Sam Harris speaks with Meg Smaker about the controversy around her documentary, "The Unredacted (Jihad Rehab)." They discuss her background as a firefighter; the effect that 9/11 had on the firefighting community; her subsequent adventures in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia; the deprogramming of jihadists; the organized campaign to silence her film; the capitulations Sundance, SXSW, and other festivals; and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
Well, there's been a lot of chatter online about Ukraine that is new.
Many people are concerned that we could be edging closer to nuclear war with Russia.
Anyway, I reacted to some of that online, but I think I'll do a podcast on Ukraine in the next couple of weeks.
Today's episode is a tale of cancellation.
For anyone who has any doubts about whether cancellation is a thing, this episode is for you.
In particular, it's a tale of a truly ridiculous cancellation, as you'll hear the mob pick the wrong target, as it often does.
Today I'm speaking with Meg Smaker.
Meg is a documentarian.
With a very interesting and unusual backstory.
In the first half hour or so you'll get a sense of just how intrepid and resilient a person she is.
There's been some important coverage of her and her story.
Michael Powell wrote a good piece for the New York Times.
I believe Graham Wood might be doing something for the Atlantic.
But what there's been much more of is noise on social media among the whinging hysterics and malcontents and grievance entrepreneurs.
Briefly, what happened is that Meg made a film, originally titled Jihad Rehab, about a program in Saudi Arabia that seeks to rehabilitate former terrorists.
And her film was accepted at the best film festivals, like Sundance and South by Southwest.
And then it was hurled from the ramparts of those festivals, which is to say, disinvited.
She even had an award rescinded, and positive reviews changed after the fact.
All in response to an utterly dishonest campaign of defamation and intimidation.
So this is a story of what happens when a creative person has her dream come true.
Because for a documentarian to get her first feature into Sundance is a truly wonderful thing.
It more or less guarantees distribution and future work as a filmmaker.
But it's also a story of what happens when that dream is maliciously turned into a nightmare by the woke mob.
As you might expect, this bothers me for many reasons.
First, it hits close to home.
This is the kind of thing that has been directed at me.
But when it was, I was lucky enough to have already built a platform and an audience that makes me more or less impervious to these kinds of attacks.
Meg wasn't so lucky.
But, as you'll hear, the injustice of this episode is really compounded because Meg is absolutely the wrong target.
I mean, I can understand many people being upset by what I have to say about Islam, because my view really is condemning of the faith, at least in part.
Obviously I don't think I or anyone else should be cancelled for honestly discussing the link between specific doctrines in Islam and much of the pointless misery we see leaking out of the Muslim world.
Jihadism especially.
Although we might currently note what's happening in Iran with social protests bordering on revolution in defiance of the hijab.
But this is just to say that in my case, the offense and even outrage isn't totally surprising and illogical, right?
Because my view really is that Islam has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, if need be, into the modern world.
But in Meg's case, there is literally nothing in her film for people on the left to honestly find offensive.
She doesn't share my view of Islam at all.
And there's no criticism of the religion in the film.
As I make clear in our conversation, this is an utterly humanizing portrait of men who we have every reason to believe have been treated terribly in Guantanamo by the U.S.
government.
So, what's happened to Meg in her film is quite perverse.
It's just a spectacular own goal for the far left.
And it's perfectly emblematic of the moral and political confusion that is screwing up everything now.
And as you'll hear at the end of the podcast, there's also a call to action here.
Meg is still struggling to get her film distributed, and she has set up a GoFundMe page for that purpose, which is accessible at jihadrehab.com.
And I would really love it if our community could help Meg.
So if you find this story compelling, and you want to help right the wrong that was done here, I would greatly appreciate it.
And now I bring you Meg Smaker.
I am here with Meg Smaker.
Meg, thanks for joining me.
Thank you.
I'm really nervous, but I'll try to do my best.
No.
Well, it's really great to talk to you.
We were thrown together by, I guess, a mutual friend.
She's a friend of mine.
I don't know how well you know her, but Melissa Chen put you on my radar, and I'm glad she did because it's a fascinating situation you're in.
I'm sure it's an uncomfortable one, but I want to get into it.
It pulls together so many issues that we're dealing with collectively and culturally.
There are several things to talk about.
You've made a film originally titled Jihad Rehab, which I've seen, and which is really quite wonderful, and the irony of its cancellation will be quite evident to our audience.
But so we want to talk about the film and its reception, perhaps above all.
But before we do, you have a very interesting and counterintuitive background.
So let's just summarize who you've been before you ever thought you might make documentaries, and then we'll get into the film and the current controversy.
I don't know how far back you want to go, but I want to go back at least as far as September 11th.
Yeah, well, I'm currently a filmmaker, but before I'm a documentary filmmaker, journalist, but before I was a filmmaker, I was a firefighter.
And if you asked me back then what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, without hesitation, I would have said be a firefighter.
I mean, I love that job.
Every day was different.
You got to work in a team.
And it was just such a really, really great job to have.
And the people that I work with were like family to me.
All that kind of change, though, On 9-11.
And the reason for that is, but like, the day before 9-11, I would describe my firehouse as a place of like family of like supportive, caring people who, you know, were very, yeah, they're just like family, a place of love and support, right?
And within 24 hours, that place turned from a place of love and support into a Into a place that had a lot of like vitriol and hatred and bigotry.
And none of the things that I was seeing on mainstream media kind of answered those questions of that, like that were generated from that day.
And my dad always told me that there's only three types of people in the world, right?
Those that when you hit them, they hit you right back.
And those that when you hit them, they run away.
And those when you hit them, they asked, why'd you hit me?
And I've kind of always been in that third camp.
So after 9-11, my initial response was to try to, like, understand.
So I watched a lot of news, and I read a lot of books about Islam, and I read, you know, some books about Arabic and the history of the Middle East.
And what was really interesting to me was the things that I was reading about Islam.
were directly contradicting what I was seeing on the news.
And the only way that I can think of at that time was to basically go to Afghanistan on my own and try to find those answers for myself.
And so it was a little bit after six months, around six months after 9-11, I traveled to Afghanistan on my own.
And after arriving there, I was immediately humbled by my own ignorance of the world.
I mean, I don't know if you remember what you were like when you were 21, but I was very self-assured of my worldview, and that came crashing down after my time in Afghanistan.
Okay, but before we get into your experience there, there's a bridge we have to attempt to build.
I don't know if it's possible, because it could be mysterious even to you, but you have just described your sudden interest in why they hate us, which was shared by many, many millions of people in our society at that point.
And your response to it is so peculiar and extreme compared to what everyone else did, that if there is an explanation for it, it would be great to have it insofar as you can provide it.
How is it that you, a solitary woman, who happens to be a firefighter, suddenly decides to go to Afghanistan solo, In the more or less immediate aftermath and ongoing chaos of the beginning of our war on terror.
Basically you're saying, why did you do this like crazy thing of going to Afghanistan right when we started this war on terror?
It is fairly bonkers if you just, if you look at the average.
No, I will completely admit to that.
If you don't know me, it sounds like a fucking crazy person, like does some shit like that.
Sorry.
Am I allowed to swear?
You are, yes.
Okay, cool, cool, cool.
That makes this a lot easier for me.
Yeah, I think, how do I put this?
So I remember when I was a firefighter, for me, I loved doing it.
But there was one call, there was one type of call that whenever we went on it, I would always be really nervous about it.
And that was any calls involving hazardous materials.
Because every video we saw in training where firefighters died, it was because some kind of chemical or gas asphyxiation or something like that.
And so it always kind of Scared me, right?
And it was the only calls that I went on that I would hesitate.
And it was the only calls that I went on that I would second guess myself.
And I don't know how you're wired, but for me, when I don't understand something, like I didn't really understand how chemicals and hazardous materials work, it scared me.
And so for me, Diving deep into that and understanding it is a way of kind of like a safety blanket.
So when I realized that this was one part of me being a firefighter that I just needed to overcome that fear, I went in and I started training as a hazmat specialist.
And it's really like involves a lot of chemistry, a lot of like You know, on the firegrounds work type drills and stuff like that.
And it's a pretty involved process to become a hazmat specialist.
But then after I got that, the next call that I went on that was for a hazmat call, I didn't hesitate.
I was super comfortable and super deliberate.
And I think for me, it might kind of, my friend thinks it's a little bit obsessive compulsive, but like, if I don't understand a thing, like I have to understand the thing.
Like, I can't let it go.
I can't be just like, oh, that's going to be a mystery, and I'm just going to keep on living my life.
Does that make sense at all?
Yeah, although, I mean, there are many, many things to understand.
And on paper, at that point, it must have looked, if not to you, to others fairly crazy.
Yeah, batshit crazy is what my dad said.
Because literally we have journalists, you know, seasoned journalists getting decapitated at that point.
I mean, you know, Daniel Pearl got murdered, I think, in February of 2002.
Yeah, I was, yeah, I was, I actually had a knock-on effect of that, is when I went back to Pakistan, I was going to Afghanistan.
So I went back to Afghanistan, I went to Afghanistan right after 9-11, and then I went to, back to Afghanistan in 2004.
And when I went back, I actually had the secret police There weren't so secret, actually, because I knew they followed me in Pakistan because they were they were worried that I was going to get kidnapped.
And it was funny because I wasn't there as a journalist who had loads of resources.
So I was staying in the really cheap part of town, which also was the very dodgy part of town.
And when they found that out, they were really scared that something was going to happen and they sent this like caravan of like armored cars to literally remove me and they like put me up in the Marriott.
What is going on guys?
And I think the Marriott was bombed shortly after that.
So.
No, that was the best decision.
But yeah, I think that, listen, I, my experience has been that most of the people that I meet are good people.
And that goes for every country I've been to, I think, through different cultures and different traditions and You know, religions, it's most of the people I've met have been good.
I think if I had never left the United States, and I didn't have that experience, I would feel very fearful of the world.
Because I know that before I started traveling, and before I started really doing a lot of reading ferociously, the world seemed very scary.
Because imagine if you I never left your hometown and you just, you know, watch the news all day.
That's fucking terrifying.
And I think when I, the way that I describe Yemen and Afghanistan to people, because inevitably they always think that it's so dangerous and there's explosions going off all the time.
And then I'm like, you know, running for my life.
But the way that I describe it to people is imagine that you knew absolutely nothing About the United States.
You didn't know it was located on a map.
You didn't know who the president was.
You had never seen any movies from there.
The only thing that you knew about the US was what you read in the New York Times and about like the rapes and the robberies and the killings.
And you would think that America was like Mad Max on crack and you're like, that place is dangerous.
I'm fucking never going there.
And I feel like a lot of the times, like living in Yemen, most of my friends and family were like, and then initially they were super scared for me.
But you know, when you live in a country like that, or, you know, even going to Israel or other countries that I've been to that are portrayed on the news in kind of like this hectic, chaotic way, I think the majority of the population, the majority of the time does not Yes, there are, you know, explosions here and there of, like, violence, but you also have, like, school shootings here.
Like, I remember when I was in Saudi Arabia, I had a taxi driver, and he asked me where I'm from, and I told him America.
And his first thing was like, oh, it's so sad about your crazy schools over there.
Like, you must be so worried for your children to go to school.
And I was like, I don't have kids, but yeah, I think that's something that people do think about.
But it's interesting that that's our view of the states over there.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I ramble on a lot, so just tell me to shut the fuck up if I go on too long.
Sorry.
No, it's great.
So, Yemen, obviously there's a significant civil war and humanitarian crisis happening there now.
Was any of that going on when you were there?
Or is that pre-chaos?
I mean, I really kicked off in there.
So the Houthis have been were definitely an issue when I was there.
Like there was bombings in the outside the city.
Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was the president at the time, it was it was a definite issue there.
And we had lockdowns sometimes when things really kicked off and And there was riots sometimes for I remember this one time, it's one of my like, so when you live in Yemen, you have to have clan.
And what I mean by that is, when I move there as a single person, I would like Move into an apartment.
And then this happened to me a handful of times.
I'd move into apartment and then I would like repaint it and like do the, you know, redo everything and make it nice.
