In a film about the origins of the Oxford English Dictionary, there is one British city you would expect to feature — and so did Mel Gibson.
The Hollywood star was creating what he described as a “labour of love” in bringing to the screen The Professor and the Madman, which tells the story of the birth of the world’s best-known dictionary.
The film adaptation of the book by the British author Simon Winchester appeared to be proceeding well until the producers decided the one thing they did not need in the film was Oxford itself.
Scenes to be shot in some of the university town’s iconic buildings, including Christ Church, the Bodleian Library and the Oxford University Press premises, were scheduled for January — but the producers withheld the $1.8m (£1.4m) necessary for the shoot.
Last week, Gibson, who owns the film rights, filed a legal case in Los Angeles alleging that the company, Voltage Pictures, had failed to abide by the terms of the production agreement by refusing to allow important scenes to be shot in Oxford.
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As a result, the director, Farhad Safinia, was said to have been unable to shoot the whole of the screenplay or to produce a finished cut. A version approved by Voltage has been developed but Gibson claims his contract meant he had the final say on which cut would be used.
“It’s all got very nasty indeed,” Winchester said last week. “They did 41 days of filming in Dublin, with all the major actors — Mel, Sean [Penn], Jennifer Ehle. They said to me at the time that they had told the producers, ‘Well, this is all fine and dandy but we really do need to shoot in Oxford.’”
He said Voltage complained they were spending too much money and was “rather cool on the idea of them doing additional shooting in Oxford”. Winchester said: “That set waves of alarm going because to make a film about the Oxford English Dictionary, you have to go to Oxford.”
In the film, Gibson plays the professor, James Murray, who oversaw the creation of the dictionary, while Penn plays the madman — William Chester Minor — who contributed 10,000 entries from Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, where he was confined after killing a man in London.
Jonathan Deckter, the president and chief operating officer of Voltage Pictures, told The Sunday Times he had no comment on the court case.