Lindsay Lohan's The Canyons Faces Rejection from SXSW as well as Sundance

Lindsay Lohan's The Canyons Faces Rejection from SXSW as well as Sundance

It’s not looking good for Linsday Lohan’s new film, The Canyons; after being rejected by the Sundance Film Festival, the film has now been snubbed by the South by Southwest festival circuit, too.

Despite Lohan’s ability to give almost anything she’s in a bad name, Canyon’s rejection does come as a surprise, given the calibre behind the camera. Paul Schrader is the writer of Martin Scorsese classics Taxi Driver and Raging Bull as well as being a celebrated director, and Bret Easton Ellis is the literary mind behind American Psycho and Less Than Zero. The Hollywood Reporter quotes an insider at the Austin, Texas festival as saying there is "an ugliness and a deadness to it", though, and such is Lohan’s reputation, she – and the fact that she’s difficult to work with – are being blamed for the film’s embarrassing progress. 

Ellis, Schrader and the film’s producer Braxton Pope reportedly had a falling out over the final cut, and at one point the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh offered to cut the entire movie over three days after seeing a rough cut. "The idea of 72 hours is a joke," Schrader told the Times. "It would take him 72 hours to look at all the footage. And you know what Soderbergh would do if another director offered to cut his film? [Puts up two middle fingers.]" Meanwhile, Ellis is quoted as saying: "The film is so languorous. It's an hour 30, and it seems like it's three hours long. I saw this as a pranky noirish thriller, but Schrader turned it into, well, a Schrader film." (via The Guardian).