And then inevitably my landlord would come a couple months down the line to check the place out.
And then he like, Oh, it really looks nice in here.
I was like, yeah, thank you.
And then about a month later, he's like, I've decided to move back in and I'd have to move out.
And I, I realized after a while that I just had no recourse to any of this.
And then I met There's a huge diaspora of Iraqis in Yemen because of what happened with the war in Iraq.
A lot of Iraqis moved to Yemen to kind of get away from that and escape that at the time.
And I met and befriended this family, and they kind of took me in and adopted me.
And one of the women, I consider her like a sister to me.
She actually helped me on the film and did some translations and gave some story notes.
But yeah, she's like a sister to me.
And so when they adopted me, the next time I got messed with, the whole crew came down.
And we're not talking about two or three people.
We're talking aunts, uncles, cousins.
And then as soon as it was clear that I had clan, that I had people, I was left alone.
And then they found me this place to rent in Hadda, which is the newer part of Senna.
And it was this really old Ghibli guy.
Gabili is a Bedouin with a lot of money from selling Kot, which is a drug there.
And he was a huge fan of mine because I was always put around on time, really, really low maintenance.
And when the riots kicked off, This is very Yemen and the riots kicked off.
He sent two Hilux trucks with Toyota Hilux trucks with each of them had a 50 caliber gun in the back and right outside my gate to like protect me.
And then he dropped off an AK 47 for me to have just in case, just in case.
And I was like, Oh, I love Yemen.
This is hospitality.
It's great.
Yeah.
Well, I'm seeing the hospitality, although the safety is looking questionable at this point.
Well, you know what?
Like I said, if I was by myself at that time and I didn't have a clan, I didn't have a very well-known and influential, powerful Ghibli as a landlord, I would be like, yeah, it's very dangerous.
Okay, here's how I describe it, right?
I don't know about you, but I like puzzles.
Not puzzles as in, like, I put together puzzle pieces.
That shit drives me nuts.
But actual, like, human cultural and political puzzles.
And so, for example, it was 2004.
And so growing up, my dad was a firefighter, but he had this knack of like, he loved to read.
He read a lot of textbooks in his spare time.
That was one of the things that I picked up from him.
And so I was reading about laissez-faire economies.
It was this theory and they'd really never been in practice, but at that time, because this collapse of the Somali state, I was like, this would be a really cool thing to go find out about because technically this is a laissez-faire economy.
There's no government, there's no rule of law.
So I was in Northern Somalia, Somaliland, and I was trying to figure out how I could go to Mogadishu because Mogadishu at that time It was absolutely chaotic, and if you can picture Mogadishu as a pizza, each slice of pizza is a different clan or different faction rules, and you can't cross over that without permission.
If you do, you'll be shot.
And killed.
So I was trying to figure out, because I wanted to basically be able to go all over Mogadishu freely, and I was trying to figure out how to do that.
And I realized that in Mogadishu they had, you know, marble cigarettes and Coca-Cola and other kind of products.
And it occurred to me that they have to get that from somewhere, because there's no factories that make that kind of stuff, at that time anyway, in Somalia and Mogadishu.
So, even though the Somali state collapsed in 1991, and as did the post office, that means someone has picked up some kind of and made a private postal business.
And my theory was that if I can befriend that guy, that would be the person who would be able to get me free access.
Because even if you're a warlord, if you're running a piracy ring, you need to have your supplies, right?
For your men, for your family, you don't want to get cut off.
And that's the one guy no one wants to piss off, is the guy who brings you that stuff.
So I found out who ran the private postal service in Somalia.
I met with him.
I befriended him.
And then I went to Mogadishu with him.
And when we walked around, everyone saw me with him and just figured that I was his friend or that we were You know, I was doing a business deal with him and then once he left, I was able to go all around Mogadishu and no one messed with me.
And it was like pretty night and day.
And it was just figuring out the puzzle of this place and how you're able to navigate it.
So, I guess the answer to your question is yes, going to Mogadishu as a six foot tall albino Godzilla on the surface is not smart, nor is it safe, but it's all how you do it.
And by doing it that way, it actually was quite, quite safe.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think you've just further confirmed that I want to be with you in a crisis, if I have to be in a crisis.
I'm on a lot of people's, like, top list for if the zombie apocalypse actually comes.
I was really disappointed, because I honestly thought that when this all started, I was expecting, like, Mad Max Fury Road.
I'm like, man, I'm going to rock in this new world.
I got this great skill set, and then it wound up being, like, the big Lebowski apocalypse.
We're all home in our robes, so I didn't get to use my skill set, unfortunately.
Yeah, kind of went stir crazy actually.
So how long were you in Yemen?
A little bit under four, five years.
So like a little bit over four and a half years, yeah.
And was Somalia just a, did it punctuate that time or did you go to Somalia after Yemen?
So Somalia, I went in Yemen twice.
Once when I was in Yemen, and then again, when I went back to school, I wrote a paper based on my time in Somalia called The Advantages of Anarchy.
And I turned it into one of my professors.
And the paper basically said that Somalia was in this unique position because Somaliland had declared itself independent and had its own currency.
It has its own elections and president, but it was not recognized by the international community.
And because it wasn't recognized, it wasn't able to get money from the IMF and things like that, which on the outside people thought was a bad thing.
But what actually happened was, because they didn't have international recognition, they also didn't have international influence.
And so the government didn't go abroad for money, it had to go to the local populace and the local business leaders.
And so it created a very healthy relationship between the local business and the politicians where it was more organic.
And they were responsible to the local populace, where a lot of countries in Africa receive a lot of their budgets and funding from, you know, the IMF.
And so they're okay pissing off the locals because people that they don't want to piss off are these foreigners in these foreign countries.
So it actually created a very healthy economy and a very healthy political system in the North and Somaliland.
And so the paper that I wrote was kind of like about the advantages of the anarchy that happened in Somalia.
And I turned it to my professor and she called me into her office.
And I thought I was in trouble because, I mean, you don't know this about me, but I have a learning disability and my spelling is fucking atrocious, like really bad.
So I thought I was going to get in trouble.
And so she called me in and she said, you know, I read your paper.
I was wondering if you would be interested in writing an academic article about it, and we could co-author it.
I didn't know what it took to write an academic article.
I thought it was going to be a couple of weeks of my time, so I was like, sure!
It took two years.
Then I applied for some grants to go back to Somalia and actually do real field research.
And so then I went back in 2010 and went all over Somalia kind of doing field research on state building and piracy and using piracy as a way to measure stability and state building.
Mm-hmm.
Fascinating.
Sorry.
I can't just tell me shut the fuck up So, but yeah, I do want to get to the present concern Yeah, so you I guess one more step along the way So you're you have created this still by my lights fairly insane cultural exchange program for yourself And it's all working out.
You've gone to, you've spent years in Yemen.
You've had adventures in Somalia.
At what point do you decide to become a documentarian?
That actually happened while I was living in Yemen.
When I was in Yemen, I was the head instructor at a firefighting academy, so I taught Yemeni men how to fight fire.
That's a whole different story, how I got that job.
I don't know if you know this, but women aren't firefighters in Yemen.
I can imagine.
I remember my first day, I walked into the classroom and they didn't know I spoke Arabic.
I walked in the classroom and I could hear them whispering and they thought I was the secretary for the instructor.
And I started writing on the board and they're like, wait a minute, this is our instructor and they completely You must have been in many situations where people assumed you could not understand Arabic and they're talking about you in front of you and then you disabuse them of that.
Oh, it's great!
I love, I love that.
I absolutely, I love it because I mean I don't look like, yeah, I don't look like I would speak Arabic.
Yeah, you don't look like you speak Arabic.
So the first day, I literally went home and I was almost crying because I thought, oh my God, I'm going to get fired from this job.
And then the second day, the same thing happened.
And so, you know, firefighting, we have this saying like improvise, adapt and overcome.
And it's something that we just kind of go to all the time.
And when you become a firefighter, your fire academy is about 20 weeks long, probably more than that in some cases.
And you do all this classroom work where you study fire science and safety equipment and, you know, you know, standard protocol and, you know, chain of command, all that stuff before you ever do live field drills.
And what I mean by that is we have something called the burn building when you're training, and it's a house that basically you can set on fire multiple times to kind of do live fire drills.
But you wait until the very end to do that.
So what I decided to do was to take them because I figured that they looked at me and didn't see me as a firefighter and that they just thought I was this woman to teach them stuff and I knew that I had to change that perception.
So on day three, I took them out to the fire ground and we did a live fire drill.
And I taught them what an SCBA is.
It's a self-contained breathe apparatus that firefighters use.
And I taught them about how to don it.
And my goal that day was to teach them skip breathing.
Skip breathing is a very advanced technique that firefighters use that when your air runs out, This alarm bell goes off and it basically tells you you have like a couple minutes left there.
And you, if you're an experienced firefighter, you change your method of breathing that you make that last longer, but you have to remain calm.
And you have this huge alarm going off in your ear.
It's really, really, really hot all around you.
There's fire.
There's smoke.
And unless you have a lot of experience and a lot of training, you tend to freak out when that alarm bell goes off and you suck your air down even faster.
And I knew that.
So there's all these cadets and I took them in two by two to the burn building and I would shut off my air and shut off their air and then the alarm would sound.
And to the person, they all freaked out.
This one guy tried to pull off his mask and I had to slam his body against the wall like on his mask and I yell at him in Arabic.
I'm like, if you take this off, you will breathe in superheated air and you will die.
So don't do that.
And then this one guy, he like almost passed out and I had to basically drag him out of the building.
And then we did that and it was about like, I think I had about 40 cadets and they all went in two by two.
And at the very end of it, I came out and they're like all on the ground, like breathing really heavily.
And this one guy looks at me and he goes, Teacher, you are a man!" And then after that, that was it.
It was fine.
And we got along great, and they just looked at me as a man dressed as a woman teaching them firefighting, and that was fine.
That was the end of it.
And so, yeah, it's definitely not the first time that that has happened.
But I do think that being able to understand where people are coming from, These men, I think most of them had around a third grade education, because firefighting is very different in Yemen.
It's not seen as a desirable job.
So, you know, people aren't people who have really well educated aren't aren't going after that.
And so a lot of them were from the rural areas and this was a huge thing for them.
And so it's like realizing that, you know, there's people who are maliciously sexist and there's people who just have not been exposed to women in different positions like that.
And so once you're able to show them like, hey, like I can do this, I'm actually pretty good at it.
It shifts their paradigm.
And then we were able to work no problem.
One more firefighting question that just occurred to me because 9-11 was an atrocity when viewed from one angle, certainly a tragedy when viewed from another, and it was especially so, I can imagine, from the point of view of a firefighter.
What happened to the firefighters in New York that day and the heroism on display and the doomed nature of it was so acute.
I have to imagine that these events hit the firefighting community generally in an especially hard way.
I think you alluded to some of that when you talked about how riven your firehouse was with hatred of Islam, perhaps, or at least jihadism at a minimum.
Is there more that you can say about that?
I mean, how did this land for firefighters?
So in California, we have fire season.
And back in the day, it used to be actual season, not year round.
And we have these things called strike teams, where during fire season, when there's huge fires, there are five engines that are sent out by different departments and to as resource allocations.
And so I was on a strike team.
So I was on a different unit.
And that morning, we were at a station that had another engine on it.
So there's sometimes stations have two or three engines on.
Better station there.
And that engine had been out the whole entire night running calls.
And my guys, I was a senior firefighter at the time, and my guys got up early and started to get ready.
And there was making a lot of commotion in the TV room.
And I was in the bathroom and I came out to actually yell at them because I was like, hey, the other crew's still sleeping, like keep it down.
So I walked in the TV room, and I kind of gave it to one of the firefighters, and he pointed to the TV, and I saw one of the Trade Towers on fire.
And I turned to him and was like, I don't fucking care what movie you're watching.
Because I literally thought it was a movie, because I just thought they were watching a movie or something.
And he's like, no, this is the news.
And I looked at it, and the one thing That I remember most of that day was the shift.
