As part of the Nanovic Institute Film Series, “Europe Beyond Borders,” which explores the relationship between Europe and countries near and far, the film FOUR LIONS was showcased at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center on November 8. The director, Christopher Morris, discussed his film prior to the showing. Before he made his appearance though, Christine Becker, an associate professor in the department of Film, Television, and Theater, offered a introduction: “Chris Morris likes to go where other people fear to tread; he raises questions that many others shy away from, he tackles topics that many like to ignore, and he satirizes media and moral panics that most refuse to even acknowledge. If you’re made uncomfortable by his work – well, you’re probably experiencing it right.”
His latest film, FOUR LIONS, is a slapstick comedy about Islamic terrorists. In this satirical comedy, four Muslim men embrace fundamentalist ideals and desire to become suicide bombers. The movie was well received by audience and critics alike: In fact, FOUR LIONS received multiple awards, one being the 2010 BAFTA for “Outstanding Debut By a British Writer, Director or Producer.”
Here’s a portion of what Morris had to say about his film:
Why a comedy about Islamic terrorism?
First I’d like to apologize for having produced work which in vulgar description makes me sound like a sort of nightmare on crack, sniffing various forms of shoe polish, because that’s not the intention. You might ask why I would make a comedy about Islamic terrorism; I’ve tried various sort of audiences around the world, everywhere from Istanbul right through to very strong Pakistani cities in Britain, but nowhere have I found an audience that thinks that terrorism is intrinsically funny, so it’s not for that reason. In fact, I was reading up on it just to try to understand what was going on beyond the basic media narrative, which is pretty binary and not really very informative, and I started coming across stories that struck me as unexpectedly funny.
On inspiration for the film:
I was reading a very good book called AL-QAEDA by a writer and journalist named Jason Burke, and I came across a story about a group of Yemeni Jihadis who planned to blow up a U.S. warship by ramming into it with an exploding boat. Well, the boat was moored out into the bay, and they put the launcher in the water, filled it with explosives—and it sank. I thought that would be a really interesting conversation, because you’ve got 5 guys standing around a blubbing boat now and someone’s got to ask who didn’t do the measurements right. It was something like a cut-away in a comic film, and I was like, well that’s sort of funny. I just kept coming across more and more examples of similar lead-footedness. There were some Canadian Jihadis who were planning on assassinating their prime minister, but they forgot who he was. This same lot also went to training camp in the woods out of town, and they ended up having to sleep in their van because they were scared by a mouse that got into their tent.
Morris explains how the ridiculous merged with the extremist acts:
So, you find that within these stories of people who are maybe capable of committing lethal acts, there are true, real life stories that are innately ridiculous. You stumble into what actually has a name in expert circles called the bunch of guys theory, where terrorist cells are not a sort of brilliantly organized master mind of terror construct from machine-like, evil creatures who can do anything. They are people, and they often make mistakes.
Morris highlights the underlying theme:
These operations are fraught with very comprehensible human error, and that struck me as interesting. I went to court cases where there were months and months of surveillance videos of these guys sitting around talking, not about bringing down the west—I mean they were talking about bombs and things, but most of the time they were talking about who was cooler, Bin Laden or Johnny Depp. These kinds of conversations were not what I was expecting. One terrorist cell who bought 600 kilos of fertilizer and had gone to Pakistan to training camp to learn how to turn that fertilizer into a bomb, came back, had forgotten how to make it into a bomb, and started making phone calls to their contact back in Pakistan saying, “Yeah, brother, you know how you taught us how to make a bomb using that fertilizer? Could you just give us the recipe again?” to which of course the line goes dead.
In the end…
It doesn’t mean that they’re not making bombs, but by the time I discovered that there’s a sort of slapstick element to this, it felt like there was no way I couldn’t make this film. It’s these real life examples that I found were just saying making a film like this is just unavoidable, because what it describes in a way is what really happens. You may get to blow up a bomb, but chances are there have been a lot of quite ridiculous incidents along the way.
Ellen Roof is a freshman majoring in business and English who is still laughing from FOUR LIONS. She can be contacted at eroof@nd.edu.
