Amel wrote and produced the controversial Princess Grace period drama Grace of Monaco, starring Nicole Kidman, Tim Roth and Frank Langella, and directed by Olivier Dahan. The script was listed in the 2011 Black List of the most liked Hollywood screenplays written in that year. The film opened the Cannes Film Festival 2014, where it was heavily criticised. Harvey Weinstein, whose company owns the distribution rights to Grace of Monaco, was absent from the Cannes premier of the movie. Weinstein was said to have been doing charity work with his wife Georgina Chapman. Weinstein stated that the director's cut of the film was missing a key scene that would address the "legitimate concerns" raised by the royal family over the depiction in Dahan's film. In January 2015, Harvey Weinstein clarified the events leading to his conflict with the director, praising the screenplay and indicating that the US release will be a "Writer's Cut", restoring the movie to the spirit of the screenplay The Weinstein Company signed on for, which he compared to The King's Speech. He said, "The writer, Arash Amel, called me and said, what happened to my script. It’s like welcome to Hollywood. Writers don’t have any say, but we decided to pair him up with a team of people and see what he could do about restoring the movie to the way it looked when he wrote it. He did a wonderful job." Though Amel never publicly took a side in the long-running feud over final cut, he refused to attend the film's official photo call and press conference at the Cannes Film Festival for the director's cut being screened. Amel's script was also criticised by the Royal Family of Monaco for being "farcical" and was said to "bore no relation to reality." The Prince's Palace released a statement stating, "The Princely Family does not in any way wish to be associated with this film which reflects no reality and regrets that its history has been misappropriated for purely commercial purposes." Mark Kermode in The Guardian wrote, "The biggest problem is Arash Amel's script, which asks us to side with tax evaders and gamblers, and to imagine that there is something beautiful and noble about allowing companies to shirk their revenue responsibilities. ". Kermode's review of Olivier Dahan's film was directly rebutted in a long defense of the movie by critic Brad Stevens in the British Film Institute'sfilm magazineSight & Sound, stating "The critical condescension that met Olivier Dahan’s Grace of Monaco biopic shows tastemakers still struggling with ‘feminine’ cinema."
Other work
Amel is adapting for the screen and producing Chris Greenhalgh's epic love story Seducing Ingrid Bergman, in partnership with Uday Chopra and YRF Entertainment. The novel was published in the UK in 2012 and in the US in 2014. Amel's adaptation was listed in the 2014 Hollywood Black List of the most liked screenplays. The film is to be directed by James Mangold. Amel also penned the Jackie Chan, John Cena film, Project X-Traction which is expected to be released summer 2020 in China. On August 14, 2013, Universal Pictures announced its acquisition of Amel's science fiction screenplay Soldiers of the Sun as the beginning of a new action franchise starring Vin Diesel. The project will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Vin Diesel, and Samantha Vincent. Universal subsequently set Amel to adapt Robert Ludlum's The Parsifal Mosaic for Zhang Yimou to direct, with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer producing. His previous credit is the Aaron Eckhart thriller Erased, which opened to mostly bad reviews. Amel also wote the sequel to I Am Legend for Warner Bros. Akiva Goldsman announced in 2014 that the sequel had been scrapped and the studio is rebooting the franchise.
