Summary and quotes:
The 4-pages article explains why the movie 'Idol's Eye' has been cancelled. It is written in the first person, and it's Olivier Assayas speaking. In his own words, he said it was "a ship taking on water from all sides." Here is a summary of what interests us: why the movie was canceled. It was a highly expensive movie, Olivier tells the budget was between $23 and $25 million. He talks about the fear they had him and Charles Guillibert, every morning, during two months, when opening their emails. On September 14, he was in Chicago with De Niro working on the details of his character. On October 10 he received an email from a lawyer of their American producer to tell him that the shooting was being pushed back a week. Olivier briefly explains that such a delay has considerable expensive consequences added to the budget of a film. With "a bunch of legal bullshit", this email explained that it was the fault of the film crew, led by Olivier Assayas and Charles Guillibert, and so it would be their wages that would be decreased to reduce the costs. They had six hours to accept these new terms, "without this, production would be stopped for good and a hundred people would be unemployed. Welcome to my life at fall 2014." But the movie didn't end that day, but on October 23, then it was back on track, and then he was finally cancelled on November 2. But that's the day he received the email on October 10 that he realized he had lost control on the movie, and that "its existence, or not, was now in the hands of highly opaque financiers of Los Angeles that we hardly knew and to whom a reasonable person would never have grant them a fraction of his confidence. In brief it was bad for us." For Olivier it was very clear, they postponed the shooting because the financiers had no more money and couldn't honor the deadlines for the coming week. They had postponed a week to try to gather the missing funds. And during the following weeks it was hopes and disappointments ... Olivier Assayas had to pretend that all was well during this time pretending to be focused on Robert De Niro's clothes and hair color for the character. He talks about finding himself taken hostage by an industry that has never interested him. He finally realized that all this would at least bring him back to himself and what has always determined his desire "far from the toxic passions that destroy the American industry, money, power and perversity, law and order." Sunday November 2, 36 hours before the start of the shooting, the financiers still didn't had the funds and production has been stopped and no more bills nor wages were paid. On november 3, the financiers released a statement accusing the producers, saying they wanted to entrust the movie to another team, which is crazy because the rights are not theirs. The next day everyone left Toronto and everything was dismantled. Since a month, Olivier Assayas "receives almost daily signals (by the financiers), almost pathetic, telling me that this time they are really able to fund. We talked about December, we talked about January, and now we talk about March April ... " His conclusion: "Looking back, now I see this as a horrible misunderstanding, in the best case a parenthesis, a movie that I will make perhaps, why not, and so much the better, but without illusions, knowing that it's the intimacy of writing, in the practice of a cinema determined by inspiration and freedom of movement, the opposite of what's eating today's American industry, that is my one true way."
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