Amanda Knox Does Not Want To Be Associated With The Matt Damon Movie “Stillwater” Which Is Loosely Based On Her Story

I kept seeing ads for the new movie Stillwater starring Matt Damon and I assumed it was about an oil-rig worker on the Deepwater Horizon because of Matt’s blue color get up and the fact that I can’t read too well. But, as it turns out, Stillwater is actually “directly inspired by the Amanda Knox saga” according to the film’s director Tom McCarthy. Amanda of course was wrongfully convicted (twice!) and eventually acquitted of the brutal murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher when they were both students studying abroad in Perugia, Italy. Upon the film’s release, Amanda #tooktotwitter (and Medium) to, understandably, express her dismay at being associated with Matt Damon’s working man’s goatee and artfully distressed flannels. That and her life story being sensationalized, manipulated, and used as fodder For Your Consideration.

The Guardian reports:

Amanda Knox has accused actor Matt Damon and director Tom McCarthy of “rip[ping] off my story without my consent at the expense of my reputation” in the upcoming film Stillwater, which McCarthy has said was inspired by Knox’s experience after the 2007 murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy.

In an essay on the online publishing platform Medium, Knox takes particular aim at McCarthy, who told Vanity Fair that Stillwater was directly inspired by the Kercher case, which resulted in Knox being wrongly convicted for Kercher’s murder along with her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, and spending four years in prison, before ultimately being acquitted in 2015 by Italy’s supreme court of cassation. Rudy Guede, who was sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2008, is the only person convicted of Kercher’s murder.

Stillwater premiered at Cannes earlier this month and it’s already generating Oscar buzz. Matt plays “an American construction worker who travels to Marseille in France after his daughter is imprisoned for murdering her lover.” Amanda’s issue with the movie is that it’s being marketed as being “based on true events” but then “fictionalized” those events with no regard for the life or reputation of the person that experienced that shit in real life.

This new film by director Tom McCarthy, starring Matt Damon, is “loosely based” or “directly inspired by” the “Amanda Knox saga,” as Vanity Fair put it in a for-profit article promoting a for-profit film, neither of which I am affiliated with.

— Amanda Knox (@amandaknox) July 29, 2021

It refers to the shoddy police work, prosecutorial tunnel vision, and refusal to admit their mistakes that led the Italian authorities to wrongfully convict me, twice. In those four years of wrongful imprisonment and 8 years of trial, I had near-zero agency.

— Amanda Knox (@amandaknox) July 29, 2021

In her Medium essay, Amanda said fuck a spoilers tag, but I’ll give you one now. Matt Damon will lose the Oscar to Jared Leto in House of Gucci. I’ll let Amanda tell you what happens at the end of the movie.

In her essay, Knox says that while McCarthy based Breslin’s character on her, he “fictionalised” the character in ways that made her look like a participant in the crime, including having a sexual relationship with the victim and asking the killer to “get rid” of the lover.

Knox writes: “How do you think that impacts my reputation? I continue to be accused of ‘knowing something I’m not revealing’, of ‘having been involved somehow, even if I didn’t plunge the knife’. So Tom McCarthy’s fictionalised version of me is just the tabloid conspiracy guiltier version of me.”

Accepting that the film-makers were under no obligation to consult her, she says that the failure to understand her perspective has resulted in “others continu[ing] to distort my character”.

So there you have it. Stillwater is NOT about an exploding oil rig or Amanda Knox. It’s about 2 hours and 20 minutes in length and looks like a hot mess.

Pic: YouTube