[LCM Articles] Another Round of Explosions, but This Time It's Fake (NY Times)

[Loai Naamani]

February 22, 2008 |
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/world/middleeast/22beirut.html


Another Round of Explosions, but This Time It's Fake 


By ROBERT F. WORTH



Bryan Denton for The New York Times | A film about Western contractors in
Lebanon uses not only locations from its civil war but also veterans from
the conflict. 

 



Bryan Denton for The New York Times | Max Ryan, an actor, works with a
sniper rifle on loan from the Lebanese Army.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Lebanon is a country on edge, with every side warning
about foreign interference and the spark that could lead to factional war. 

So when explosions and gunfire broke out in an abandoned building east of
Beirut the other day, two Lebanese Army platoons quickly surrounded the
site, guns drawn. 

"Cut!" yelled a frightened American voice. The sounds of gunfire stopped
abruptly.

It was a foreign film crew, not a militia. And if life sometimes imitates
art, this was something stranger: The crew was making a movie about a group
of armed foreigners who come to Beirut and almost set off a factional war by
mistake. 

The actors put their guns down. The director, Christian Johnston - who was
dressed like a guerrilla fighter in a kaffiyeh and fatigues - nervously
circled his hand to mime a movie camera. "Film, film!" he said. Eventually,
the soldiers got the idea and withdrew. 

This Borgesian little episode was an accident, but in a sense it was a
natural consequence of American film's obsessive effort to catch up with
reality. 

The movie, based (naturally) on a real incident, revolves around three
private contractors who are sent to present-day Beirut to rescue a hostage.
Although Mr. Johnston conceived it a year ago, he added details based on
last summer's battle between the Lebanese Army and the radical Islamist
group Fatah al Islam in northern Lebanon. 

"What filmmakers should do is get as much authenticity as possible," he
said.

As it turned out, the soldiers who stumbled onto the movie location this
week told cast members that they had initially mistaken them for Fatah al
Islam fighters. 

There were plenty of other echoes of Lebanese reality. The film was being
shot in a burned, shell-scarred hospital building that was an important
demarcation line during Lebanon's civil war from 1975 to 1990. Several of
the extras had fought in the war, and two of them had fought in and around
that very building - on opposite sides. 

"It brings back the memories," said Emil Zir, 38, who fought near the
building in the 1980s as a member of the Lebanese Forces, a Christian
militia, and was twice wounded.

Another cast member, Abbas Sayed, returned to Lebanon for the first time
since 1985 to work on the film. He remembers seeing the hospital, which also
housed a school, in 1974, before the war started. 

"It's terrible to see it like this," he said, gazing around at the
blackened, graffiti-scrawled concrete structure, where water from recent
rains dripped from huge gaps in the ceiling. 

Nearby, shivering in the cold, stood Grant Masters, a chiseled 43-year-old
British actor who plays the leader of the three-man private security team. 

"When you're standing next to someone who's actually been on the front line,
that's a reality check," he said. "We're working with a guy who was shot
nine times."

Crew members moved back and forth around him, carrying black M-16 rifles and
rocket-propelled grenade launchers. The bleating of sheep could be heard on
the grassy hillside outside, where the winter sun glittered on the
Mediterranean far below. 

There is an active minefield next to the building, another relic of the
civil war. Cast members were surprised to see sheep wandering freely through
it. But a local shepherd told them not to worry: the mines were set to
explode under an 80-kilogram weight, or 176 pounds. The sheep weigh no more
than 90 pounds. 

It was the final day of shooting, Mr. Masters explained. "We enter the
building where the hostage is being held, then our sniper gets overpowered,"
and then everything goes haywire, he said.

Minutes later, loud explosions rang out, simulating the rocket-propelled
grenades of the bad guys, and shouting filled the air.

All the weapons in the film came from the Lebanese Army, which had to stamp
each page of the script before allowing the crew to proceed with filming,
Mr. Johnston said. The Army also provided two soldiers to stay on the set
throughout production and prevent mishaps. (Apparently the two platoons that
mistook the crew for terrorists had not been informed about the film.)

Making films in conflict zones is something of a habit for Mr. Johnston, who
grew up in Evergreen, Colo. He shot his first feature, "The September
Tapes," in Afghanistan in 2002, using members of the Northern Alliance in
the cast. It was mistaken for a documentary, both during the filming and at
the Sundance Film Festival. 

The new movie, shot for about $5 million, draws heavily on Mr. Johnston's
conversations with private security contractors over the past few years, he
said. 

But it evolved further over the past few months as he and cast members
witnessed some of the bombings and assassinations that have threatened to
push Lebanon into a new civil conflict. In September, when the Parliament
member Antoine Ghanem was killed in a car bombing along with six other
people, Mr. Johnston was only a few blocks away. 

Last month cast members heard the shots when the Lebanese Army fired on
protesters in southern Beirut, in an episode that left seven people dead and
sharpened political tensions. 

At times, the producers worried that Lebanon's crisis might overwhelm them. 

"This movie echoes everything we're going through: Westerner comes into
conflict zone to do a job with not enough time, not enough money, and things
get complicated," Mr. Johnston said. 

He would not reveal the ending of his film. But he offered a hint. 

"There's a very large twist that echoes everything that's happening here
politically," he said.

 

 

Blackline: The Beirut Contract will be the first film in a trilogy. It
revolves around Blackline International, a fictional private military
company. Three of the company's soldiers go on a mission to rescue a man
taken hostage in Beirut. The film will be released on the same day as a
videogame based on the trilogy, as well as an interactive DVD that lets the
user explore the main characters bios and alternate versions of the
storyline.

 

Part of three film series entitled Blackline International Trilogy, it is
being written and directed by Christian Johnson. According to The Hollywood
Reporter, the project was inspired by the recent Blackwater incidents
resulting in the death of Iraq civilians.

 

Shooting begins this month in Beirut, with additional production in Paris
and Morocco to follow. The following two films in the trilogy will shoot in
the first-half of 2008 in Russia, Poland and Venezuela.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/lebanon-articles/attachments/20080222/6b49c6d4/attachment.htm
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 58089 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/lebanon-articles/attachments/20080222/6b49c6d4/attachment.jpg
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 73305 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/lebanon-articles/attachments/20080222/6b49c6d4/attachment-0001.jpg
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 73 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/lebanon-articles/attachments/20080222/6b49c6d4/attachment.gif