And when the first plane hit at the firehouse, it was more like, oh shit, like that's going to be a crazy call because normally you have either a plane crash that you go on or like a high rise fire that you go on.
But that was like two.
So we all, as firefighters, we were all talking about how, what kind of call that would kind of be on, how crazy it would go.
Go to do something like that and what you have to understand is before 9-11.
All the training that we got was that steel-reinforced buildings don't collapse.
Yeah.
So when you went to a high-rise fire, you set up, you set your incident command system at the bottom floor, right?
So we knew there's loads of resources and loads of firefighters and chiefs always were going to be at the bottom floor.
And so we knew that.
And so when the first plane hit, it was, the shift that I'm talking about is like, it was more like thoughts and prayers and concerns and talks about how to be Blunt how cool of a call that would that would be to go on right like how cool would we do a plane crash into a high rise and like we were all talking about kind of being jealous of that going on a call like that.
And then there was a palpable shift.
When the second plane hit, because it was very clear when the first plane hit, we thought it was some kind of accident.
And when the second plane hit, the shift was so palpable because it went from concern and thoughts and prayers to rage and vengeance.
And it was interesting to me because the facts were the same.
Plane hit at the building, people had died, and it was tragic.
Those facts are the same, but because the perceived intent had shifted from accident to this is an attack, this is on purpose, that shifted the whole paradigm at the firehouse.
And so that, to me, is one of the things that I remember so vividly from that day.
And also that, and then when the towers came down, everyone in the firehouse was silent, because we all knew where all the firefighters were, because the Incidents Command System had to be on the bottom floor.
And so we knew that, probably before the rest of the nation did, that hundreds of firefighters had died.
And so the reaction was So firefighting is not like normal jobs.
It's not like you go to an office and you just do a nine to five with someone.
It really is like an extended family.
And so I trained with guys in my department.
I trained with guys.
From FDNY, I trained with guys from Louisiana because I did a lot of search and rescue training and USAR training, which is like when the Oklahoma City building exploded, they'll send a USAR team.
And it's basically, I think it's 72 firefighters who are trained in different things, hazmats, low angle rescue, confined space, different specialties.
And they'll send a team to that site to manage it.
And so you get to train with other departments.
And it's, I think it's also like a, like when, even when I was traveling in Pakistan, I brought some shirts from my firehouse with me and I actually stayed at a firehouse in Pakistan and I gave them some firefighting shirts.
And it was, yeah, they just welcomed me in.
They were very curious about women firefighting in America, but it is an extended family that actually goes beyond the borders of the US.
And I've, it's just a different kind of profession because the way I describe it is, It's a very unique job when you're exposed constantly to other people's like most traumatic moments and it attracts a certain person and it kind of develops a certain personality to where when you meet another firefighter there's this kind of look of like, yeah, you know, you've been through the shit too.
Yeah, you've seen it all.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there really was no expectation on your part when you saw the fires burning out of control in both towers that the buildings themselves were going to start to pancake and come down?
Oh, no, absolutely not.
That's the thing.
Absolutely not.
Because that's not what we were taught.
Literally, it was when they started to collapse, it was shock.
Because I I was not stationed in a place with high-rises, but I knew firefighters who were.
Part of the training that you do is setting up on that ground floor for your incident command system.
Again, part of firefighting is you have to learn about building construction, you have to learn about hazardous materials, you have to learn about medical stuff.
It's a pretty great job if you're a person who gets bored easily, because there's always new stuff to learn about.
Yeah, all the building construction training that we had, it was like, steel-reinforced buildings don't collapse.
And then that was the golden rule.
And then they did, and then the whole world kind of shifted.
Yeah, well, in defense of our erroneous assumptions, no one had ever flown a fully-fueled passenger jet into a high-rise to see what would happen.
Yeah, this is true.
Jet fuel burns really hot, and hot enough to melt those kind of steel-reinforced beams, no matter how thick they were.
So yeah, it was something that hadn't been tested before.
Yeah, well, you'll get a few emails from 9-11 truthers after this.
Okay, I'm going to go on a tangent.
Can I just tell you this?
In the Middle East, there's a lot of conspiracy theories.
There's a lot of conspiracy theories also around 9-11, and almost to a person, people that I talked to in Saudi Arabia all thought 9-11 was an inside job either done by the Israelis or done by the United States as an excuse to go to war.
Right.
And I remember there was, there was a guy that I'd met there, really nice guy, Abdullah, who would, I would classify super conservative, very, very religious, but salt of the earth, fucking good human, just a great human being.
And, uh, he would, he was adamant, he was adamant that it was like an inside job and America did it and XYZ.
And I remember I, like he, he acted as my driver sometimes.
And I went to go interview Khaled, you know, the guy who opens the film, the bomb maker.
So Khaled was, his interview was 10 hours long.
He was just such a fascinating person.
And he was with Osama bin Laden on 9-11.
And so we talked a lot about that and his experience.
And Abdullah was in the room for part of the interview, and that part it was about...
Khalid talking about 9-11 and the attacks and being with Osama Bin Laden and the plan and all that other stuff.
And I remember leaving that interview and I got in the car with Abdullah.
And this is from the horse's mouth, the guy that was next to Osama Bin Laden on 9-11 telling how it went down.
I took credit for it.
I was like, Abdullah, after hearing that 10-hour interview, have you changed your mind about this being an inside job?
And he's like, You know, Meg, yeah, I think, I think maybe, maybe you were right.
And I was like, yeah, it only took like 10 hours.
Like, it's Alvin Lawn's best friend telling you this.
So I was like, okay.
But yeah, that was, that was pretty funny.
You just have to do that a few million more times.
Yeah.
And you'll change your opinion.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, I think, you know, Khaled, my hope someday is to take his interview and do like a podcast of it because his interview was just amazing.
Like, for example, there was so much that couldn't go in the film, but I was talking to Khaled about just small talk and asked him, you know, do you do I'm a documentary filmmaker?
Do you ever watch documentaries?
He's like, yeah, I watch a lot.
I was like, oh, what's your favorite one?
And he said, oh, it's the one that we that was on the syllabus at Al-Faruq.
I'm like, wait a minute.
You guys had a syllabus at the Al-Qaeda training camp that had documentaries that were assigned watching material?
He's like, yeah.
I was like, well, what's your favorite documentary?
And I was kind of racking my brain and thinking, what would Al Qaeda assign for homework for these guys in training?
And he said, you know, my favorite one was the one about the man.
He's always looking in the camera.
And he's talking about the war in Vietnam and I was like, wait, Fog of War by Errol Morris?
And he was like, yeah.
He's like, we watched that film and we know all we need to know about America.
I was like, this is crazy.
Someday I want to tell Errol Morris that his movie was on the syllabus found in Al Qaeda training camp.
That was great.
I would bet they've got a few Michael Moore films too.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so let's jump in.
We're just going all over the place.
I apologize.
I see the through line.
It's working.
So you are steeped in the culture at this point, and you have decided to make a film which sends you to Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps you want to say how you got pointed in that direction and heard about this, the phenomenon of Jihad Rehab.
But perhaps you can just briefly summarize the film.
I want to talk about the film, but I really want to talk about what has happened since the release or attempted release of the film.
Yeah.
Because therein some powerful ironies await us.
So what is Jihad Rehab, the place, the phenomenon?
And give me the elevator summary of the film you made.
Yeah, so I'll take those in reverse.
So, Jihad Rehab, now retitled The Unredacted, is about a group of men who, after spending 15 years in Guantanamo, are sent to the world's first rehabilitation center for terrorists, terrorists which are located in Saudi Arabia.
I first heard about the Center way before I was a filmmaker.
I was living in Yemen and I was teaching firefighting and I kind of overheard a conversation from some of my cadets and they were talking about a terrorist attack that had taken place in Saudi Arabia.
I think it was around 2007.
And they said that the perpetrators had been caught, and that half the perpetrators were Saudi, and half the perpetrators, and the other half was Yemeni.
And that the Yemenis had been tortured and killed, but the Saudis had been sent to something that they referred to as jihad rehab.
And at the time this was really interesting to me because Saudi Arabia was and also is not known for its human rights record or for being very progressive and so always kind of perplexed me why this very conservative country was running some kind of progressive rehab program for for terrorists, and it always kind of stuck with me.
And then my last film I made in Cuba, and my Spanish is not great.
And when it came time to do my next project, I wanted to do something where it was going to be easy to be easier because I spoke the language.
It was way not it was so hard to make this film.
Yeah, and so I originally wanted to do this, and I didn't know the kind of access I could get.
I was pretty sure I could get enough access to at least do a short documentary.
That was definitely within my, I think, powers.
But I wasn't sure if I was going to have enough access or the kind of access that I wanted to do a feature-length doc.
But it took me like a year to get access, at least the kind of access that I have to make this film.
Like full transparency, they there are reporters that visit the center before me, but they're given like a two hour, you know, PowerPoint presentation, and then they're shown around.
And then they're really, really kind of escorted everywhere and very curated.
And they might be able to talk to maybe one or two people there, but the kind of access that I was asking for, they had just never given, ever.
Right.
I think, I can't remember, is it the same place that Graham Wood, the Atlantic writer, went to when he Yeah.
So he, full disclosure, I listened to his podcast with you and actually it's the only reason why I really wanted to hear that full interview.
So I paid for your subscription for that month just to listen to that.
And then I had to actually stop my subscription that same month because when you get canceled, like I did, you're really poor.
So even though I loved your podcast with Graham, I was like, I can't afford to keep on doing Well, I've got some connections over here.
Let me hook you up with a subscription.
Yeah, can you talk to the person in charge?
You know, I listened to that.
It was really great.
Yeah, so I spent some time at El Hier, which I think Graham talked about in his podcast, and I spent obviously a lot of time at the Center.
So just to give you some context here, I interviewed or talked with, I would say, probably over 150 of these guys.
probably over 150 of these guys.
Of that 150, around 30 were interested in doing the project.
Of that 30, only 12 were interested in doing the project without their face being blurred or For me, it was really imperative for the audience to be able to see these guys and look them in the eye, because I think that's how you are able to see someone's humanity.
Were they all Yemeni in the end, or were three of the four Yemeni?
Um, so in the film you have Khalid, and he's Saudi, and then Abu Ghanim, Ali, Muhammad, and Nader are all Yemeni.
Right.
Okay, so you make this film, which I've seen, and which few other people have seen, given what happened upon its premiere.
Maybe I'll just say this at the outset, just to set people up to understand.
Well, you saw the film.
Before you saw it, you heard about it.
What did you think you were going to... What were your expectations before you watched the film?
Well, because Melissa got in touch with me, I was set up to understand it appropriately.
You know, I just sort of knew what I was getting into.
But nevertheless, I was surprised upon watching it how insane its reception was.
What you've produced in this film, apart from it being just a very professional and well-done documentary, and this is the kind of thing you'd expect to see on Frontline or Netflix or any place that would... Hint, hint, hint, distributors.
Yes.
Um, but it's, it's just a remarkably compassionate and humanizing document, right?
I mean, so to give people a heads up here, I want you to run through everything that happened once it premiered at Sundance, but one would think this is precisely the kind of film that people who have criticized me for Islamophobia Would want people like me to see, right?
I mean, it's literally impossible to watch this film and not have serious misgivings about how we've conducted our side of the war on terror.
And, you know, serious misgivings about Guantanamo, for instance.
And, I mean, you totally humanize these guys.
And if anything, I could imagine the concern for criticism, you know, going into this would have been that you'd be worried you were perceived as being soft on terrorism, right?
Or just taken in by the humanity of these guys and not really getting, you know, the nature of the evil we had to deal with and still have to deal with out in the world, right?
So like you would imagine, if anything, you could imagine some criticism from the right or from even someone like me.
I mean, I'm not a creature of the right at all, but I'm someone who, you know, like you, 9-11 had an instantaneous impact on me, but the direction I took it is a real focus on the problem of jihadism and You know, that focus is often misunderstood.
It's not at all unanimous against Muslims, generally, as people.
