An Egyptian director says he “hated” Clint Eastwood’s blockb📖uster “American Sniper” and its portrayal of the villain Mustafa so much, 🌸he is making his own movie to lobby against it.
Amr Salama, the award-winning director of “Sheikh Jackson,” which will be featured at the Toront💯o Film Festival next month, says he already has a script called “Iraqi Sniper” to tell a compassionate story about East🍰wood’s mysterious Arabic villain.
Bradley Cooper starr🦩ed in the 2014 box-office hit as US marksman Chris Kyle, who was pitted against a mysterious sniper on the side of the Iraqi ♎insurgents.
In real life, there was a top sniper fighting for the Iraqis, given the nickname Juba, whose murderous exploits were cel🥀ebrated in a number of videos re🐼leased between 2005 and 2007. It was rumored he had once been an Olympic athlete.
Salama 🍰꧙ he is making it partly because he was sickened by Eastwood’s movie.
“That was my inspiration — I hated it so much that I wanted to work on a different version of that🌳 story.”
In “I𒉰raq♔i Sniper,” he says, Mustafa will be the hero.
“Whereas ‘American Sniper’ was pro-war,” says the director, “I’m trying to make an anti-war film.”
Salama says he is working with two of the region’s bigges💮t names: prolific producer Mohamed Hefzy, with whom Salama collaborated on both “Sheikh Jackson” and his 2014 hit “Excuse My French,” and Hany Abu-Assad, the P﷽alestinian director who earned Oscar nominations for both “Paradise Now” and “Omar.”
“This story merits to be told even if ‘American Sniper’ hadn’t come out,” Hefzy says. “He’s a very interesting character, a complex character. Amr did a lot of research and we’re trying to get his evolution right.”
He says at least one o🍰f the actors who was in “American Sniper,” Sammy Sheik, is attached to the fiꦆlm.