This week I am gonna blow you away with a story about an adventure on the set of a movie! It's far too complicated to explain how I got myself in the position of being with the region's most exciting film director but let's just say that strings were pulled to breaking point!
I know that you have all seen the highly acclaimed City of Life, the ground-breaking movie shot right here in town, so when the chance came up to get involved in the next big screen venture of Ali F. Mostafa, I grabbed it!
The project is called Classified and it's a full-on action-adventure-mystery with more twists than the road network behind JLT. My vantage point was restrained to a purely (way!) behind-the scenes position, so this meant that I could watch how the movie magic gets made.
The first thing I noticed about Mostafa is that he is a calm and reserved kind of guy. This is all the more surprising when I came to realise that thousands of dollars of equipment, manpower and organisation to make this thing happen all rests on his shoulders. We've all seen thousands of movies without really giving a thought to how it all gets made and pulled together but when, like me, you get to see it first hand, it is mind-boggling!
A movie director needs to be many things. Forgetting all the technical stuff, he needs to be able to inspire and motivate his cast to deliver a vision of the words on the page and translate that to a reality through the camera. I guess the skill of a great and passionate director is to inspire his cast to overcome these challenges and deliver great performances. This is where Mostafa transformed into the most animated man on set, and seemed to embrace the tough conditions and use them to his advantage.
It was thrilling watching the action play out with Mostafa demanding take after take until he saw what he was thinking come to life.
The sign of a great leader is showing your troops that you can lead by example, and I can't tell you too much about the times that Mostafa leapt from his chair behind the monitors to act out exactly how a bad-guy-assassin-biker should be whacked with a baseball bat! And this is just the tip of the iceberg - let's just say that Steven Spielberg would never get as involved in an underground car-chase scene as Mostafa did… much to the horror of all on the production.
All there is now is for you to watch the film, which is being screened exclusively online on mbc.net (http://classified.mbc.net/) right now. Get your popcorn and strap yourself in for the ride!
Hollywood-ingly Yours
G*Nice
