French actress Eva Green has recently won a High Court case over her $1m (£810,000) fee for a sci-fi film that got shelved.
The Casino Royale star sued the production house White Lantern Film, claiming that they owe her a sum after the film was abandoned due to her disagreements with producers, but on the flip side, White Lantern claimed her “unreasonable demands” to be the driving factor the film, A Patriot, discontinuing.
The ruling followed a trial in January where Green’s text messages were derogatory in which she called one producer a “moron” and another “evil.” On Friday, the judge, Mr. Justice Green, ruled that the 42-year-old actress was entitled to her fee, and dismissed White Lantern’s counterclaim.
The judge stated that Green “did not renounce her obligations” under her contract as White Lantern had claimed “nor did she commit any repudiatory breaches of it”.
“There is no doubt that Ms. Green did not make any conclusive decision or statement that she would not comply with her obligations under the artist agreement. Nor could anyone have reasonably understood her to have made such a decision,” he added.
The Nocebo actress was also asked about the texts she sent about the filmmakers where she described two of them as “weak and stupid.”
Green told the court, “It’s my Frenchness coming out sometimes. Sometimes you say things you don’t actually mean. Of course, they are not weak and stupid.”
In light of her text messages and casual behavior in the court, the judge described the Perfect Sense actress as “in some senses a frustrating and unsatisfactory witness.”
“For such a perfectionist in her art, she was surprisingly under-prepared for her evidence,” the judge continued, adding that he understood “the torment it must have been for her to have all her private texts and WhatsApp messages revealed in open court.”
In response, Green said that it was “humiliating.”
The judge further added, “However, I do think allowances need to be made for the heightened emotions that were clearly present when some of the messages were written and for the fact that these were assumed to be a personal correspondence between friends that would never have been imagined to be seen by anyone else and certainly not analyzed to the extent they were.”
In her defense, the Dark Shadows actress told the court she was unhappy with the budget cuts which forced the filming to move from Ireland with “chaotic” preparations. Green also complained that the project became corner-cutting with an “extremely dangerous” reduction in her stunt training, and the crew being paid “significantly” below industry rates. In one of her text messages, Green referred to crew members as “peasants… from Hampshire.”
The actress explained to the court, “I have nothing against peasants. I didn’t want to work with a sub-standard crew. I wanted to work with a high-quality crew who just wanted to be paid standard industry rates.”
However, the judge decided that Green “may have said some extremely unpleasant things born from a genuine feeling of concern that any film… would be of very low quality.”
The Proxima star issued a statement following the judgment, suggesting that her “professional reputation has been upheld.”
“As a result of this case, the cat’s well and truly out of the bag that I am mildly terrified of public speaking, that I don’t understand technical financial structures, that I am fragile in the face of aggression, that I’m passionate about my work and that my heart breaks when people are unkind. I fought tooth and nail to defend the beautiful film that I loved and had signed on for,” she added.
On the flip side, White Lantern claimed that the star had “expectations for the film were incompatible with its budget”, and that she was “repeatedly making unreasonable demands” about the crew, locations, and equipment.
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