Even if you don't know the troubled history of director Mathew Cullen's thriller LONDON FIELDS before you watch the newly released trailer, it will still become apparent that this movie has been sitting on a shelf for a while when Johnny Depp appears on the screen with his former wife Amber Heard. Yeah, this movie wasn't filmed any time recently – getting Heard and Depp together on a set today sounds like the makings of a thriller in itself.
Scripted by Roberta Hanley, LONDON FIELDS is based on a Martin Amis novel that David Cronenberg, David Mackenzie, and Michael Winterbottom had shown interest in adapting over the years. The story centers on
clairvoyant femme fatale Nicola Six, who has been living with a dark premonition of her impending death by murder. She begins a tangled love affair with three uniquely different men: one of whom she knows will be her murderer.
With Cullen at the helm, Heard in the lead, and Cara Delevingne, Jim Sturgess, Billy Bob Thornton, Theo James, Jaimie Alexander, Jason Isaacs, Gemma Chan, and Lily Cole in supporting roles (with Depp stopping by to make a cameo), LONDON FIELDS went into production in September of 2013. Since then, the film's progress toward release has been bogged down by multiple lawsuits – Cullen sued the producers for failing to pay him and for taking away final cut and the producers countersued him for breach of contract, then the producers sued Heard for making unauthorized changes to the script with Cullen and leaving work on the film unfinished, and Heard countersued them for violating the nudity clause in her contract by including "unauthorized sexual images and vulgar images" in their cut of the film.
It looks like all of the legal issues have finally been worked out, because LONDON FIELDS is now set to be released in August, and a NSFW trailer has arrived online to prove it. Speaking of nudity, there's a bit of that in there.
It's never a good sign when a movie has been delayed several years over legal issues, but hopefully this one will still be entertaining despite all the behind-the-scenes quarrels.