This ought to go over well with the Hollywood crowd.
Peter Fonda launched a four-letter attack on US President Barack Obama at the Cannes film festival on Wednesday, calling him a traitor over the handling of the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill.
The star of the 1969 road movie "Easy Rider" was in Cannes for the premiere of "The Big Fix" by Rebecca and Josh Tickell, the only feature documentary in the official selection at the Cannes film festival this year.
Fonda -- a keen environmentalist and co-producer of the film which centres on the explosion of the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon, the ensuing spill and its consequences -- accused Washington of trying to gag reporting on the issue.
"I sent an email to President Obama saying, 'You are a f(expletive) traitor,' using those words... 'You're a traitor, you allowed foreign boots on our soil telling our military -- in this case the coastguard -- what they can and could not do, and telling us, the citizens of the United States, what we could or could not do'."
Fonda, who said he sent the email last week, appears in "The Big Fix" trying to get on to Louisiana beaches to assess the impact of the biggest oil spill in US history, only to be turned away by BP clean-up personnel.
In
other news from Cannes, a Eurotrash director lets the mask slip:
Controversy gripped Cannes on Wednesday with Lars von Trier expressing “a little bit” of sympathy for Adolf Hitler and Peter Fonda calling US President Barack Obama a traitor in four-letter fashion.
The rhetorical double feature overshadowed what many expected would top the bill for uproar at the film festival, French director Xaviar Durringer’s telling of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise to power, “The Conquest”.
At a press conference for his new film “Melancholia”, which is up for a Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize, Von Trier, a notorious provocateur, was asked about his German roots.
“I really wanted to be a Jew and then I found out that I was really a Nazi, you know, because my family was German, Hartmann, which also gave me some pleasure,” the Danish director said with a cheerful smile.
“I understand Hitler,” he added. “I think he did some wrong things, yes absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end.”
His star Kirsten Dunst, who is also of German descent, looked uncomfortable and murmured “oh my God, this is terrible” to co-star Charlotte Gainsbourg. But the auteur assured her: “There will come a point at the end of this”.
“I’m just saying that I think I understand the man. He’s not what you would call a good guy, but, yeah, I understand much about him, and I sympathise with him a little bit, yes,” he said.
“But, come on, I’m not for the Second World War. And I’m not against Jews (but) not too much because Israel is a pain in the ass.”
Classy.
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