The New York Post’s Page Six
is reporting that 20th Century Fox’s Babylon
A.D. is experiencing a grand clash of on-set egos, between director Mathieu
Kassovitz and star Vin Diesel. It’s the usual blend of late arrivals and temper
tantrums hearsay… yadda yadda yadda. (I’m betting co-stars Michelle Yeoh, Gérard Depardieu and Charlotte
Rampling are sitting on the sidelines, shaking their heads).

The movie is based on a novel by French author Maurice G.
Dantec, and stars Diesel as a war vet-turned-mercenary named Toorop (sigh…) escorting
a woman from Russia to Canada… a woman who’s carrying an organism that a
bizarre cult wants to harvest to produce a genetically modified Messiah. Mmmkay…

In addition to budget and schedule overruns — the result of a
skiing sequence that had to be shot in Sweden thanks to a lack of snow in
Eastern Europe, producer Alain Goldman explained — a lot of the problem would simply
seem to be a matter of communication: French director, largely Czech crew, muscle-bound
star in his own self-aggrandizing orbit. Besides, doesn’t the movie’s planned release
date, February 29, 2008, tell us a lot about what we really need to know? For
the link to the Post piece, click
here.