With its release just one week away, the film 'The Drama (The Drama)' has been swept up in a fierce backlash over the director's past remarks.
According to foreign media reports including People on the 27th (local time), an essay that Norwegian-born director Christopher Vogli (40) contributed to a magazine in 2012 was recently reexamined on the online community Reddit, reigniting controversies over racism and relationships with minors.
At the time, director Vogli was 27 and in the essay he vividly described a romantic relationship with a high school girl. He confessed, "I met a girl 10 years younger than me who didn't even have the right to vote," and said he looked for films dealing with "May-December romances (couples with large age gaps)" to reset his moral standards.
In particular, he cited Woody Allen's film Manhattan as an example and justified his relationship despite concerned reactions by asking, "If a 1979 film positively portrayed a relationship between a 42-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl, why is my relationship not acceptable in 2012?" He added to the shock by recounting, like tall tales, dating at bars that did not check IDs and sneaking away when the girl's parents returned early from a trip.
Under Norwegian law the age of sexual consent is 16, so the relationship may not be a legal issue, but criticism within Hollywood is growing over the attitude a grown man showed toward a high school student and the way he publicly justified it.
The problem is that the controversy broke just one week before the April 3 release of 'The Drama,' which had generated expectations with its star-studded casting of Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. Distributor A24 has not issued an official statement, but the image damage to lead actors Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as well as setbacks to the film's box office prospects appear inevitable.
A local industry source criticized, "The film deals with a couple facing a trial as they confess a dark secret just before marriage, but the director's actual 'dark past' has become something that disrupts the film's immersion."
In this way, 'The Drama' went from one of the most anticipated films ever to the center of controversy in an instant. The world film community is watching closely to see how director Vogli and the production team will confront and overcome this crisis.
[Photo] Interview magazine SNS, ⓒGettyimages (unauthorized reproduction and redistribution prohibited)
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