Captain’s log

 

“Oh shit,” I said to Jim. “There’s no airplane here. Where’s the airplane? We need to have a Royal Jordanian airplane outside this window.” It’s in our second week of filming Captain Abu Raed, and on our second day of shooting at Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport. In this scene, Captain Nour passes by Abu Raed, the airport janitor, as he stares out the window reflecting on life as he watches airplanes outside. But we arrive at the windows by Gate 4, our planned location, to find no airplanes. And not much of anything else. Our bustling airport is, in fact, deserted. With our very tight schedule ahead of us, and very little time to improvise. It’s four in the afternoon and we have an hour to set up for the next shot to keep to our planned schedule. Must think.

 

As our crew begins trickling in having negotiated the security points leading to our set, the options seem to narrow to moving down a few windows and shoot the scene with a Qatari airplane outside, or shifting the entire location and wait for a smaller plane to come in. I need to have an aircraft outside that window or Abu Raed is staring wistfully at nothing. That wouldn’t just compromise the scene, it would destroy it. But then I also want those exact three windows; they form a perfect symmetrical shot with the silhouette of Abu Raed. Arrrrgh!

 

 

It’s 5am. The sun hasn’t come up yet. We arrive at the Citadel, the small collection of Roman ruins on the otherwise deserted hill overlooking the capital’s congested Downtown. There’s a cool morning breeze. The trucks arrive. Crew members, numbering 100 or more, cluster in. What was silent a few minutes ago has now become a loud collage of people, tents, machines, trucks and cables. There was also a growing congregation of the  heavy duty equipment that would capture little snippets of human action that will in the next four weeks form a collection of bits to tell the story of Captain Abu Raed, my first movie, and the first feature-length movie entirely shot and made in Jordan in something like five decades. My producer David Pritchard comes over, gives me a hug, says “Ready?” I smile. I’ve been itching for this for a long time.

 

It’s not an exaggeration to say that I’ve been gearing up to this moment my whole life. Imagine the excitement – and the pressure. Ahead of us was a road full of unknowns. I’d expended blood, sweat and hundreds of hours living in this Abu Raed world inside my head and putting it on paper. Now it was time to not f*** it up. 

We start with scene 85. Abu Raed comes to see the kids for another day of storytelling. Yes, the kids. All 12 of them. And suddenly, the flashback returns to me. I remember the day I felt my blood-pressure rise when I arrived at the the office and found all the kids being loud, abnoxious, and out of control. I had completely forgotten what posible logic had allowed me to let myself write a film where I would be in a position to direct 12 kids. Talking about setting a trap for myself. I’d forgotten how much I loved a good “challenge”. 

 

Thankfully, the brilliance of Nadim Sawalha inspired the kids to act like something approaching professionals, although there were still times when I was less a director and more a school-teacher as I chased rug-rats around the set. But once we figured out a communication system – me and the kids, that is – we were fine. We developed a bond to such an extent that I was the subject to yells of “Ustaz Amin, Ustaz Amin”. So, I actually was their school-teacher. Great.

 

Having completed the first day, in which we had shot an incredible 65 set ups, which is a mind-boggling amount of coverage, we had set the tone for the rest of the production. We all knew we were making a special little film. Cinematic visuals with cranes swooping up and down, performances that I could never have hoped for in my wildest expectations mean that the by close of the first week, we had lived up to the quality of work we produced on day one. While most productions start out slow, we nailed a very ambitious day from the get-go.

 

We arrive in Salt. I picked this small town, the country’s Ottoman capital, to double for an old part of Amman because of its architecture, including brick roads and arched windows, and soft, honey colour. It plays much more interesting on film than the grayish cement tones of old East Amman. And of course the endless stairways bring their own character to the film. While writing the early drafts of the movie, I modified the script to include the stairs after discovering this location in Salt. Actually, the whole neighborhood was my mother’s idea. She goes to that little church where a miracle happened some years ago: Saint Georges appeared to a mute and brought his voice back to him to warn people about some impending tragedy.

 

Most of us on the crew, though, remember Salt as a hellish experience. The whole shoot was jeopardized with fights breaking out and problems in the neighborhood. A guy threw a chain at my face and missed by a couple of inches. Our craft services guy was struck by a metal pipe thrown from a roof-top. Blood was shed in fights breaking out at 30 minute intervals. It must’ve been a full moon. People were going crazy. And in the most lethal blow, a mad-man hit our two cameras with water balloons. One of the lowest points of my life was when we made the decision to leave and find somewhere else to shoot in Amman. This place was just not safe anymore. 

We had four days left, and all the magic we’d captured was going to be ruined because of a few destructive idiots who had nothing better to do with their time. Dsirupting our film was as inventive as their lives got, clearly. 

 

Laith and Ken set off around Amman searching for alternate locations to match what we’re doing, while my other producer Nadine Toukan pulls me aside and says “Do you really want to leave Salt?” I look around, then back to her and whisper “No. What can we do?” She smiles. “Okay, that’s all you had to tell me. Just wanted to make sure.” 

That evening Prince Ali himself comes to the set with 20 police officers. He assures me that they will fortify the set. “You’re not leaving Salt until you make the movie you want to make,” he said. A light had suddenly been illuninated at the end of the tunnel. And so we went back to Salt the next day and the last three nights were truly the most remarkable of the entire shoot. The footage we captured was incredible. It couldn’t have been done anywhere else.

 

On the last day of the shoot, we fly in a helicopter over Amman to film it from the sky. This is icing on the cake. After 24 full days of filming, 13 hours a day, six days a week, Captain Abu Raed is done. Everyone goes home as we hand-carry the movie in boxes halfway across the planet back to Los Angeles. And here I am now writing from my apartment in Hollywood – where else? – while we edit the film at Gigapix Studios. I am impatiently itching to show the world what we’ve done. I believe this is the beginning of Jordanian cinema.  And it all started on a napkin. 

One little idea, with enough care and nurturing, can become an industry. We have a million Jordanian stories to tell, and I hope emerging filmmakers take the opportunity to invest in themselves and in their stories because this is just the beginning.

 

For the full version of this article, see NOX13.