“It was the stupidest thing in the world,” director Alexander Payne has said regarding a screenwriter’s allegation that The Holdovers was plagiarised from a 2013 script.

In March, Variety ran an article which shared British screenwriter Simon Stephenson’s allegation that Alexander Payne’s Oscar-winning comedy drama The Holdovers was plagiarised from a script he wrote in 2013.

Speaking at the Sarajevo Film Festival, Payne has now provided a strongly-worded response to that allegation. He called it “the stupidest thing in the world,” and then went to describe Variety’s reporting on the matter as “irresponsible”.

“It was irresponsible of Variety to report on that without having read the scripts and comparing them themselves,” the director said, as reported by Deadline. “Do you think The New York Times would have done that?”

According to Stephenson – best known for his work on Luca, Paddington 2 and the drama The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain...