Eva Green | photo credit: Peter Nichols
Eva Green was on Friday awarded USD 1 million by a British court in a sensational dispute over the collapse of a film project that was feared would turn out to be a “B movie” that could ruin her career.
The film in question was a sci-fi thriller but the case played out in court like a melodrama. The makers of “A Patriot” portrayed the French actor as a diva. She called one of the executive producers a “crooked psychopath” and “pure vomit” and said the production manager was an “idiot”.
A High Court judge cut through acrimony that she said threatened to complicate the case and deemed it “relatively straightforward”, awarding Green the fee she was promised for production in 2019.
Green, 42, who played Vesper Lynd in the 2006 version of the James Bond thriller “Casino Royale,” said her professional reputation was upheld when she stood up to a small group of wealthy men who “bully- Boy Tactics”. Made him a scapegoat for his failures.
However, his lengthy statement exposed his fragility in the face of criticism and the hurt he suffered from what he claimed was misreporting in the press that “pained more than I can say”.
Green said, “The media gets more pleasure out of tearing a woman to pieces.” Looks like female hysteria. It was cruel and it was untrue. Justice Michael Green dismissed a countersuit brought by England-based film production company White Lantern Film, which said the actor had made “excessive creative and financial demands” and torpedoed the production.
The judge ruled that Green had not abandoned or breached her obligations and was entitled to her £810,000 fee.
Green said she “fell in love” with the script of “A Patriot” and its environmental message but became increasingly concerned as corners were cut and production moved from Ireland to England.
“When an actor appears in a B movie, they are labeled as a B actor, you are never offered quality work,” she testified.
During the trial, the court was told that Green used a slur, describing potential crew members as “peasants”.
She said that executive producer Jake Seal was “rogue” a “devious sociopath” and a “crazy man”, and labeled production manager Terry Byrd a “idiot”.
She valued his bitter words as his “Frenchness”, which the judge described as insufficient and not credible.
While Justice Green found in favor of Eva Green, he gave a poor review to both parties in his 71-page decision.
“For such a perfectionist in her art, she was surprisingly unprepared for her evidence,” he wrote, calling the actor “in some sense a disappointing and unsatisfactory witness.”
The judge said that the disparaging things Green said about Seal were out of a genuine concern that the film would not do justice to the script, and that he did not entirely disagree with her criticism.
The judge wrote, “I have to say that, having given him the evidence, I can see how it might be possible for him to be immediately disliked.” One can understand the innate aggression and why Ms. Green and others might be resentful at being told that they had to make the film under their complete control.