And it's certainly not any symptom of xenophobia on my part.
And, you know, I'm not at all surprised at the humanizing story you're able to tell in this film.
I mean, my problem with jihadism is that, and just with bad, contagious ideas generally, is that, you know, bad ideas get good people to do bad and otherwise unthinkable things.
It's the bad idea problem that I'm most worried about, and jihadism is one species of very bad ideas that has religious roots, but it's not the whole story.
And again, watching your film, what comes through very clearly is The rest of the story, right?
Like, so you see these guys as truly ordinary men who are faced with various life challenges like, you know, earning a living and getting married or, you know, how to get married, right?
How to even get a woman's attention and And you see this quite standard set of social problems, and you see the way in which, you know, jihadism can capture that and leverage that.
And, you know, ideology and religious belief aside, you see other variables there.
And that really is your focus in the film.
So, the irony, and again, we're going to talk about what happened once you made this film, The irony is that this is, you know, from my view, this is like, it's almost the perfect rejoinder, or it should be.
I mean, again, it's not a true rejoinder because, you know, I don't reject anything in your film, but it should be perceived as the perfect rejoinder to everything I've said about Islam and jihadism, right?
It's like, it is the thing you should want me to see if you hate what I've said.
Yeah, I honestly thought you wouldn't like the film.
I mean, again, I don't listen to your podcast religiously because I'm poor, but the few things I have seen the clips online and stuff, I'm sure intellectually I think that you would have been fascinated by it.
I was prepared for you to be like, I watched your film Meg, and I didn't like it, and hear all the things I think you did wrong.
I should be the person who should be criticizing you for this film.
And certainly anyone to the right of me, that's where you would think it would come from.
Yeah, and honestly, we, I say we, I always say we, I should say me more often, but I Thought and believed that this film was going to be atrociously attacked by the alt-right and because of that I took a lot of steps both pre, during, and post-production.
to butt Triss up against those.
What I mean by that is I knew that if like so typically when you make a film and it's in a most of the films in English but there are places where it's Arabic you hire like a translator to do the initial ones and then you hire one translator to go in at the very end and make sure and spot check and make sure everything's on the up and up Because I knew that this film was going to be just ripped apart, we didn't hire one or two.
We hired three different translators to go through the entire film before we picture locked to make sure that every single word that was in there was correctly translated, because I thought that if something was off or wrong, that they would use that one thing to say, see, this isn't right, and therefore the whole film isn't right.
I went through the film with a fine-tooth comb, and as did our lawyers, and we have this law firm called Donaldson Calliff in there.
You've never heard of them, but they are the top lawyers for documentary films.
They've represented all the Oscar Award winners going back like 10, 15 years, and they're really well-respected.
And they went through the film and they kind of was like, yeah, you kind of like went way above and beyond what you really needed to do to clear this film.
Like, yeah, because we're going to get ripped apart once this thing gets out there.
And I just, you know, I am also an ex-competitive boxer.
And so I'll use that metaphor.
And I was expecting the right hook and I wasn't prepared for the left cross, you know?
So therein lies the problem.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so what happened?
And what did the left cross actually look like?
Well, I mean, before we get into that, I want to back up because you mentioned something about these guys and their motivations.
And I will say, I wanted just to add to that, because, you know, like I said, I interviewed over 150 of these guys.
And some of the interviews lasted 10 minutes, some of them lasted like call it up to 10 hours.
After a while, I began to see this pattern of that they would fall into one of four categories.
Not all of them, there was exceptions, but like one of four categories in terms of how they got into this lifestyle or this world of And I think what was really interesting to me was that of the four, there was only one that actually had to do with religion, and the other three had nothing to do with religion.
So when you were talking about jihadism, this bad idea thing, that wasn't a universality from the people that I talked to.
I only talked to like, you know, I didn't talk to thousands of them, but it was, you know, a little bit less than 200.
Right.
And so... Also, I should just know, you have performed a kind of psychological experiment in making this film, and what you got is a, the very definition of a self-selecting group of people who are willing to talk to you.
Oh yeah, well I will say that the people that were willing to talk to me, so how I got access originally and the reason why I was able to talk to so many of them was, so When you operate in a regime, a dictatorship, be it Yemen with Ali Abdullah Saleh or, you know, anytime that there's an authoritative regime, going through official channels is always, in my opinion, kind of the worst thing to do.
The way to get access in those kind of places is by building relationships and back channels and whatnot.
So, like I said before, it took me a year to get access and part of that was building relationships with people who were influential and who could who had friends and powerful places.
And the one thing you have to understand about Saudi Arabia and other dictatorships is they'll never tell you no.
But what they will do is they'll throw hurdle after hurdle after hurdle after hurdle in front of you until you kind of just give up.
And there are a lot of things that I'm not good at.
I'm a horrible speller.
I'm very, very bad when it comes to directions, but I got tenacity for days.
So I was up for that challenge.
We'd been going back and forth for about a year.
I remember at one point they said, you know, we went to the prison and we went to the rehab center and none of the men want to talk to you.
So that's the end of it.
And I said, well, why don't you let me just, just let me talk.
Let me just go to the rehab center and to the prison.
And talk to these guys and they were really reluctant to do that.
And so we were going back and forth for a long time.
And so finally, I was able to put enough pressure on the right people to where they acquiesce.
They said, OK, we will let you physically enter the prison and the rehab center with one caveat.
And here's where the hurdle comes in.
They said, you're not allowed to film one frame of video unless these guys agree from the jump to be part of your project.
Meaning I couldn't spend months trying to get to know them and make them comfortable with me.
They had to like agree from day one, which they knew was never going to fucking happen because a lot of these guys were Either fresh off the plane from Guantanamo, where my country had just tortured them for a long period of time, or they were fresh back from Syria and fighting in ISIS.
And they were right.
So they let me in the center and they let me in El-Heir, and when I sat down with the first batch of people, there was the older Al-Qaeda guys.
I started talking in Arabic, and they wouldn't even acknowledge my presence.
They wouldn't even answer any of my questions.
Some of them wouldn't even look me in the eye.
And then I went to the next group, which was the younger ISIS guys, and same thing there.
But what had serendipitously happened was that was also the same time that Saudi Arabia took its first batch of non-Saudi nationals through the program.
And they just happen to be from Yemen.
And I learned Arabic in Yemen, so I have a very thick Yemeni accent when I want to.
And so I went in, and there was nine of them, and I sat down, and I started speaking.
And their heads popped up.
And they're like, why the fuck do you speak our mother tongue?
They didn't say fuck, but I'm going to add that for dramatic flair.
And I told him I used to live in Yemen and they want to know how long and where I lived.
And I said, I live in the old city near the Sila.
And they want to know like, oh, like near that is a very famous Fasa restaurant down there.
And I was like, yeah, best Fasa in all of all the old city.
And we we just had this immediate rapport because they hadn't been back to their home country in over 15 years.
And so we just started talking.
And we talked for hours.
And then at the end of it, I said, I would really love to talk to you guys more individually.
about your stories and learn about, you know, who you are and as people and, you know, would anyone here be willing to speak with me individually?
And a couple of hands went up and then I met with those guys individually and then kind of word spread throughout the rehab center that like Meg wasn't a journalist because I didn't really ask him where the bodies were buried in the beginning.
It was more like, you know, tell me about your childhood.
Like tell me about like your favorite sports teams is very benign stuff initially because I knew I was there for the The long haul, which is great.
One of the things I love about being a documentary filmmaker is you're given like the time and the space and the grace to explore a story where I feel if I was a journalist on assignment, I'd have to ask those hard questions from the jump because I'd only be there for a week or two.
So, yeah, word spread around the Rehab Center and throughout, like, the staff that, you know, Meg was, like, basically a white Yemeni, is what I was told.
And so I was able to talk to a lot of the guys that initially wouldn't talk to me.
And even though a lot of those guys didn't want to be part of the project, with the exception of a handful of people El Heyer, who just would not meet with me at all.
It was pretty, it was self-selecting for the project, but I think I spoke to most people.
And I don't know, I mean, I would say I probably spoke to, maybe there was like, I'd say 10 to 15 people that I met that absolutely wanted nothing to do with me.
But other than that, I was able to talk to quite a few people.
But getting back to the original thing, after talking to all those people, and yeah, it is self-selecting in a way, I started to notice a pattern.
And so it came down to like four different motivations.
And that's why there's four different characters in the film.
So the first one, and I think this is the one that most Americans are familiar with, is the cause, right?
Like, I see Muslims being persecuted or being oppressed, and I want to go and defend them, and it's my religious duty, right?
And so that's like Abu Ghanim, where he talks about going to Bosnia when he first got into this to go defend Muslims in Bosnia.
So that's the one I think most Americans are familiar with.
But the other three have nothing to do with religion, so the next one is economic necessity, right?
Like you have someone like Nader who was, he says in the movie... Just to be clear, I would put a 0.1 cause ahead of that first cause, because I mean there are many jihadists, they may pay some lip service to defending their fellow Muslims, but In many cases, that's not even the rationale.
It is much more about paradise.
I mean, literally, we've got people who dropped out of medical school in London to go fight for ISIS, and they're fighting other Muslims for ISIS.
I mean, it's got nothing to do with saving the Bosnians who were left.
Yeah, but I mean, that's an interpretation of the cause, right?
So, like, I spoke to a lot of men who Do subscribe to a certain ideology, right?
And so it's like, unless you're this specific type of Muslim, this Salafi type of Muslim who describes to this, these certain rules and ways of living, then you're not a real Muslim, right?
And in their mind, if you're not a real Muslim, then you're like an infidel and you can be targeted.
And so I think that's, that's definitely an ideology part of it for sure.
But it's still like them thinking they're doing the just and right thing.
And it's a cause.
So, it's just a different version of like, where it's one where, you know, Abughanim went to Bosnia because that's what he thought his religious duty was, where I'm sure the guy you're talking about in London thought his religious duty was to go and join ISIS and do that stuff there.
Does that make sense?
I put those in the same category.
Okay.
Yeah, I didn't mean to derail you.
So, So the second one was that I found a lot of men talk about was economic necessity, right?
So in the film, you have Nader saying his life was hard before and that he needed money.
And I think the exact quote is, you know, you want money, you need money, you go do the jihad.
And in his mind, it became a way to make an income.
And it became a career for him because he did this for a really long time.
He started out, I think, when he was 16.
And I think he was doing it till he was in his late, late 20s, early 30s.
And so that's motivation number two.
Motivation number three would be pure pressure, right?
So your family's into it, your friends are into it.
That's Ali, right?
His brother was really high up in Al Qaeda.
And in the Middle East, your older siblings or your fathers are very influential in terms of your life trajectory and your path and your decisions.
And so Ali went to Afghanistan to an Al-Qaeda training camp because his brother was an instructor there and told him that he should go there.
And Ali didn't really want to, but he was just like, you know, he's my older brother.
I got to do what he says, because that's the respectful thing to do.
And then the last one, the fourth motivation that I found was more age-dependent, more of the younger guys, and that was sense of adventure, right?
So that's Muhammad.
He said, you know, I didn't want to go to school.
I thought it was boring.
I didn't want to work.
This guy offered me a free ticket to go shoot rockets in Afghanistan.
Like, heck yeah!
I mean, you're 19 years old.
You want to blow some shit up?
Cool.
Travel.
Awesome.
And I think that, like, what was really interesting to me is when I realized that, I also realized that, like, I had a lot of friends in the military, and I'd heard similar motivations from them, right?
Like, I had a lot of friends who joined up for the military after 9-11.
That's the cause, right?
They're like, like, we want to join up.
We want to defend our country.
So that's cause number one.
I have a lot of friends who, you know, sometimes the best job in the state is with the military, you know, economic necessity.
That's job number two.
A lot of friends who come from military families and, uh, you know, that's just what their family does.
That's motivation number three.
And then a lot of my friends who joined up who don't come from money, but wanted to, you know, see the world and travel and have those adventures during the military.
And that's, you know, Number four.
And a lot of people who join the military to go to school, right?
As well.
So it's kind of a monetary incentive.
