Arabs get fair play
Mideast confronts portrayals of terrorism
Spielberg's "prayer for peace," as he described it in Time magazine, has also forced Arabs to confront the wrongs of terrorism, an ironic twist given the heated reception it has received in the States.
While past depictions of Arabs as terrorists have ranged from the ludicrous (Art Malik's turn as a psycho in "True Lies") to the absurd (the gang of Libyan terrorists who gun down Christopher Lloyd in the otherwise family-friendly "Back to the Future"), creative teams behind "Munich" and "Syriana" went to great lengths to go beyond stereotype.
George Clooney hired Arab-American academic and author Dr. Jack Shaheen, with whom he had previously worked on the Gulf war-set "Three Kings," as a consultant.
"We stereotype Hollywood as a monolithic place, but it's a very diverse community with lots of different opinions running in different directions. I certainly think there are several filmmakers intent on telling stories without dehumanizing people," Shaheen tells Variety.
"My hope is other filmmakers will follow suit and portray Arabs and Muslims no better or worse than anybody else. That's the way it should be."
"Syriana" writer-helmer Stephen Gaghan traveled across the Middle East with former CIA agent Bob Baer -- on whose book, "See No Evil," the film is partly based -- while researching the film. The experience took him to places he never expected, including Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, deep inside Hezbollah territory, on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
"I was at a customs house and there were two little black and white televisions that kept playing images of the World Trade buildings falling over. There were a hundred other men in there, most of whom were Arabs and Muslims," he recalls. "We'd been hearing about how people had been celebrating, but all I saw was the solemnity of that moment and the sadness everyone in the room was feeling. Every moment of my research in the Middle East surprised and confounded my expectations," Gaghan says.
Gaghan's push for authenticity carried through to the choice of location. "Syriana" was the first Hollywood film to shoot in Dubai -- although the shoot was not entirely smooth sailing.
On one occasion, the crew nearly caused a diplomatic incident when members discovered they had mistakenly crossed the border illegally into neighboring Oman. The daily culture-clashes of filming in the Arab world, particularly during Ramadan, also soon became apparent.
"We're being sensitive to the idea that no food or liquid passes your lips from sunrise to sundown, so during lunch I'm sneaking over to the car to have a bite of a sandwich and a sip of water below the dashboard while my driver has taken his prayer rug to pray in the midday sun," Gaghan remembers.
Clooney describes filming in Dubai as amazing. "You get the sense that they tried to open it up a little bit and say there's a window into here to look at some of the places in the Middle East through cinema."
The actor even tried his hand at speaking both Farsi and Arabic in the film. "It's not an easy thing for a kid from Kentucky to pick up. English was our foreign language," he quips.
