A group of journalists who were set to interview Johnny Depp at the San Sebastian Film Festival have cancelled their coverage of the actor’s latest film, on Italian Modern artist Amedeo Modigliani, to protest the limited access they were offered by publicists.
Depp is promoting Modi: Three Days on the Wings of Madness, his second full-length feature film as director (the first was The Brave, a 1997 neo-Western), and was due to sit for interviews alongside actors Riccardo Scamarcio and Antonia Desplat on September 24. When publicists changed the arrangement of the interview, instead offering a single brief roundtable, the journalists refused.
Marco Consoli, one of 12 reporters to abandon covering Modi, said the proposed 20-minute sit-down was insufficient. “When we were told that the only option was less time with the three of them all together,” Consoli told Deadline, “we all decided to abandon the junket, and not talk to Johnny and not report on the film.”
The move fits into a broader pattern of journalists feeling shortchanged by entertainment industry studios. At the Venice Film Festival earlier this year, a group called the International Film Festivals Journalists published an open letter criticizing reporters’ limited access to actors and directors, saying that “cinema journalism is at risk of extinction.” The letter suggested that in the future “protest could involve the festivals themselves, which risks seeing the departure of hundreds of accredited journalists.”
Riccardo Scamarcio in Modi: Three Days on the Wings of Madness (2024). Photo: Modi Productions Ltd, courtesy of the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Beyond the contention surrounding the treatment of writers, Depp’s film has received mixed reviews. Modi details three days in the life of the artist whose precocious talent and proclivity for wildness has featured in a handful of other films, including Montparnasse 19 (1958) and Modigliani (2004).
Scamarcio stars as the artist alongside Desplat, who plays his girlfriend and model Beatrice Hastings. Set in 1916, the film is a window into the world of an artist who was barely appreciated in his own lifetime and died aged only 35. Variety’s Guy Lodge called Modi “palpably sincere in its admiration for its subject,” though “more dutiful, more conventional, than sparked by genius. ”
The Hollywood Reporter’s Leslie Felperin reckoned that Depp is more interested in Modigliani’s biography than his art. “It’s essentially a decorative period piece for the art house circuit,” Felperin wrote. “The film doesn’t even pay the real Modigliani the compliment of securing the rights to show any of his actual pieces.”