Director of Oscar favourite The Shape of Water accused of copying scenes from Amelie and Delicatessen
Oscar favourite The Shape of Water has already had to fend off two charges of plagiarism and is now being accused by a French director of copying scenes from the romantic comedy Amelie and the cult classic Delicatessen.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s black comedy Delicatessen was released in 1991 and quickly became a cult classic, but it was his whimsical take on life and love in the picturesque Paris district of Montmartre, Amelie, that gave him his first global hit.
He claims fellow director Guillermo del Toro was clearly plagiarising one of his scenes in The Shape of Water when he has the characters played by British actor Sally Hawkins and Richard Jenkins perform a two-step dance while sitting on a sofa watching an old Hollywood movie.
"When [Guillermo del Toro] steals the scene of the couple sitting on the edge of the bed dancing with their feet, with the musical on telly in the background, it is so cut and pasted from Delicatessen that there’s a moment when I say to myself that he lacks self-respect," said Mr Jeunet.
“It is obvious that he had ‘Delicatessen’ in mind,” he said.
“I’m not going to sue him for plagiarism, that’s not my style. But Guillermo has enough talent not to be doing things like that,” he told Ouest-France newspaper.
Mr Jeunet said he emailed the Mexican director to ask him why he was stealing his ideas.
“He replied.. that he did not steal from others, that it was [British director] Terry Gilliam who influenced all of us,” he said.
The 64-year-old French filmmaker said Mr del Toro was also clearly inspired by a scene from Amelie when he shot the beginning of The Shape of Water where there is “the painter, the apartment, the girl who is a bit naive”. Representatives of Mr del Toro did not immediately respond when asked for comment by the Telegraph.
Last month he was accused of stealing the plotline of his film - which follows a janitor working in a secret laboratory who falls in love with a man-like sea creature and tries to rescue it - from a play by the late Pulitzer-winner Paul Zindel. The playwright's son David Zindel believes there are close parallels between his father's 1969 play Let Me Hear You Whisper, and the Hollywood film, which has been nominated for 13 Oscars, including Best Original Screenplay for its co-writers del Toro and Vanessa Taylor.
The film's distributors, Fox Searchlight, have firmly denied that it was influenced by Zindel's play.
Online commentators have also spotted parallels between the film and a 2015 short called The Space Between Us, written and directed by Marc Nollkaemper, a student at the Netherlands Film Academy.
