Actor John Malkovich has told the BBC he was so "stunned" by the story of a con artist who spent 10 years taking money from people who believed him to be director Stanley Kubrick that he took the role of the man himself for a new film.
Colour Me Kubrick tells the story of Alan Conway, who spent a decade impersonating the director, despite knowing very little about his work, looking not at all like him, and having been born in Whitechapel in London rather than the Bronx in New York.
Conway's victims included a number of famous British celebrities, from heavy metal bands to cabaret singers.
Malkovich, who plays Conway in the film, told BBC World Service's On Screen programme that he was amazed when he first heard about Conway's scam.
"It's not that I applaud it - but I am kind of stunned by it," he said.
"Why would you bother? To a lot of people, their lives are so beneath the size of their dreams, that they need to be someone else."
Making a killing
Malkovich plays Conway as an alcoholic on the edge, improvising his every scam and parting credulous people with their money.
"He knew nothing about Kubrick, and he was an incredible drunk - which would have made it hard to remember anything he knew, had he known it," Malkovich said.
"It seemed to me to make a lot of sense to just read the person in front of you, and be who they would like you to be."
Conway was able to carry out his deception because Kubrick had a reputation of being a recluse.
Despite having made some of the best-known films in cinema history - including 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining and A Clockwork Orange - the director only very rarely appeared in public, and spent most of his time off set in his mansion in St Albans, Hertfordshire.
Conway, however, was much more gregarious. In an interesting twist, Colour Me Kubrick director Brian Cook - who himself worked with Kubrick on a number of films, including The Shining and Barry Lyndon - found that many of the British actors he employed for the film had met Conway.
"Jim Davidson encountered him and thought he was Kubrick," he said.
"Conway had really got around, so we heard about it from many of the people actually in the film."
Kubrick himself only became aware of Conway's existence in the mid-1990s, as he was preparing to make what would turn out to be his last film, Eyes Wide Shut. He began to receive letters accusing him of breaking promises, stealing money and wrecking people's lives.
Tabloid exposes
The idea for the film came from Tony Fruin, Kubrick's personal assistant for many years, who was charged with tracking Conway down in 1998.
Conway's story has been told before, in the British documentary The Man Who Would Be Kubrick, as well as in numerous tabloid exposes.
Colour Me Kubrick is described as "A true-ish account", played by Malkovich as broad comedy.
"When I saw a TV programme about the gentleman in question, he mentioned his extraordinarily exact American accent - but it didn't resemble anyone I'd ever heard," Malkovich said.
"That gave me the idea of having the accent a little bit Yiddish, a little bit Croydon, a little bit Copenhagen, and a little bit Seoul."
The film is also a peculiar sideways tribute to Kubrick, and has a number of oblique references to his films, especially in the dialogue and the music.
However, despite its intriguing premise, the film is currently struggling to get distribution in the two countries Kubrick lived and worked in all his life - the US and the UK.
It has so far been released in France - as Appellez Moi Kubrick - and Australia, but there is no word whether it will get a chance in the world's major film market.
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