If you're among the select group of people who've seen Babylon A.D. --the sci-fi action whatsit that opened last Friday without the benefit of press screenings--its director, Mathieu Kassovitz has a message for both of you: it's not his fault. Kassovitz, who made a splash as a director in 1995 with his international hit La Haine (and who is perhaps best known here for his acting roles, such as the male romantic lead in Amelie and the boyish explosives expert in Munich) feels that 20th Century Fox, the movie's American distributor--it was co-financed by them and the French-based StudioCanal--gutted and mangled his baby, and he's gone public with his complaints via an interview with the website Scifi Scanner. If you only noticed the faint signals of Babylon A.D.'s publicity campaign and were unfamiliar with Kassoviitz's reputation as a filmmaker, you might be startled to learn that the movie, which stars Vin Diesel, Michelle Yeoh, Charlotte Rampling, and Gerard Depardieu ("wearing," according to New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott, "the most superfluous prosthetic nose extension in film history"), and which was originally set to be released back in February, was something that a studio might be able to mishandle. But it turns out that this, once upon a time, was a labor of love. The script, which is credited to Eric Besnard, is based on a novel, Babylon Babies by the French writer Georges Datec, that Kassovitz had wanted to film for years. The director rhapsodizes that "The scope of the original book was quite amazing. The author was very much into geopolitics and how the world is going to evolve. He saw that as wars evolve, it won't be just about territories any more, but money-driven politics. As a director it's something that's very attractive to do." But his efforts to remain true to the material were undercut, he says, by Fox's meddling. "I never had a chance to do one scene the way it was written or the way I wanted it to be. The script wasn't respected. Bad producers, bad partners, it was a terrible experience."
" To whatever degree the movie that Kassovitz made resembled what he had in mind, the finished product was further altered when Fox got out the chop-chop scissors before throwing it into theaters over the Labor Day weekend. The official 93-minute release is said to have lost anywhere between fifteen minutes (Kassovitz's best guess) and seventy minutes of footage from the director's version. (Informed of the changes, Vin Diesel, who has spoken of the movie as a comment on "an age where borders are closing," could only ask sardonically, "Am I even in the movie any more?") What's left, Kassovits says, is "pure violence and stupidity...like a bad episode of 24", like the ones where Jack's wife had amnesia. The way he sees i, he wanted to make a movie where "All the action scenes had a goal: They were supposed to be driven by either a metaphysical point of view or experience for the characters," whereas Fox ""Fox was just trying to get a PG-13 movie." The end result for him has been a sad lesson in just how superfluous the director of a movie can be made to feel. "I'm ready to go to war against them," he says, "but I can't because they don't give a shit."