Like Diablo Cody’s nude photos, the past of another Oscar winner is coming back to bite her in her cute ass. 32 year-old French actress Marion Cotillard, who won the Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of tragic French singer Édith Piaf, once made statements questioning the official version of events on 9/11.

She said over a year ago in a television interview that “I think we’re lied to about a number of things… They [sic] was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burnt for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [in New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed.” She then went on to offer a possible motivation for an inside job destroying the towers and causing the deaths of thousands, saying “It was a money-sucker because they were finished, it seems to me, by 1973, and to re-cable all that, to bring up-to-date all the technology and everything, it was a lot more expensive, that work, than destroying them.” [As quoted in The Daily Mail]

Her quotes were taken out of context though. A French reader commented on D-Listed that Cotillard wasn’t making blanket statements, she was talking about the points that were made in specific documentaries she had seen. This would explain why she touched on such heated topics. It also was an informal interview and according to this person who has seen the show, Cotillard wasn’t set up to be interviewed ahead of time, she was caught off guard and was speaking off the cuff:

I’m french and some datas were missing here. So Marion was interviewed in a show called “Paris derniere” which is a very informal show at first. To goal of this show is to travel at night in the town, in interesting places like restaurants and museums and usually they meet randomly famous people. So Marion was interviewed and she said she was very paranoid and very influenced by documentaries. So she talked about all those events (9/11, the death of a famous french humorist,…) as an example on how her paranoid is fed by documentaries. This was not clever to talk about this in front of a camera, but it’s important to know the context.

[Comment on D-Listed by alx5962]

It’s a very controversial issue and is not something to talk to the press about if you’re famous. Still, it seems like Cotillard didn’t quite say this like it’s being portrayed and was talking about documentaries she had seen. Since this is being reported in The Daily Mail it’s not like we can expect them to get the story straight.

You can tell that Cotillard is referring to documentaries when she referred to the 1969 visit to the moon as suspicious based on the films she saw. She didn’t say she didn’t believe that it happened, just that she doesn’t trust everything she sees. It’s not clear from the way she phrases this whether she’s talking about not buying into the documentaries questioning the events or the events themselves:

She said: “Did a man really walk on the Moon? I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered. And in any case I don’t believe all they tell me, that’s for sure.”

[As quoted in The Daily Mail]

Other celebrities who have said that there’s something suspicious about the official version of events on 9/11 include Rosie O’Donnell and Charlie Sheen. Both have recommended a popular Internet-distributed film questioning the terrorist attacks called Loose Change. O’Donnell and Sheen were widely discredited and mocked by the US press for their comments.

This strikes me as revealing a cultural difference between the US and Europe. She was expressing her doubts about 9/11, something that is acceptable mainstream conversation in Europe. I have seen documentaries questioning 9/11 on regular television in Germany, and if this type of thing is on TV people don’t think it’s a big deal to talk about it. Like Cotillard’s on-screen sex scenes, which may seem titillating to Americans, it’s commonplace and isn’t considered particularly controversial. That’s not to say that everyone believes this, just that it’s something that is not a taboo subject.

According to The Daily Mail, Cotillard will soon be in Chicago filming Public Enemies with Johnny Depp. It is a gangster film set in the 1930s, but all I need to hear is “Johnny Depp.”

Update: Cotillard’s lawyer has released a statement saying that she “never intended to contest nor question the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and regrets the way old remarks have been taken out of context.”