The forgotten mystery thriller cursed by four lawsuits, a five-year delay, and Katy Perry
Literary adaptations are fairly straightforward as far as movies go; the rights are acquired, the personnel are assembled on either side of the camera, and the film is shot. On paper, at least, with one page-to-screen translation becoming a litigious nightmare for almost everyone involved.
Director Matthew Cullen was being heralded as a rising star, having won a pair of Grammy Awards for directing The Black Eyed Peas’ ‘Boom Boom Pow’ and Weezer’s ‘Pork and Beans’. The latter set a world record for featuring the most memes in a single music video, while his other collaborators included Adele, Green Day, Taylor Swift, and Beck.
In 2010 he co-founded multimedia company Mirada Studios alongside Guillermo del Toro, and soon set his sights on the world of feature films. Deciding that Martin Amis’ blackly comic murder mystery novel London Fields was the ideal way of going about it, the filmmaker called action in September 2013, which was about the last positive thing anybody had to say about it.
The movie was pencilled in to premiere at the 2015 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, but it ended up being pulled. In fact, it didn’t secure a release in the United States until October 2018, during which time London Fields was beset with legal issues from all sides.
Cullen sued the producers for fraud after alleging that his salary had been withheld. He’d been denied the final cut, with the rebuttal stating that “the timing and the content of the director’s lawsuit show that it is a publicity stunt,” with the subjects of the filing stating that “he was given two deadlines to deliver a director’s cut and missed both deadlines”.
The producers responded in kind by countersuing Cullen for breach of contract after London Fields went millions of dollars over budget and didn’t meet the pre-agreed deadlines for submission. At the same time, it alleged the filmmaker had also violated his agreement with the studio and the Directors Guild of America by working on a music video with Katy Perry during the post-production process on his debut feature.
Refusing to go quietly into the night, the same producers then sued star Amber Heard for $10million, claiming she’d gone into business for herself by making changes to the script, refusing to complete ADR work, and conspiring with Cullen to undermine London Fields. As a result, it left the movie “in limbo, hijacked, and placed under a cloud by Heard, Cullen, and others” per their statement.
Was that the end of it? Of course not, because Heard then launched the fourth London Fields lawsuit by countersuing, claiming that a no-nudity clause in her contract had been violated after the scenes were shot with a body double before the stand-in’s face was replaced digitally with hers. This ended in the actor securing a settlement.
The never-ending dismay might have been worth it in the end were London Fields any good, but it wasn’t. Resoundingly trashed by anyone unfortunate enough to waste 102 minutes of their life on it, the five-year wait and quartet of courtroom battles weren’t close to justifying the hassle.
