According to a Sci Fi Wire interview with Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Patriot, 10,000 BC), the director will depict the destruction of the White House, the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro in his “upcoming global demolition derby movie 2012.” Extra emphasis on the latter three since, Emmerich says, he’s “against organized religion.” For Sci Fi Wire, however, the story is what the director won’t depict–the destruction of an Islamic holy site:
“Well, I wanted to do [destroy the Kaaba], I have to admit,” Emmerich says. “But my co-writer Harald said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie. And he was right . . . We have to all . . . in the Western world … think about this. You can actually . . . let . . . Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have . . . a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it’s just something which I kind of didn’t [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out.”
In a similar vein, the Guardian is reporting that Matrix producer Barrie Osborne is planning a film that will “chart Muhammad’s life and examine his teachings” without actually depicting Muhammad himself. A Wall Street Journal report explains: “Strict Islamic religious interpretations say it is prohibited to depict Muhammad in a human form, an injunction that artists have ignored to their peril.” The Australian provides some background on the money behind the film:
With Middle Eastern money an increasingly powerful cog in the global entertainment industry, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would embark on a mega-budget epic about the life of the Prophet Mohammed. That moment has arrived thanks to a wealthy Qatari media company that has put together a big Hollywood producer and a Muslim cleric who is banned from visiting Britain.
And on the film’s Muslim overseer, scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi:
He was refused entry to Britain last year because of his views. He has reportedly condoned the Holocaust, supported the stoning of homosexuals, praised suicide bombers in Israel and has said he considered Shia Islam as a heretical branch of the faith.
According to the Gulf Times, he told journalists in Doha that the film was a response to “the crusader-styled distortion of Islam (that) continues to influence (the) world population today. I will say we Muslims have not exerted sufficient efforts to correct the fake tales as Christians have used (in) the media.”
