An actress in the movie about the Prophet Muhammad that sparked outrage across the Middle East on Tuesday and Wednesday said she will sue the filmmaker and that the film's script, titled "Desert Warriors," focused on life 2,000 years ago.
Cindy Lee Garcia told Gawker that she called the film's writer and director, who has now gone into hiding, when she saw the protests and his quotes in the media.
"'Why did you do this?' and he said, 'I'm tired of radical Islamists killing each other. Let other actors know it's not their fault,'" she told Gawker. "I'm going to sue his butt off."
She said the mysterious filmmaker, who's identified himself as Sam Bacile, said on set that he was Egyptian and spoke Arabic with his associates. (A report from the Atlantic indicated the filmmaker was not Jewish or Israeli, as the filmmaker stated earlier in interviews.) Garcia said she was horrified when she discovered the video's connection to the deaths of four Americans after an assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya.
"Now we have people dead because of a movie I was in," she said. "It makes me sick."
Garcia said the only ruckus she saw during her three days on set in July 2011 involved the filmmaker's request that the character appearing to viewers as Muhammad sleep with a girl who looked 7 years old, rather than 10. Assistant directors protested, Garcia said.
"He was just sitting there, and he wanted certain points to be made," she told Gawker.
The "Desert Warriors" script and production was without references to religion, Garcia said, and Muhammad was named "Master George" in the screenplay. Words and dialogue about Muhammad were edited in during postproduction, Sarah Abdurrahman noted in On the Media.
Garcia did not respond to Yahoo News' request for comment.
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