The actor is in Cannes – where Unlawful Killing is not being shown – to squeeze as much festival publicity as he can
"It's made from my point of view," said Keith Allen as he defended his film about Princess Diana's death, Unlawful Killing. "It's what the French call being an auteur."
Every so often a little invented scandal blows into Cannes; a harmless, or not so harmless, flurry of carefully created media noise for a film that, while nothing to do with the festival's official programme, uses Cannes to lever in credibility by association.
So it was with this new film by Allen, an actor who once appeared in Shallow Grave. It is being touted as the film you will never see in Britain – lawyers have demanded 87 cuts before it can be certificated. Some may say: lucky Britain.
When Allen uttered his "auteur" line there were titters in the grand salon of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, where the press had been assembled to hear details of what Allen believes is an establishment cover-up of the true import of the inquest into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed. He also described the film as "forensic" and "not sensational" – perhaps forgetting that it contains an interview in which psychologist Oliver James opines that Prince Philip is a "psychopath".
And then there is the business of the film's financing. Mohamed Al Fayed, it transpired, was its sole but unacknowledged backer, to the tune of £2.5m. He is also the film's mainstay, his well-publicised views on the royal family rehearsed at length. "I don't know at what point in the film I would have told the audience it was financed by Mohamed Al Fayed," said Allen. "It would have interrupted the flow of the film. A lot of films coming out of America are financed by the mafia – but they don't acknowledge that."
The film, which also includes interviews with a well-nigh incoherent Tony Curtis as well as Piers Morgan and Kitty Kelley, aims to show the establishment conspired to "talk to each other and square their stories" about Dodi and Diana. The collusion of British journalists was explained by the notion that they "answer to editors who answer to proprietors who all want knighthoods". (There was also a genuinely funny moment reconstructing an episode in which poor Nicholas Witchell, the BBC royal correspondent, apparently dropped off while watching the inquest proceedings.)
Other key evidence for this conspiracy included the fact that QCs swear allegiance to the crown, ergo cannot be impartial on the royal family (presumably with the exception of Michael Mansfield, Fayed's lawyer, who was interviewed for the film). And the royal family themselves? "Gangsters in tiaras", we were told.
The most arresting, and unintentionally comic, passage came at the end of the film, when Fayed was shown making a large but rather unsuccessful bonfire in his Surrey garden using the vast "by royal appointment" crests that once adorned the facade of Harrods. He is, confirmed his spokesman Conor Nolan, "delighted with the film".