Oscar-Winner Marion Cotillard Apologizes for Her Anti-American Slurs; Disavows 9/11 World Trade Center Attack Quote
Oscar-Winner Marion Cotillard apologized for her quotes that the 9/11 World Trade Center Attack and the 1969 moon-walk were American hoaxes. A week after winning the Academy Award for her remarkable portrayal of the doomed chanteuse Édith Piaf in La Môme (retitled La Vie en rose for release in the United States), Cotillard is embroiled in an Internet-fueled controversy that portrays her as not only anti-American, but as a member of the lunatic conspiracy fringe.
The Internet has disseminated a year-old interview with Marion Cotillard in which she claims that the dominant view that the 9/11 Attack on the World Trade Center was perpetrated by the Muslim militant group al-Qaeda was a hoax, and not just a hoax, but a money-fueled hoax unique to Americans. Cotillard claims that the World Trade Center buildings were antiquated white elephants that had to be destroyed, and that the Americans decided to maximize their political capital by blowing them up and then blaming them on Muslim radicals. She then justified her view by claiming that the 1969 moon walk by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin also was an American hoax, citing unnamed documentaries she had seen on the subject.
It is conceivable that had Cotillard’s comments been widely circulated during the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences award-voting period, that she would not have won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Julie Christie, who had portrayed an Alzheimer’s patient in director Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, was the favorite to win the Best Actress Oscar, having won the New York Critics Circle Award, a Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild Award.
Julie Christie is a leftist-progressive who, during the run-up to the Academy Awards, publicly criticized the U.S. for imprisoning “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo and criticized Canada for denying sanctuary to American military deserters. It is unlikely that Christie’s left-wing, though temperate, criticism cost her the Oscar as her views are shared by many in Hollywood. She likely lost as she stated that winning the Oscar was personally meaningless to her and complained that the Academy Award ceremony was vastly over-hyped and too commercialized.
Marion Cotillard’s comments were fare more incendiary. “I think we’re lied to about a number of things,” she said on the Paris Première – Paris Dernière TV program in a broadcast from early 2007. She then called the World Trade Center attack a hoax
“We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes, are they burned? There was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burned for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed.”
Cotillard made the fantastic supposition that Americans destroyed the towers as they were too expensive to maintain, and the cost of modernizing the Twin Towers’ telecommunications infrastructure would be too prohibitive. So they apparently were destroyed, with thousands of people inside.
Of the World Trade Center buildings, Cotillard says, “It was a money-sucker because they were finished, it seems to me, by 1973, and to re-cable all that, to bring up-to-date all the technology and everything, it was a lot more expensive, that work, than destroying them.”
Such comments are well within the mainstream of popular thinking in France, in which anti-Americanism has raged since the American invasion of Iraq. President George W. Bush rejected a Canadian-brokered compromise approved by the French government that the invasion of Iraq be delayed by a month to permit one last effort to get Saddam Hussein to allow United Nations weapons inspectors to look for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). If the U.S. agreed to support the new timetable, France agreed, in turn, to support an invasion if Hussein continued to stymie the U.N. weapons inspectors. Of course, Saddam Hussein had no WMDs. The compromise was rejected by the Bush Administration, which then proceeded to invade Iraq without the support of France of Canada, two of its chief NATO allies.
Books alleging that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were elaborate operations staged by the Bush Administration have been best-sellers in France.
The suicide attack on the World Trade Center took at least 2,726 lives (the number of death certificates issued related to the incident, all but 13 of which occurred on 9/11/01), while the Pentagon attack cost at least 183 lives (125 people in the building, 54 people on the plane, and four terrorist-hijackers). United Flight 93, which was either shot down or crashed by terrorists-hijackers in Pennsylvania, cost 44 lives, including four hijackers. (The “Why?” behind the destruction of Flight 93 seemingly is ignored by most 9/11 conspiracy “theorists.”)
However, Marion Cotillard wasn’t content with merely voicing the popular 9/11 theories still current in France, but continued her anti-American bent by questioning the U.S. space program, a favorite of conspiracy theorists here in the States.
“Did a man really walk on the moon?” she asked rhetorically. “I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered. And in any case I don’t believe all they tell me, that’s for sure.”
An Oscar can mean millions in earnings power to the winner, and after news of Marion Cotillard’s year-old comments began making the rounds of the Internet, it was time for damage control by the diva’s handlers. Her lawyer in Paris, Vincent Tolesano, was quoted by the Daily Telegraph (London) as apologizing for the French star.
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“Marion never intended to contest nor question the attacks of September 11, 2001, and regrets the way old remarks have been taken out of context.”
Marion Cotillard, a household name in her native land but who was virtually unknown in America until the release of La Vie en rose, is about to shoot her first major Hollywood film, director Michael Mann’s 1930s-era gangster picture Public Enemies, with Yank superstar Johnny Depp, who plays John Dillinger in the picture. Ironically, Depp was an expatriate living in France with his French model girlfriend, until the 9/11 attacks brought him scurrying home. The film’s producers must have had conniptions upon hearing of her comments.
Universal Studios, which will distribute Public Enemies, refused to comment on the controversy.
Most Hollywood insiders believe that the controversy will blow over quickly, as many Hollywood players share her beliefs. Multiple-Oscar winning writer-director Oliver Stone, who directed the 2006 World Trade Center film starring Nicolas Cage, has made a career out of filming his takes on conspiracy theories, such as his highly controversial JFK (known as JFK: Affaire non classée in France). In fact, believing in conspiracy theories is considered by some to put Marion Cotillard in the mainstream of American thought and culture.
Los Angeles Daily News gossip columnist Joel Stratte McClure doesn’t feel that she will be ostracized by Hollywood, since “Everybody in America has a conspiracy theory.
Sources:
New York Daily News, “Oscar winner Marion Cotillard dismisses 9/11 as conspiracy ”
