Director Gene Fallaize would cast Kevin Spacey in his film “all over again”

It seems like all press really is good press, at least for director Gene Fallaize, whose upcoming Kevin Spacey-starring film seems to be going swimmingly. What was that about “cancel culture” again?

In a recent interview with Variety, Fallaize—who is directing Spacey in the upcoming low-budget thriller Control—said he “[doesn’t] regret casting Kevin” and “would do it all over again,” adding that “he just seemed like a nice guy.” Spacey plays a revenge-hungry man who hijacks the car of a government official in the film, although the role is entirely vocal and his body is not shown.

Fallaize said he didn’t want the whole “about to be on trial for 12 counts of sexual assault” thing to make his working relationship with the actor awkward. “We didn’t bring it up because we didn’t want it to be, you know, a weird thing with us. We were there in a professional capacity to work with an actor and so we didn’t bring anything like that up,” he said, noting that Spacey came off as “quiet” and “quite shy.”

The jury in Spacey’s UK sexual assault trial seemed to take a similar line of thinking, as they found him not guilty on all counts in a verdict passed down yesterday. This is obviously great news for Fallaize, who made the film “with as low budget as we could to minimize any potential risk” (i.e. its star potentially receiving, at maximum, a lifetime prison sentence), but wouldn’t have really incurred too much damage anyway because he “knew that the film would sell because there is a fan base there so it was always going to sell.”

Even though Fallaize has received “only positive [feedback] so far” after the verdict, the thought of potential backlash doesn’t scare him. “These people that are saying—if they’re saying—that we’re whitewashing him or enabling him to come back, what facts have they got to contradict the jury?” he said. “I don’t regret casting Kevin and I would do it all over again.”

“All over again,” presumably means he’d do it if he was found guilty of the horrific things he was accused of, which sounds like it also wouldn’t have really been that bad for the director anyway. “Right from the start, every distributor we spoke to outside of the majors was saying, ‘Yep, really, really interested. Let’s wait and see how it goes.’ So they were interested right from the start,” he said.

“It was a case of ‘Let’s see if there’s any guilty verdicts, and if so, how many, because that will affect what we offer you in terms of sales.’ So nobody—not one—just said ‘no’ straight off the bat. It was, ‘Let’s see how they go.’ And really, that is just a case of ‘how are the public going to react to this?’” the director added, offering yet another neat little tick in the Hollywood Execs Are Money-Hungry Assholes box. “Now it’s very much a case of everybody’s interested,” he added.