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Home Front: Culture Wars
Emmerich 'feared fatwa for 2012 scene'
2009-11-03
Roland Emmerich has admitted that he feared a fatwa would be placed on him if he filmed a scrapped scene for 2012.

The filmmaker is well known for decimating famed landmarks on movies including The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day. He stated that while he decided to destroy the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro because he is "against organised religion", he was fearful of the Islamic religious decree for a sequence that was planned but not shot.
Catholics don't cut heads off anymore for blasphemy ...
The 53-year-old wanted to demolish the Kaaba™, which is a cube-shaped building at the heart of Mecca™ and is the centre of prayers and the Islamic Hajj™ pilgrimage.
... but Muslims do ...
He told Sci-Fi Wire: "Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit. 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, yeah, I'm against all organized religions, generally speaking, but, it's mostly against those which don't actually will hit back that I'm against, if you look at the finer picture."
"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."
"Please, don't kill me".
2012 is scheduled to open in cinemas on November 13.
Posted by:anonymous5089

#7  The long counting of the Maya calender ends in 2012... and then begins anew, like it has done before.

Yes, but THIS TIME it's rolling over the same creation date as the end of the previous world!! AND it's happening on a winter solstice (which the Maya always considered to be BAD NEWS....) Fear! Fire! Foes! RUN AWAY!!
Posted by: Free Radical   2009-11-03 19:57  

#6  "movies including The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day"

Those two titles shouldn't be used in the same sentence.

Independence Day - great.

Tomorrow - dreck.

Ol' Roland's gone off the deep end; can't tell if it's because he became a Warmenist fanatic, or he had a head injury series of small strokes.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut   2009-11-03 19:16  

#5  Free Radical, from what I've heard it's somewhere between Plan 9 from Outer Space and Manos the Hands of Fate ...
Posted by: Steve White   2009-11-03 18:17  

#4  Roland Emmerich. Is that German for P*ssy?
Posted by: ed   2009-11-03 17:42  

#3  Emmerich has a unique talent to blow the world to pieces in his movies with absurd scenarios and stories.

The long counting of the Maya calender ends in 2012... and then begins anew, like it has done before.
Posted by: European Conservative   2009-11-03 17:31  

#2  The whispers are that this movie is so terrible that it's good in a comedic fashion. The pitiable cowardice of this clown is breathtaking. A bankrupt spirit eventually faces a bankrupt existence. (The Greeks called it hubris.)
Posted by: Free Radical   2009-11-03 16:36  

#1  I wish that, by default, this made him a Moslem, then I could watch his atheistic a** squirm. I used to be an atheist and don't mind them a bit. It's the bigoted ones I don't like.
Posted by: Richard of Oregon   2009-11-03 16:08  

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