On Thursday, a protracted legal fight involving an unproduced movie featuring the French actress Eva Green made it to London’s High Court.
Green, who co-starred with Daniel Craig in the James Bond movie “Casino Royale,” is asking for reimbursement of her acting salary for the sci-fi project “A Patriot,” which was never finished.
The 42-year-old actress is suing White Lantern Film, a production company based in the UK, asserting that she is still entitled to her $1 million fee (o810,000).
The production, announced in 2018, collapsed the following year.
Green filed her lawsuit saying she owed the fee under a “pay or play” contract clause. She is also seeking reimbursement of her legal costs.
White Lantern Film countersued, alleging that she derailed the o4 million project by making “unreasonable demands” and by dropping out of the lead role.
The judge will render a decision after the trial, which is scheduled to last nine days.
Attorney Edmund Cullen represented green at the first full hearing on Thursday, but she did not show up. Green is scheduled to testify on Monday.
Cullen said of the actress, who was an executive producer for the movie, “she went over backwards to get this done. She wanted the picture to be made.
In order to garner attention and harm Green’s reputation, he claimed that the production company was aiming to portray Green as a “diva.”
A lawyer for White Lantern, Max Mallin, said Green had shown a “vitriolic aversion” to production plans and was “increasingly reluctant to be involved”.
“We have got a critical split between the expectation of Eva Green and the film she wanted to make, and what the budget could afford,” he told the court.
In written arguments, Mallin also pointed to text messages in which she harshly criticized several of the production crew members.
In them, Green calls the film’s executive producer Jake Seal a “devious psychopath” and production manager Terry Bird a “moron”.
Green’s “language is open and at times forcefully and probably recklessly delivered,” Cullen acknowledged.
However, he claimed that White Lantern was trying to “place every production failure at Ms Green’s door” when, in reality, the endeavor was in a “state of utter dysfunction”.
Cullen successfully defended two former Sex Pistols members in a London court case against the band’s former vocalist John Lydon last year about the use of the punk group’s songs in a Disney series.
According to the website Celebrity Net Worth, Green is worth $10 million.