And what I realized after a while talking to the guys, it wasn't never really about good and evil.
It was more about time and circumstance.
And even though like I will say university, not university, almost university, a lot of these men were younger and they were searching for purpose and they were searching for belonging.
And that also played a big role as well.
But I think those four motivations are the reason why we have four different characters in the film, because they all represent the nuance and the complexity of this thing.
And so I think when people talk about terrorism, and they equate it to Islam, and just strictly religion, I think that's a misrepresentation of the actual, at least my experience in interviewing these guys.
Yeah, I think there's probably more to say on that subject, but it's not important here.
But the most important thing to emphasize is that anyone who has attacked me or anyone like me for Islamophobia You should want me to contemplate a document of the sort you have produced, right?
I mean, you have produced nothing like an echo of any of my diatribes about Islam and jihadism and my specific criticisms of belief in paradise and
And what work that does for suicide bombers and terrorists and in certain contexts and so it's just it's none of that right and yet you have been attacked explicitly as an Islamophobe upon the release of this film so that that's some
And I think there's probably, you know, perhaps you know more about this than I do, but I think it's a fairly organized campaign of, you know, counter PR against your film, and it has worked.
Oh, yeah, it goes way beyond that.
Like it there's there's things that you see in public, but there's private stuff.
So there's been lawyers that were hired to send threatening letters.
They're like, like just the we got initially got loads, universally positive reviews from all the major trades like the Hollywood Reporter and IndieWire.
And then right after that, this group sent letters to all the places that gave us positive reviews and threatening lawsuits.
And then subsequently, a lot of those Publications changed the wording of their reviews, which I thought was quite shocking.
Wow.
But yeah, so it was a very coordinated, you know, like, I just want to be clear on something here.
I think that whenever you make a piece of work, be it a book or a movie, and you put it out into the public space, Being criticized is part of that process.
And I think that is a good thing.
I think criticism is something that is helpful for dialogue and also sometimes can make you a better writer or a better filmmaker.
However, I differentiate between criticizing a piece of work and orchestrating an actual attack to take it down and There's a difference between tweeting, I don't like this film, and then hiring lawyers to try to scare people off the project, or scare buyers off, or harassing people online.
So, for example, Sundance announced the lineup of documentaries on December 9th, and the film would have its world premiere on January 22nd.
So this is 2021 into 2022.
Yes.
Correct.
So the, but the announcements were on the 9th, but the attacks started on the 10th.
So the attack started way before anyone had actually seen the film.
Right.
And initially, if we're being completely honest here, initially the amount of like rage and Anger that was directed at a film that no one had seen and a filmmaker that no one really knew.
I think a lot of people, their initial response would have been to either attack back or been like, you know, you haven't even seen my film, so screw you.
But that was not my initial response.
I actually, in the beginning, but this is before I found out some information later, but at the beginning, I actually understood it.
And here's why.
When I was a firefighter, I went on a call once where this kid had been seriously injured and would probably lose his hand.
And when we showed up on scene, you know, the mom was crying and the kid was bleeding out.
And the father, the father, He was fucking pissed.
We showed up and he was just like, where the fuck have you been?
You're so incompetent.
What's taking so long?
And he had this anger and rage that was directed at us to the extent that I looked at my captain like, are we safe?
Is this guy going to come after us physically?
So we got the kid bandaged up and packed him up in the ambulance.
And right after the family was out of earshot, one of the other firefighters said, that guy's lucky I didn't fucking deck him.
And my captain, because he's older and wiser, turned around with this is a, this is about to be a teachable moment.
Look on his face.
He said, listen, what you have to understand is that in this job, you are interacting with people at the most traumatic moment of their lives.
And trauma is a very tricky thing.
People respond very, very differently, he said.
And it's very unpredictable.
Some people cry, some people laugh, and some people get angry.
And that guy, even though he was angry at you, It is not about you.
That guy doesn't know you.
He's never met you before, but he has just seen his kid seriously injured and probably maimed.
And the way that he's dealing with that traumatic moment is through rage.
And even though he's yelling at you, even though he seems like he's just has this rage towards you, You have to understand that has nothing to do with you.
And so when the film we started getting the attacks before anyone had ever seen the film, initially, I thought like, oh, this makes sense to me, because number one, What you have to understand is like every other film before this film that kind of talks about terrorism is very sensationalistic, is very kind of fear mongering.
And so if I was a documentary filmmaker and a Muslim and I saw that Sundance had programmed a film about terrorism done by this white lady, who's not a Muslim, I would think too that like, oh, like not another one of these, these films, right.
And so also, because like my sister who I told you about, that kind of adopted me in Yemen, she now lives in the States and in Texas.
And we talked quite a bit.
And she's told me over the years about her experience in this country.
being a Muslim woman who wears the hijab.
And so, for example, she landed in America from Yemen when she moved here.
So she was living in Iraq, and then we fucked up Iraq, and she moved to Yemen, and then Yemen went to shit, and then she moved here.
She was born in the States, but she grew up in Iraq.
And so she came here and she said that she went through customs and immigration and she took three steps out of the airport.
And she was three steps into America and someone walked up to her and spit in her face and told her to go back to where she fucking came from.
And that was her introduction to this country.
And so over the years, I've talked with her about her experience, and I have a lot of friends who are Muslim.
I'm really close with my executive producer, Mohamed.
He's Yemeni Muslim, and we've talked about his experiences as well.
Although they're not as harsh, I think, as Raghad's, because she wears hijab, and a lot of people mistake Mohamed, he said, for being Mexican.
So he's like, I can pass as Mexican sometimes.
It's better.
But I think that, like, knowing the amount of just I don't want to say tacit bigotry that they have to kind of experience on a pretty regular basis.
Like post 9-11, Muslims were treated very differently in this country.
And I think unless you're in that culture or you have really close friends who are in that culture, you're unaware of the toll that takes.
Like, for example, imagine being A person where everywhere you go, you're treated with suspicion or you're treated in a way that is different than the other people around you.
Or you're having to deal with things like stepping out of the airport and just being spit on.
I mean, that is not one incident.
That's over years and over 20 years of experiencing that in this country.
That causes somewhat of a traumatic effect, right?
So that is in itself, I guess, a type of trauma to endure that over two decades.
And so when this originally happened, because that amount of rage was directed at a film that no one had seen, it reminded me of that call where even though the rage was directed at me, and at the film because no one had seen it yet or met me, I kind of figured, "Oh, this is not about me or my film.
This is about the trauma that these people have been through for the last 20 years." And the assumption that this film is going to add to that and add to the problem of the stereotypes that are propagated in this country about Muslims and about Islam and And so it was really interesting.
So the imam that helped us on the film, he told me that when he was first told about the film, his first response was like, oh, not another one of these films about Islam and terrorism and jihad.
And then he said once he saw it, though, he goes, Meg, if you're going to watch any film about terrorism, this is the one people need to watch.
And I was like, thank you.
And so he actually went from being very skeptical of the film to then coming on as kind of a consultant and helping us with some stuff in the film and still is a really big champion of it for today.
And he's a really well-respected mom, and he actually studied in Saudi Arabia as well, so he knew a lot about the kind of stuff that we had to do to make the film get it done in Saudi Arabia.
Funny enough, his brother was also a firefighter on 9-11, but because of the bigotry that he faced Post 9-11, he actually left the fire service.
So we had a lot in common.
It was a really interesting conversation.
But this is to say that before I got information down the line, my initial response to the hate that came with the film at me pre-premiere was... Understanding.
Yeah, was understandable.
Well, so, I have a reaction to that.
I don't want it to take us too far afield, and it will sound, perhaps, cynical, because, or, I mean, in reality, it's probably, I just, I have more experience than you had at that point being targeted by dishonest morons.
So, I would have viewed it differently, but the way, the fact that you viewed it the way you did proves, yet again, How ironic it is that you are being targeted as an Islamophobe, as someone who's totally inappropriate to bring us this kind of, you know, analysis of the phenomenon of terrorism and our response to it.
It's quite insane what is now about to unfold for you.
But I want to be clear that I felt that initially, but then things happened that made me change.
So for example, before the premiere, it was less than a week after the announcement, I got a very distressing email from a translator that we worked with.
In 2018.
So even though my Arabic, it's pretty rusty at this point, so I couldn't translate the film myself.
So we hired a bunch of translators.
He was one of them, really good guy.
And he sent me an email that was really disturbing, basically saying like, so this guy was so excited when the film got into Sundance and that he translated a film that was going to premiere at Sundance that that same day, he bought a ticket to Park City because initially Sundance was supposed to be in person, but it went virtual, basically because of Omicron.
And so he bought a ticket to Park City that day.
And then he also posted on all his social media about, you know, having translated this film that was going into Sundance.
And soon after, he was contacted by one of these people who were attacking the film.
And they messaged him.
And they basically said, like, you have to come out publicly against this film and tell people it's Islamophobic.
And he responded, you know, actually, I haven't seen the film yet.
But I don't think that that's this film because the footage that I saw, at least I translated, was very humanistic and very, like, character driven and not like that at all.
And then she messaged him back and basically said, this was kind of the gist of it, I'm summarizing, you're either with us or you're against us.
And if you don't come out publicly for this film, we're essentially going to blacklist you and you'll never work as a translator in the documentary community again.
And this is a Muslim to another Muslim.
And when when he told me this, because he sent the initial email and I was really worried for him.
So I called him.
He was very shaken.
He was really shaken by this.
And I felt like I felt like absolute shit, because here's the thing.
When you're when you're a director, you're responsible for your crew.
And at that point, the crew was starting to get attacked, and I didn't know how to protect them.
And I didn't know how to fix this.
I didn't know how to make it stop.
And I just, I was really taken aback because on the one hand, I wanted to be super empathetic with these people who had experienced these last 20 years of trauma in this country and viewed my film as a threat to that.
But the other hand, it's like, you don't fuck with my people.
You want to come at the film, you come at me.
But to come after my fucking translator?
No, that's fucking bang out of order.
Like I was irately pissed.
I made Sundance aware.
Sundance didn't do anything.
In fact, I think that like, they handled that quite poorly.
And so for me, I started to shift there when I saw some of the tactics that were being used by this main group.
And then I shifted again in March.
So up until March, I was trying to be, I was trying to take what they were saying as face value, right?
Because I come from a place where I look at documentary filmmaking in some ways as a calling.
So when I was a firefighter, it's definitely a profession that's a calling.
What I mean by that is there's a specific culture when you're doing something that is a A calling.
So if I work at Google, I don't think that's I think most people would call that a vocation, but that's like a calling or whatnot.
But when fire in firefighting, we have very strong culture of loyalty and honesty and sacrifice and duty.
And even the shittiest firefighters that I that I had to work with, sometimes they might lie about how many women they slept with, but they would never lie about doing an equipment check.
And so there was a baseline of like, you don't lie.
You tell the truth.
You take the hit for the team.
If you're if you're a captain, you take the hit for your firefighters.
If you take your chief, you take the hit for the captain.
It was this chain of command.
If you're a leader, that's what you do.
And so for me, I think I naively went into the documentary profession thinking that that same culture existed and was part of what we did.
So for example, when you're a journalist and a documentary filmmaker, I would hope you favor the truth above all else, even if that's inconvenient for you.
And what I mean by that is there's a lot of people who, during the whole Me Too movement, were like, believe all women.
And there's some women who lied about stuff.
And it's very inconvenient to tell those stories about women who were deceptive and that stuff when you're trying to further a cause.
And if you're an activist, you don't highlight those stories.
You ignore those stories.
If you're a journalist, yeah, it's inconvenient to talk about that, but that's just the fucking truth.
So, to ignore that, I think.
If you're a journalist and you ignore those stories, then you're no longer a journalist, you're an activist who writes.
So in the beginning when this all happened and we were getting all this like hate before anyone's seen the film.
Take me back.
So you get accepted to Sundance and then Sundance goes virtual.
You're getting this hate even before the film is broadcast virtually at Sundance.
Take me from there, but I guess I'm interested to know when the wheels really start to come off and you just have the time course of that.
