She Might Be Right...
By Jeffrey Jolson

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 3/2/08 — Oscar 2008 Best Actress Marion Cotillard, set to co-star with Johnny Depp in a film shooting in Chicago next week, is making headlines not with that movie “Public Enemies,” but by becoming one in America with her comments that the United States fabricated the 9/11 attacks for financial and political reasons.

“This could be a powder keg issue for thousands of firefighters and the families of victims who may picket her next film with my full support,” said 9/11 first responder/fireman Mike Lennon who later made a documentary on the events surrounding the horrific disaster. “Having human remains in my hands on a dozen occasions makes her ignorant statements despicable.”

Cottilard, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress last Sunday for playing singer Edith Piaf in “Le Vie en Rose”is in the news for comments she made a year ago to French TV that have surfaced with a vengeance. She contends the U.S. destroyed the World Trade Center buildings and killed its 5,000 occupants because the towers needed costly rebuilding.

Speaking to French TV, she questions if everything about 9/11 was a fake. “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.”

It gets more bizarre: “I think we’re lied to about a number of things,” said the 32-year-old actress. “We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes. Are they burned? They [sic] was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burnt for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [in New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed.”

She is set to play Depp’s girlfriend in the major US studio shoot starting next Monday, which brings up the question of should Universal Pictures stick with a contracted co-star that may draw picketing by 9/11 victim’s families to its premiere and showings everywhere?

That is suddenly a very real prospect, and not one Uni is likely to bet $100 million dollar-plus on. Depp, who gets $20 million per film, plays 30s gangster John Dillinger in “Public Enemies,” and Cotillard is scheduled to play his belle Billie Frechette.

“She has a fundamental right to come over here and film a movie, but for her to say 9/11 was a government conspiracy, you have to ask, why does she want to come here and shoot a movie?” said Lennon, who made a firefighter perspective doc called “Brothers on Holy Ground.” There will be backlash and she will suffer the consequences of what she said.”

Apparently feeling she had not sufficiently torpedoed her budding career as a Hollywood leading lady, she went on to explain in the interview that the moon landings in 1969 were another US hoax. She said: “Did a man really walk on the Moon? 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.”

Expect her to do some emergency back-pedaling this week. Cotillard, who is very popular in France and born and raised in Paris, made the comments on TV show Paris Première - Paris Dernière, in a program broadcast a year ago.