Frank Oz is not the first director to hop the pond with murder on his mind and a determination to recharge his creative batteries. Most recently, Woody Allen employed the strategy after the box office failures of “Melinda and Melinda” and “Anything Else,” leaving New York for the London-set murder melodrama “Match Point.” Before him, Robert Altman followed up the disastrous “Dr. T and the Women” with a quaint British murder mystery — the Oscar-nominated “Gosford Park.”

So it was in 2004, when Mr. Oz — best known for directing such lighthearted fare as 1991’s “What About Bob?” and 1988’s “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” as well as voicing Yoda, the green Jedi master of “Star Wars” — found himself in much the same position. Having just recovered from the critical and commercial lashings that came with the big-budget, star-studded flop “The Stepford Wives,” Mr. Oz was feeling frustrated with Hollywood’s marketing-above-all mentality — and with himself.

“Although I loved many parts of ‘Stepford,’ I don’t think I did a great job,” he confessed recently. “I didn’t listen to myself, and it got so expensive that I started feeling responsible to producers and a studio. I felt responsible to money where instead I should have just said, ‘I’m going to go with what I believe is best.'”

Mr. Oz compared the making of “Stepford,” which featured Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, and a production budget hovering near $100 million, to flying a B-52 bomber, a bulky machine that’s difficult to turn and slow to respond to the pilot.

In many ways, his new film, “Death at a Funeral,” much like Mr. Allen’s “Match Point” and Altman’s “Gosford Park,” is the polar opposite of the film that came before it. With a budget roughly one-tenth that of “Stepford Wives” and a cast of lesser-known British actors, Mr. Oz likened the making of this black comedy less to a B-52 than to flying a small, agile Spitfire.

“I wanted something low-budget, wanted the freedom that I didn’t have with the last film,” he said. “There are pressures both in making a big-studio film and a small film, and I love the pressure, but at least with this sort of pressure, I was the boss. This film was good for the soul. I told my agent: ‘You know, even if it’s a piece of crap, at least it’s my piece of crap.'”

Audiences at film festivals around the country have already weighed in, and the exit polls are good. Winner of the audience award at this year’s U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, “Death at a Funeral,” about a rural British funeral gone awry, has already garnered praise for its tight, classic comedy formula that seems lifted from another era.

“It’s odd, people have said it’s original and refreshing, and that’s a wonderful compliment but it’s a paradox,” Mr. Oz said. “I think it seems fresh because people haven’t seen a well-crafted farce in ages. They think of comedies and they think of Jim Carrey or Steve [Martin] or Eddie [Murphy], and they’re terrific, but those comedies are tailored around one or two stars, while ‘Death at a Funeral’ is about a very particular, rigorous structure.”

It was the challenge of tackling that rigorous structure, as well as the chance to remove himself from the Hollywood machine, that Mr. Oz said drew him to the project. The film carefully builds a sense of desperation through its first and second acts — always a tricky thing to do with a comedy, he said — before throwing its characters into various states of distress and then celebrating the way they save themselves.

Utilizing multiple read-throughs of the script and weeks of rehearsal to allow the actors the freedom to improvise and develop their characters, Mr. Oz said it was the movie’s meticulous preproduction planning that allowed the cast to find its groove during a chaotic shooting schedule that sometimes required a shift from desperate to zany at the drop of a hat.

He said “Death” was the very first script he’s ever read that became a movie instantly in his mind’s eye, and that he perfected the story’s timing during rehearsals, so that he had most of the movie’s scenes timed down to the second before the first day of filming. The resulting mayhem begins with a family that must unite to mourn a death. But when an accident leads to a second death, the story explodes into various personal dramas that spill over into the prim-and-proper British funeral service — dignified grief turning quickly into unbridled chaos. Between the different generations and familial relations, no comic device is left untapped.

Traveling the world with the film, which will arrive in New York theaters next Friday, Mr. Oz said he’s been surprised by how American audiences in different markets have reacted the same way, whether the film is being screened in Kansas City or Los Angeles. Ironically, it’s been with the native British audiences that the director has seen a more muted response.

“They didn’t laugh nearly as loud, but on their way out of the theater, they gave it the exact same score as the Kansas City audience the day before,” he said of a London screening. “I found it fascinating. I think in England there’s more a sense of propriety, which this film reflects. In America, it’s just a funeral, but over there, there is this sense of how everyone has to behave in order to keep everyone happy. And I think we saw that at the screening, that they were laughing, but it wasn’t the big guffaw that we got in Kansas City.”

Mr. Oz speaks with the candid conviction of a filmmaker converted, of a former studio man who has seen the promised land. And he thinks the further Hollywood drifts in the direction of sales over story, the more people will join him in his exodus.

“I think you need to ask yourself: Are you making movies that excite you, or are you making a business decision? Many scripts are not so much formulaic for entertainment purposes but for marketing purposes. They all feature two comedians, two $20 million players, who are at each other for some reason. My angle here is that I went for story, not a star — I don’t have a star in this movie, maybe that’s a mistake — but some actors and directors are at a point like me: They just want to go back and do it for the purity of the experience.”