Yeah, so what you should know and probably most of your audience doesn't know is how pivotal and important Sundance Film Festival is in the documentary world.
So in the independent documentary space, there is no better festival to premiere at than Sundance.
Like it literally can make your whole entire career and it can launch your film.
And what I mean by that is, in the category that I'm in, which was in competition for the US competition, they only took 10 films that year.
They took less than they normally do.
I think normally they take 16, but because of the pandemic, they took less.
And so the competition is really high.
And also, the year that I submitted to was supposed to be the first year in person since the pandemic.
So a lot of people had held off And then submitted to that year.
So they got twice the amount of submissions, but took half the amount of films.
I think they get like, I was told like 15,000 or on a normal year.
And like, so twice amount would be 30,000 and submissions.
And so when you're talking about my category, they're only taking 10.
The competition is quite fierce.
And so when those films are seen as the it films of that year, and usually when you get to the Oscars, which is about a year later, Most of the films that were nominated premiered at Sundance.
So it is a place to launch your career and it is a place where your film will get a springboard and a platform and an audience that it would never get anywhere else.
And so to get into Sundance is like winning the filmmaker lottery on steroids.
And I cannot stress that enough because I think most women like maybe I'm being a little sexist here.
Most women think about their fantasize about their wedding day, right?
What they're going to wear and like what it's going to be like.
I throughout this whole entire process in the back of my brain.
I was fantasizing about the premiere of this film, and I never thought I would get into Sundance, but that was the fantasy I had of what my premiere would look like, the Q&A, and it's just, it's the thing that people go their whole entire careers and they never get a film into Sundance.
And so, yeah, competition is fierce.
So, shit, I forgot.
And you could have, so the wheels are starting to come off even before the film is shown.
Yeah.
But what I was saying, the wheels were starting to come off before the film was shown.
And at that point, because like I said before, I was coming from it from a place of, oh, this is, this is from a group of people who've been traumatized.
Believe all Muslims.
Oh, I just, I thought that everyone was acting in good faith.
So what I did is I assumed that this was just a misunderstanding because we had done so many screenings before Sundance with people All across the board, we did a screening with the Yemeni community and Muslim community.
We had guards from Guantanamo in the audience and a couple of them.
We had MAGA people, we had super activists, liberal people, and we had never gotten any feedback at all that was even like a sliver of this is Islamophobic.
So I thought this was just a big misunderstanding that because these people hadn't seen the film, they just assumed it was like every other terrorist film ever made.
And so what I did was, I said, okay, like, if this is just a misunderstanding, let's show them the film, because we were still editing at that point, because we weren't done yet with the film.
And so I went to Sundance and this other organization called MPAC.
I think it's the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
And through each, because I didn't know who these people were, because a lot of this was anonymous at this point.
I invited them to come and meet me and meet Mohammed and talk to us and ask us any question they wanted, and then screen the film.
And if they had really good notes and that made the film better, of course I would have taken them.
And so We extended that offer and what I got with Sundance, they said in the history of Sundance, no one has ever offered to show the people attacking their film before the premiere.
And I was like, because I truly believed that this was just a misunderstanding.
But then we heard back from both those entities and they basically said, you know, they told us they don't want to meet with you.
They don't want to meet with Mohammed and they don't want to screen the film.
And they also were really offended that you asked them to sign an NDA.
We have everyone sign an NDA before the premiere.
This is not just this group.
So in my profession, before a film premieres, you do test screenings, and you have to have everyone in those test screenings sign an NDA.
So for example, my boyfriend went to a Test screening of Jordan Peele's Get Out, and he had to sign an NDA.
So it's like, it's just industry standard.
So at that point, I was like, okay, well, there's really nothing more I can do.
And I thought at that point, I just interpreted as Oh, this is not about me or my film.
This is about Sundance.
And they're angry that because I knew it was Muslim documentary filmmakers that much I did know about the group.
So I was like, okay, this is probably like, anger at Sundance for programming one of the few films that got in is from a non-Muslim person telling stories about Muslims.
So I was like, okay, this is Sundance issue, not mine.
But I think the problem was, and when I say Sundance, I want to differentiate between Sundance the Institute and Sundance the festivals, because they're two different things.
And I guess we can talk about that later.
But I think the wheels came off, partly because of how Sundance handled it.
And partly because it was just kind of, so instead of Sundance saying, just watch the film.
And after you watch the film, then we'll talk.
It was like Sundance taking some of their demands and giving them to us.
So for example, we were given this list of the questions about the film that we They demanded we answer, which we'd already answered to Sundance.
And so it was weird that they wanted these in writing.
And it was pretty clear that this is what they're going to give to the group.
And I was told by the head of Sundance at the time that she had met with the group personally and had a long meeting with them and took their concerns seriously.
And at the whole time, I was like, how can you take their concerns seriously because they haven't seen the film?
So for example, what you have to understand is The accusations that were initially being thrown at the film, again this is before anyone had seen it, was that this was Saudi propaganda, and that it was funded by the Saudis, and that my co-producer was the Saudi government.
Because we have an anonymous co-producer on the project.
And, and so then Sundance gave us a list of questions that had to do with like, who funded our film and all that stuff.
And I was like, you guys have seen the film, you know that this is horseshit.
And so but I mean, I think Sundance definitely placated to, I shouldn't say placate, I think, at the time, the head of Sundance was trying to make everyone happy.
And that It caused people to be more emboldened about going after the film.
Also, that criticism is ridiculous on its face because the film doesn't make Saudi Arabia look especially good.
I mean, one thing that happens in the middle of the film is that there's this Regime change, and now MBS is running the place, and your access gets curtailed, and everyone gets quite paranoid, and the problem of Saudi authoritarianism becomes a character in the film.
There's no way someone could look at this film, especially not someone at Sundance who's actually in the business of watching documentaries, and think this is Saudi propaganda.
Yeah, I mean, anyone who has actually seen the film would definitely have that takeaway.
And what I what I mean by that, what the reason I bring that up is because instead of Sundance saying, hey, watch the film and then we'll talk.
It was meeting after meeting with these people and with me getting me and my film team to jump through some hoops like that they'd never asked anyone to jump through before.
Like they wanted us to have an outside review board look over our film.
And so in contrast to Sundance, right?
So we got into a bunch of festivals other than Sundance.
Most of them pulled the film after the controversy, but one of them didn't.
And it's a film festival called Dock Edge in New Zealand.
And when it got out that the film was going to play there, there was a professor at San Francisco State University that decided that this was such an egregious thing to play my film that she had to write this festival that was halfway across the globe.
Yeah, New Zealand being dressed in her backyard.
Yeah.
But this, I gotta read you this, and I don't even know if you can use this or not, but this is the exchange.
And this is what I think Sundance should have done.
So this is her writing to the festival.
I'm kind of disappointed that your festival decided to program the now renamed Jihad Rehab.
Seems pretty disrespectful to the Muslim community.
To which they reply, Have you watched the film?
If so, we'd love to hear which part of it is disrespectful to the Muslim community.
To which she replies, I haven't watched the film, but many members of the Muslim community, especially filmmakers, have, and have been critical of it.
I think your team must be aware of the controversy in the discourse.
The criticism from the community members seems valid and thoughtful, so I'm listening to them and I'm respecting their opinion.
So that's why I'm so disappointed that this film is in your lineup." To which they reply, we highly suggest that you watch the film before expressing any disappointment With our decision to screen it, we know that many, many people who've commented on the film haven't seen it either.
We are more than happy to discuss any concerns with anyone who's actually watched the film.
Now, even though that seems like a very simple thing to do, I think if Sundance had done that, this might have gone a lot differently.
Right.
And but they didn't, they really wanted to, again, keep it make everyone happy.
And I understand that, like you have a group of people who've been marginalized for a really long time.
And it's all it's very hard to be a filmmaker in general, it's hard to be a filmmaker and be female, it's hard to be even more hard to be a female filmmaker who's Muslim.
And so I get Sundances, propensity to try to, you know, be empathetic to these people's concerns.
However, I think that you can't address people's concerns of a film they have not seen.
So I think the way that Sundance dealt with this in terms of having us jump through all these hoops, and it cost us an extra $20,000 to clear the film for the specific requirements that Sundance wanted us to have, that they didn't ask any other film to to clear the film for the specific requirements that Sundance wanted So I think the wheels came off once Sundance took that stance and they were wavering like they there was a time when it was clear to me.
Well, I interpret anyway, Sundance set us a bunch of demands and they gave us 48 hour working days, but Over the, if you count the weekend, four days to do it.
And, and it was simply, I mean, I remember talking to my producer at the time, he's like, there's no way we can do this.
And I was scared because I was like, they know that there's no way they can do this.
And they're looking for an excuse to pull the film.
And so I basically was like, we got to do this no matter what, because any excuse to pull it, they're going to take.
And so for example, typically you have your film run through like airs and omissions and you're through your lawyers once your picture locked.
They wanted it done in 24 or 48 hours working days.
Our lawyers couldn't do that.
So we had to pay them to work over the weekend, which is really expensive.
We're talking like when your lawyers cost a thousand dollars an hour and you have them work over the weekend, it's not cheap.
And so, so they went through our film with a fine tooth comb.
We should have been given a lot more time to do this.
You always have to do it, but to do it that early on was really expensive.
And to do it in that timeframe, we also had to, Have someone who was an outside person review the entire film and interview me and interview my producer about how we made the film and consent forms and if the consent forms were in English and Arabic and if they were understood and how we Basically got informed consent.
And so all that stuff we did, and it was instead of finishing the film in terms of editing it, we were doing all that kind of stuff.
And I think that it was alarming at the time.
I think looking back, it's even more alarming because It wound up setting a precedent that I think is very worrisome going going forward, meaning that if the most prestigious film festival in the world had a small group of people who were protesting a film they hadn't seen, and then that film festival required special audits for a film.
It just it just to me, it was just so unusual.
And when I talked to other people with a lot more experience, They were also alarmed by what was happening.
You don't have review boards like this.
The point was, one of the people who came to our defense at the time said, who is better positioned to tell What is on the up and up in the film people have actually been to that country and spent years with these protagonists or someone who's never stepped foot in the kingdom and just is reviewing a film that they know nothing about like it just seemed like they wanted to check a box rather than actually kind of like.
Taking the film and talking to people who actually knew like we worked with experts on the film We had like people in the State Department people in the Department of Defense people in Saudi Arabia like we had a lot of people who knew a lot about this subject that I consulted with and I think that if they just said we want we would like to talk to some of your consultants that would have made sense to me but
I don't know, it was just a very, it definitely felt like they were looking for an excuse to pull the film because they were getting so much heat from this group.
So I think that's when the wheel started, maybe not to come off yet, but that's when the wheel started to get a little bit loose.
And it was also pulled from South by Southwest, right?
It was accepted there and then... Yeah, that one was, that was, wasn't, it was not, it was disinvited.
So that was really hard for me because you have to understand that I have a special relationship with that film festival.
Like my last film premiered at South by and it won South by Southwest, won the top award.
And that kind of launched my career.
And I had become friends because of that with some of the people who work there and some of the programmers and This was my first feature-length documentary, and when I submitted it there, one of the programmers called me and was just gushing about it, and she's like, hey, I wanted to call you earlier, but we were waiting on one of our last programmers to see it, and we all were curious what he was going to say, because it was really important what his opinion was, because he's actually a vet.
And so before we extend the invitation, we wanted to see what he thought about the film.
He said it was extraordinary.
And they were so excited about the film.
And they were really, really like, she was really nice on the phone.
She's like, it's so great to see you do this project after last one and see how much you've grown as a filmmaker and as a storyteller.
Yeah, and I remember telling them, you know, I couldn't accept the world premiere, but I would still like to premiere there because I already accepted Sundance.
And they were like, sure, we would love to have it.
And when you go to a film festival like South By, you have to sign contracts that basically is a screening agreement.
And so they signed it, and you signed it, and you both agree that you're going to play there.
Yeah, it was really, really hard for me because I looked at South By as kind of going home, right?
Like, this is a place that launched my career, and the person who runs South By is this very ball-busting, independent woman who's a force of nature.
So how does a ball-busting, independent woman who's a force of nature cave to this pressure which, upon examination, is obviously in bad faith?
I mean, what was that interaction with her like?
What if you had one?
Yeah, no, I had many interactions.
I think there was like on-the-record, off-the-record type stuff, right?
Not like in terms of on-the-record, off-the-record.
There's emails that are in written form, and then there's conversations we had on the Early on, before they actually pulled the film, I talked to someone who worked at South By, and they expressed worry about the film because of all the controversy and all the attacks that Sundance got.
And they basically said, listen, Sundance has one of the most diverse programming teams in our industry.
Black, white, straight, gay, I mean, it's really diverse.
We are an all-white programming team, and we're going to just take a really big hit if we program this film.
So that was a conversation that I had.
And then later on, when they were wavering, they basically said, like, you know, for us to even consider this film, we need you to have a crisis PR team, which cost a lot of money, and we didn't have that money.
And so I went to one of our investors, and we literally hired someone For two weeks, because that's all we can afford to force for South by as like, okay, this is some this is a hoop you wanted us to jump through, we're gonna jump through it.
I was really looking forward to South by because it was gonna be in person.
And being in person is way better when you need to have those complicated and really hard discussions after a film.
So typically, you premiere a film and afterwards, there's a long q&a.
And you talk about your film and how it's made and then you take questions from the audience and you're able to look someone face to face whereas in Sundance was virtual.
This is all on Twitter and Twitter is a fucking cesspool of like horribleness.
I got I just I don't I'm not on Twitter but I the way I would describe it to people is it's like it's like a lunch cafeteria lunchroom at a high school.
But instead of one table being mean girls, they're all fucking tables, right?
So it's not it's not a place to have nuance and complicated and human conversations.
And so I think that added to the vitriol of the film at Sundance.
And so that's why I was really looking forward to South by because it was I felt it was an opportunity to really have an open dialogue and conversation about this film that had caused so much controversy.
But before we get to that other shoe dropping, let's just run through what the criticism was up to this point and who it was coming from, if you could discern different actors here.
I mean, so you've talked about one Allegation that it was Saudi propaganda.
That's just ridiculous on his face.
What else was coming at you?
So initially it was Saudi propaganda funded by the Saudis and then people saw the film and that one went away.
And then it was the filmmaker is racist and the film is Islamophobic and it was made by an all-white non-Muslim team.
But then we're like, well my executive producer is Muslim, my co-producer is Muslim, our assistant editor is Muslim, and we worked with two Islamic scholars and an imam on this film.
And then we had prominent Muslims like Lorraine Ali, who works for the LA Times.
She's a film critic for the LA Times, and she came out saying that she really liked the film.
And she'd spent time in Saudi Arabia and really, really kind of said it was extraordinary in terms of the access and filmmaking that I was able to pull off.
And we've already established that you're not your average white chick making this exploitative act of cultural appropriation.
Yeah, well, I think yeah, so that was one and then and that was one for a long time.
And then and there was like, you know, just basically equating that that these guys didn't give consent.
The next one was they didn't give consent.
They were forced to do this by the Saudi government.
And again, if literally if they just talked to me, I could have told them how I got access and how I talked to like, Over 150 of these guys most of them didn't want to do it.
But uh, so they didn't give consent and they didn't sign release forms and all stuff.
And so, you know, and then we're like, no, everyone signed release forms, both in English and Arabic and informed consent was something that I take very seriously.
So let me back up here.
So informed consent is something that in the documentary community is something where when you're working with someone who's a subject of film, Before you can start that film, you basically sit them down and say, like, here's who I am.
Here's the project I'm making.
And so with these guys, specifically, it was important for me to explain to them how a documentary was made, because most people don't know.
And so I told them, like, this isn't going to be one interview, I'm going to be with you for a very long time.
I'm going to be following you home to your family, I'm going to be Maybe interviewing your family and your friends.
I'll be filming you when you're in the streets.
Like this is not a one and done thing.
I'll be in your life for quite a long time.
And the way that I do informed consent, I think everyone's different, but when I approach a subject for a film, I always meet them first without a camera.
And I tell them two things.
I say, you know, this is a very long process and I want you to feel comfortable with me.
And comfortable with what we're going to do together.
And so for this first meeting, you can ask, and throughout this process that I'm going to be filming you, I'm going to ask you a lot of questions.
And sometimes those questions are going to be very personal and you don't have to, obviously don't have to answer them.
But like what this first meeting that we have, I was like, you're allowed to ask me anything you want, anything.
And I will answer honestly.
And it can be anything from my favorite color to like one guy asked, you know,
First date or why I wasn't married why I didn't have kids and it's basically I flip it around that first time and allow them to be the interviewer to me to say like who is this person that I'm gonna be sharing my life with and So we do that and then at the very end of it I say listen If you are not if you don't feel comfortable with me actually do not want you to do this project for two reasons number one It will show up on camera and that won't look good number two
I've had a documentary made about me that I really didn't give my permission for and it was a very bad experience and I wouldn't wish that on anyone else.
So sidebar here when I was 23 or 23 22 23 I was kidnapped in Colombia and then later on National Geographic made a Docudrama about it.
And the woman that played me was super hot, so I'm not too mad at it, but like, it's definitely not very accurate.
But yeah, and so I tell that to all the subjects, the films that I've made.
And if they agree, then before we ever film with them, you give them a piece of paper.
And it's in their own language, but it's also in English on the same piece of paper.
Let me just get this straight for a second.
So you went to Afghanistan having already been kidnapped in Colombia?
No, I went to Afghanistan before going to Colombia.
I went to Afghanistan in 2002.
I went to Colombia in 2003.
I went back to Afghanistan in 2004 though, so this was like a sandwich between Afghanistan.
I'm just trying to figure out just how unusual a person you are.
You know, if I had gone to Colombia and gotten kidnapped, I don't think I would be quite as carefree in my subsequent travels solo across the war-torn reaches of the world.
Well, if we're being honest, I think one of the reasons why I made this film is because, not the only, but it's one of the reasons why I made this film is because of what went down in Columbia.
The group that kidnapped me was called the AUC, and their reputation is they're known as the headhunters.
And they have that reputation because they disembowel and decapitate their victims in front of their family to kind of send a message.
So they're a pretty gnarly group.
So, long story short, you know, being kidnapped is not like what you see in the movies.
Like there's, there's not huge explosions and men dressed in all black going on long diatribes.
It's more, it's actually quite boring sometimes, because you don't have any like internet or forms of distraction or, you know, cell phones or anything like that, or music.
So a lot of times you're just sitting around and you're just talking to your fellow captees And eventually you talk to your captors and you have these long conversations.
And for me, you know, I was kidnapped for a little bit under two weeks.
I think it was around 10 days, give or take.
And, um, the thing that was most unnerving to me was not what these men and women did.
Like they disemboweled and decapitated seven people that I knew.
And then they also shot one guy as well.
These are people you were traveling with or just people you knew because they were fellow captives while you were there?
So basically, this is probably a different podcast, but I was traveling through Panama and was going overland into Columbia through the Darien Gap.
And to go through that, it's basically the Darien Gap is like 250 mile stretch of virgin jungle that straddles the border.
And to navigate through there, like the jungle is so thick, GPS doesn't work.
And so to navigate through that space, you need to have the local Kuna Indians, basically, who know the landscape and otherwise you just be lost.
And so we had befriended some people at one of the villages and they were taking us through the forest and the jungles.
And then we went to another village.
So it would be like we started at one village and then they would drop us off at a different village.
And then that village would guide us to the next part.
And so the people that they killed were people that had been in the villages that we met that were like elders and leaders, and they'd taken us in.
And yeah, it was pretty... They killed seven people, and then they basically pillaged and burned the villages to the ground because the AUC... So I don't know how much you know about Colombian politics, but the FARC... The FARC is the only one I know.
Okay, yeah, so the FARC is like Marxist, right?
So let's, for example, if you're a FARC person, and you want to take a big stretch of land and cut it up and give each person one hectare, right?
That's your kind of Marxist mentality type thing.
If you're a landowner, you really don't want that.
And you want to keep your land.
And so basically, the FARC is out there and this kind of like, you know, for the people type group and their, I guess, their strategies and tactics.
And the AUC is actually a group that was used to be in the military.
But then because of their antics, they quickly got disbanded.
And I think I remember reading they were actually trained by special forces in the Colombian military by us.
And then they got disbanded.
But then the landowners kind of were like, oh, this group is kind of great for us.
And so the landowners kind of pay the AUC and help that group to kind of fight the FARC because the FARC is the more well-off people's enemy.
And so as one of the things the AUC did is it would kill the FARC and then kill any FARC sympathizers because it's kind of like send a message, right?
So a lot of places the FARC can't really operate that well unless they have like local support.
And so one of the things that AUC does is, you know, really devastate these villages by disemboweling and decapitating their leaders in front of their people.
And then also they burn them to the ground.
And so if they catch someone and they think they're a FARC sympathizer, that's what they do to try to like send the message.
So yeah, so that's how I knew those people.
And then while I was kidnapped, I got beaten up one time, but that was my own doing.
I don't know if you've noticed from this conversation, I sometimes... You might have said something that's considered inappropriate.
Maybe, yeah.
My dad always said that the squeaking wheel gets oiled, but the screaming wheel gets changed.
And when we were kidnapped, they wanted us to do something that I did not want to do, and I was trying to distract them with something else so I could continue to do what I wanted to do.
It worked in the end, but it cost me an AK-47 butt to the head, and I bled out all over the place.
But other than that, I was pretty unscathed.
So, I think I derailed you.
You were about to say that you talked to these maniacs, and they proved to be normal human beings with whom you could share some empathy.
Well, no.
The thing is, yeah, I talked to these people, and one of them was this 16-year-old girl, and she would talk about her high school crushes and things that 16-year-old girls talk about.
It was so alarming to me because, you know, when you're a kid, you're read stories about, you know, the good witch and the bad witch, like the good people and the bad people.
And I think a lot of us when we get older, we don't actually Leave that worldview and we see the world in that very simplistic view of good and bad and I think I was guilty of that before I got kidnapped and when I got kidnapped and I met these people and they had done by all accounts probably the some of the most evil acts you can do and But they weren't these bloodthirsty psychopaths that I had imagined.
They were just your run-of-the-mill, normal young men and women.
And then when you got to talk to them, like this girl that I was talking to, her parents had been killed.
By the FARC.
And so her logical solution to that was to join the rival group and go after the FARC.
And so she joined the AUC.
And the thing that shook me so much is how normal all these people were.
And I think that was the catalyst that sent me on this trajectory to try to understand
The other, you know, the, the, the evil doers in quotes of the world, because it was such a, like I said before, with firefighting and not understanding hazmat and then being an expert in it, it was kind of like, after I had that experience in Columbia, it was really unnerving to think that the people in the world who did the worst deeds were no different from me.
And that was very unnerving.
And so I kind of sent me on this trajectory.
where I sought out those kind of people.
So I interviewed lots of pirates in Somalia, warlords in Afghanistan, arms dealers in Pakistan and the province there and the tribal territories on the border, and, you know, terrorists in Saudi Arabia.
And I think for me, if you're going to look back, I think the original pebble that set that ripple off was probably being kidnapped.
And I know that you said, like, you're Reaction would not be to go.
Just wash the blood off my passport and then go to Mogadishu.
But I think for me, it's the opposite.
It was just like, this is something that I clearly did not understand.
This is the people who do evil deeds weren't born that way.
I, for some reason in my brain thought they are fundamentally different from me, but becoming face to face with someone who Had just performed a horrific deed like disemboweling and decapitating someone, and then sitting down and talking about makeup and your favorite football team was very, very unnerving, especially for a 23-year-old at the time.
I think I was 23 at the time, yeah.
So yeah, that I think started the shift to really try to understand that part of the world.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, yeah.
I would just add as a footnote, my view here, which is that there are many sources of human violence and they're distinct, but they can be, you know, violence can be overdetermined, right?
