The French filmmaker Luc Besson has been ordered to pay legendary horror movie director John Carpenter €450,000 for allegedly plagiarising his classic 1981 movie, Escape from New York.
Besson, whose best-known films are The Fifth Element and Nikita wrote Lockout in collaboration with the Irish film-maker Stephen St Leger and the Irish cinematographer James Mather who were co-directors of the movie.
The French director denies that the 2012 film copied Carpenter’s opus, in which Manhattan island is depicted as a vast prison overrun by its prisoners. In the movie, Kurt Russell plays a government agent-turned-convict whose task is to rescue the US president after his plane crashes.
An appeals court in Paris ruled that Lockout had “massively borrowed key elements” of the movie, according to an online report by BFMTV (French). At the time of Lockout's release, many critics, including The Guardian’s Philip French, had signalled distinct similarities between both films. Box Office magazine deemed Lockout `a sleek, slick and shameless rip-off of Carpenter’s Escape from New York’ and its sequel, Escape from LA.
In Lockout, Guy Pearce plays a man who is offered his liberty after wrongful conviction if he can free the US president’s daughter from a prison in outer space.
Besson’s initial appeal was rejected and the judges actually increased damages five–fold. The court declared that there many similarities, citing how the heroes of both “got into the prison by flying in a glider/space shuttle, had to confront inmates led by a chief with a strange right arm, found hugely important briefcases and meet a former sidekick who then dies."
The judges also observed that " at the end ( the heroes) keep secret documents recovered during their mission.”
John Carpenter, now 68, is currently touring the US with a live show of his film music. Besson’s latest film, the $180m Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets received an ecstatic response after scenes were recently shown at the Comic-Con festival in San Diego. The film will not be released until mid-2017.
Escape from New York director John Carpenter
