DIRECTOR SAYS 'FEAR' TAKES GROWN-UP VIEW OF DRUGS

Debuting at Cannes, movie stars Depp as writer Hunter Thompson

CANNES, France - One of the great cult novels of the last 30 years, Hunter
S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," has finally been brought to
the screen in a version unlikely to escape controversy.

The film's director, Monty Python member Terry Gilliam, Friday defended its
powerful drugs imagery and said it was time to take a more grown-up view of
drugs.

The 1971 book told of journalist Thompson's journey with a friend to Las
Vegas in an orgy of drug-taking as the dream of the 1960s faded. His
reportage style, told through the device of fiction with heavy lacings of
psychedelia, gave birth to a new genre, "gonzo journalism," and bequeathed
the phrase "Fear and Loathing" to the language.

The movie, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival Friday
night, stars a shaven-headed Johnny Depp in the Thompson role. Several
attempts in the past to make the film have failed partly because of its
explicit passages relating to good and bad drug trips.

The making of this version has its own bizarre tales. Depp told how he had
spent three months getting to know Thompson in the fortified compound where
the latter lives. For five days he lived in Thompson's basement. Depp, a
heavy smoker, only noticed alter three days that there was a keg of
gunpowder in the basement.

Describing his first meeting with Thompson (who has a small cameo in the
film), Depp said: "I first met him in a bar. He came in with a cattle prod
in one hand and a stun gun in the other. I went with him to his house. He
had built a bomb in his kitchen. He took it outside and gave me a gun to
fire at it. There was an 80-foot fireball."

The film shows the use and abuse of every drug from the era, as well as
allusions to under-age sex, violence and intimidation. Yet some critics
found its unrelenting lack of variation in tone and pace tedious. But the
presence of the popular actor and sex symbol Depp should guarantee it wide
distribution.

Gilliam was asked whether he was worried that drugs in the 1990s have far
more negative connotations than they had in 1971. He replied: "There's such
hypocrisy about drugs. It's all shock horror. But as a world we're dependent
on drugs. I drink very strong coffee. Prozac is acceptable.

"I think the drugs of the '60s and '70s were expansive drugs for better or
worse. Yes it's dangerous, but driving a car is dangerous. We're so obsessed
with avoiding danger and it can be avoiding life.

"It's nonsense the way people talk about drugs. People should talk about
them openly. ... I've been feeling, since the Eighties, that we've gone
through such a constricted time when everything has kind of tightened up.
Everybody is frightened to say what they feel, frightened to live in an
extraordinary, outrageous way, and it's time to take off those chains."

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett