For filmmaker, war zones set the scene

International Herald Tribune - by Robert F. Worth

Friday, February 22, 2008

BEIRUT: 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 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 1980's 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.

Making films in conflict zones is something of a habit for Johnston, who grew up in Evergreen, Colorado. 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 on 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, 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.

"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," Johnston said.