately frustrating for him and offensive for the crew. People all around the Globe are proud of their cultures and resent if somebody coming from another country treats them as idiots and tries to impose a different way of doing things.

The combination of teaching and learning is the right one: the crew members will be happy to learn something new and to change their procedures when it makes sense and when the director accepts some of their ideas and leans something from them. In the past I have seen directors managing very successfully these relationships and others failing miserably.

I produced commercials with directors who enjoyed every moment of the experience of shooting in a country other than their own. They discovered new textures and colors, the appreciate the talent of local crews, they understood perfectly well how to take full advantage of the possibilities offered to them by shooting in Mexico, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Scotland, Italy, Dominican Republic, and so forth.

With the growth of the number of commercials shot abroad, directors have to evolve and become more culturally international as well: they should speak languages, understand foreign forms of art, listen to music from all around the globe, watch movies and short films from all latitudes, follow the tendencies of fashion in emerging countries and stay opened to new information. I believe that absorbing expressions of other cultures makes the directors more flexible and therefore more capable of using the global resources to enhance their creativity.

When a European or American director lands for the first time in Mexico and immediately asks if the Anthropological Museum is opened during the weekend I know that everything is going to be fine, if he or she asks for Starbucks or, and this is even worse, if the water of the tap is drinkable, I become very worried.