So there, you know, I think, I know I differentiated this in a blog post somewhere, but I think there really are psychopaths who are different from you and me.
And then there are quite normal people who, based on their beliefs about the world and about the moral imperatives of certain ways of living, they are just like you and me, but they believe different things, and they do, by our lights, horrible things in the service of those ideas.
And then there are people who get caught up in some kind of spiral of vendetta-like violence of the sort you just Indicated where, you know, they have a story about why certain people are worth targeting because of what they did to people close to them, right?
And so it's, you know, there's just this cycle of hatred beginning hatred.
And then there's just frank mental illness where people are delusional and they don't even know what they're doing, but they're doing something horrible.
And all of these can be overlapping, right?
You can be, you can check a few of these boxes and have your violence be overdetermined.
Yeah, I would say, I would add, so I would add to that in terms of like, that was my initial exposure, but over the years of interviewing people and talking to people, like I've heard before, like the pirates in Somalia and some of the warlords in Afghanistan and the fighters in Afghanistan, I would say that there were a, they're the exception to the rule, but there were a handful of times where I talked to someone that gave me, and I call it the ibbagibbies, where you're like, oh, you like to hurt people.
You derive, you're doing this, and the excuse is piracy, but you like to, you're off.
There's something a bit off about them.
The majority of them know, though, I would say, that my experience has been that there are people Who are, I would say, very scary kind of psychopaths.
But those are the rarity in my experience.
Not the rule, but more the exception.
Yeah, I would agree.
It's the difference between someone like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden, right?
I mean, insofar as I feel like I can know these guys from a distance.
Everything I know about Zarqawi is that he was a proper psycho.
Oh, you'll love this.
I was living in Yemen.
And one of the people I knew that was working at the British Embassy, who like I for embassies, they have people fly in if you're like going on leave, and they'll have someone fly in from the home office for like a week or two to look after your post who isn't really familiar with the country.
And there was this woman I met.
And apparently she was just going over that day is like, you know, Intel rundown.
She goes into like, this is a direct quote, she goes, That's a Cowie, not a nice man, not a nice man.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Okay, so back to your film, and I guess we left you at getting ejected from South By.
Yeah, so that one really hurt.
And then there was another film festival, the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, and this one really, really hurt because one of the programmers had reached out during Sundance and Not only invited the film to the festival, but he also had offered me the Vanguard Award, which is a huge honor.
And so basically the Vanguard Award usually goes to people who are like well-known filmmakers who have a catalogue of work that have just been kind of groundbreaking.
And the fact that I was offered this award after my first feature was super humbling.
And the Vanguard Award, the way they presented this film festival, is a whole weekend event.
So they screen your film, and then there's a Q&A, and then there's a panel discussion, and there's a huge gala, and there's a dinner, and it's a huge, huge deal.
And he said to me, I've been doing this for a while, and I've never seen a film like this, and I cannot believe this is your first feature-length film, and we want to give you the Vanguard Award.
There was another festival in San Francisco that was probably a little more prestigious that also invited us, but because this other festival was offering the Vanguard Award, I decided to go with them.
I was really looking forward to it because I'm from the Bay Area, and a lot of people who helped on the film from the Yemeni community also live here, and I thought it'd be great to have to be able to have them come to the theater and see on the big screen and see like all their hard work put in and then be honored at a gala.
And you know, I thought it was gonna be such a great event.
And about a month or two before it was supposed to take place, he reached out to me, and he was pretty devastated.
And he basically said, I'm going to have to revoke the Vanguard Award.
And I was like, what did I do?
Why?
He's like, I talked to the other programmers and they felt that by giving you this award now with all the controversy, it would be sticking the thumb in the eye of the people protesting your film and they don't want to do it.
And I was like, uh, Well, I mean, you know, you did offer me the award, you saw the film, I'm like, have the other, I know that you saw it, have the other programmers watch the film?
And he said, no.
I was like, wait a minute, you're telling me these other programmers have not seen the film, but based on Twitter and social media, they want to take away this award?
And he's like, yes, he's like, I know it makes no sense.
He's like, I feel so bad about this.
It's not my decision.
We have to come to consensus.
And he's like, if we play your film, I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
If?
You just talked about, like, taking, like, you offered me the Vanguard Award, and now we're talking about the film being pulled.
And I was kind of pleading with him not to do this, because we hadn't had an opportunity.
It got pulled from other places, too.
We didn't have a chance to screen the film and have the dialogue that I really think we needed to in order to turn the tide and actually have the difficult discussions that needed to happen with this film.
But honestly, from my point of view, Those discussions wouldn't have even happened because there is no difficult discussion to be had about this film.
I mean, again, the difficult discussion, if there is one, would be had from the other side, like from the neocon, we-have-to-be-hard-on-terrorism side, right?
I mean, this is like the Donald Rumsfelds of the world would have a problem with your film.
But, I mean, there is no problem To be had with this film that when I say difficult discussion, so I don't I don't know how much you know what the documentary community, but there there's a big conversation that's been happening for the last couple years about representation and who's telling whose story and why and that's been a very hot topic and also.
Well, that's actually my next question.
So all of this pushback, so the pushback is coming from the Muslim community.
No, it's not coming.
It's coming from the, I want to make this very clear, because we had a lot of people who we've shown the film to, a lot of groups that we've shown the film to, pre and post Sundance.
That were from the Muslim community that love this film.
This was a group of, not the Muslim community, it was a group of Muslim documentary filmmakers specifically.
So Muslim documentary filmmakers are playing the Islamophobia card on you, again, quite inappropriately.
But then how much of the rest of the pushback and pressure on these festivals is coming from, not from Muslims of any description, but just from woke activists who think that you are guilty of cultural appropriation or whatever the other sin is here.
Yeah, there was a lot of that, and a lot of that that was pretty Pretty harsh and pretty, um, I would say one of the hardest things about this whole entire, I hate the word cancellation because it's such a loaded word and it means different things to different people, but I don't, do you know of a better word to use?
I'm not sure.
Your film was canceled as far as I can tell.
I mean, once you have festivals withdrawing awards and withdrawing invitations, and I mean, that is the very essence of cancellation and it's not, you know, or de-platforming.
I mean, that's another term of modern jargon here, which is also not a great word.
I mean, censorship is the wrong word because it's not... Government, yeah.
Yeah, the government is not doing this, but it's, you know, I'm sure it's an old phenomenon, but the modern variant is to have completely disingenuous hysteria directed at you, and anyone who would collaborate with you, largely on social media, and just watch the failures of moral courage play out before you, where everyone begins to fall like dominoes in the indicated direction.
You find out who your friends are.
Well, I will say this.
I think Louis CK had it in his special after getting canceled.
He's like, when you're canceled, you find out real quickly who your real friends are.
And sometimes it's not the people you want.
That was a very funny bit.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was like, I was like, Oh my gosh, I feel seen.
No, so for me, there was the two of the hardest things were, I'm not on Twitter, very much at all.
I mean, I have an account, but I never check it.
And mostly because, like, we've been talking now for for a while.
And I like having these in depth conversations where you can go on tangents and talk about things and their complexity and all the nuance.
And Twitter for me has always been a place where, you know, it's a very black and white.
It's very either you're a good person or you're a bad person.
You're a person we should be attacking or villainize or you should be a hero.
And I just don't think the world works that way.
And so I avoid Twitter like the mean girl cafeteria that it is.
But the thing for me that was the hardest part of this was twofold.
One was there were people that I considered friends, like true friends, that when this happened, they either completely turned on me, or they stopped talking to me, or they just flat out lied and kind of threw me under the bus in order to I'm not sure what their motivation was.
I don't want to speak to that.
But I'll give you an example.
There was there was a woman who she was a friend of mine, and she's a documentary filmmaker.
And she was also trying to establish herself as a story consultant.
And basically, what a story consultant is, is someone who comes in and watches your film and gives you notes and kind of helps you work out the kinks.
And so we had just got some funding, and we were In the editing process.
And so I was like, you know, I want to do My Friend is Solid and hire her as a story consultant.
And we worked with her for five days for a week.
And after we worked with her, she wrote this really sweet post on social media about working with me in the film.
And I'll read it to you now.
It says, you know, a director who gives a damn.
Megan didn't just take on any story for her first feature.
This is one of the most important films I've ever worked on.
Thank you for your trust, your vision, your guts, Meg.
You are the perfect person to be telling the story, and I'm so fucking proud of you for never backing down.
I'm in awe, rooting for you.
And I took a screenshot of that because it just made me feel really good.
I was like, oh, yeah, it's such a hard thing to make a film in general, but this film is particularly hard for a plethora of reasons.
And so I took a screenshot of what I had on my phone.
And then, you know, when we got into Sundance, we were making the credits of the film.
I took a screenshot of her name in the credits.
As a story consultant, and I texted it to her like, you know, look, you're in the credits.
It's like, awesome.
And I and she's like, Oh, clap, clap, clap emoji.
Congrats.
And so that's where, you know, that's where we're at.
And then the controversy hits.
And this person who, you know, I considered her like a true friend, not like a like a film friend, but like an actual friend without talking to me.
And according to my producer, she actually hadn't seen the final cut of the film before she posted this online.
So the controversy hit.
People are kind of going really furious at me in the film.
And then this person posts on social media again without, according to my producer, having seen the film, says this.
I've been taking time off of social media for the last few months but wanted to post something about my involvement with G-Head Rehab, as my name is listed predominantly in the credits as a story consultant.
I have not had any involvement in creating and the crafting of this film's story and I haven't seen a cut of the film in over two years.
I was brought on as a story consultant in the fall of 2019 and saw a rough cut to give notes on.
I voiced serious concern around the ethics of the film and the general approach to the story.
I was insistent that the title should change and was led to believe that it would be.
In the session, it was clear that my notes and concerns were not being heard.
I left the consulting session extremely frustrated and concerned.
I was shocked That the film was accepted to Sundance and then shocked again when I told my name was in the credits.
Again I'd sent her a screenshot of it.
I strongly feel this criticism from the Muslim Arab and our film community is valid and needs to be heard.
I'm in full support of the filmmakers voicing their outrage about the film, and I am disappointed and disgusted by the response of the filmmakers so far.
If you'd like to learn more about the important conversations around the film, there are many articles by respected filmmakers and voices of our community, and they should list a couple of them.
This person never said any of that.
Like, they never said they had a problem with the title.
They never voiced anything about the film being Islamophobic.
They completely rewrote history and lied.
And the thing that's alarming to me is... Did she delete that effusive tweet that you took a screenshot of?
Or is that still in her timeline?
All that's still online, yeah.
So the only reason I'm okay reading all that is because it's public.
There's a lot of people who did a lot of other stuff behind the scenes, but I think that if you're going to publicly lie about the film and about me and about working with me, then it's okay for me to publicly call you out on it.
And especially if you're claiming to be a documentary slash truth teller.
Like for me, like once I read that, I was like, okay, we're done.
You're no longer my friend.
I'm not even going to waste any energy on you because I didn't need to know why she did it.
The fact that she did it was just reprehensible to me.
Yeah.
Yeah, so now where does Abigail Disney come into the picture?
So Abigail was one of, she wasn't our first funder, she was one of the earliest.
I think it was the first year, after the first year, I think she came on as an investor.
I will say this, like, I see Abigail's kind of getting dragged through the mud by some people right now, but I want to say that this film In the beginning, she was a filmmaker's dream investor.
For a filmmaker like me, who doesn't have a huge track record, to take on a subject like this, I got laughed out of the room.
Majority of the time when I pitched this film for funding in the beginning, I probably had 65, 75 meetings with potential investors those first two years.
And I met with a lot of people.
And for the first two years, I think the only people that invested in the film were all women.
It's not till I got a proper cut and a bunch of footage that the men started investing in it.
I get it though.
There's a limited amount of funds in the nonfiction world.
And if a first time filmmaker looking like me came to you and said, I'm going to make a film in Saudi Arabia at this center that no one's been able to get access to my first time out of the gate, you'd be like, I'm not going to waste money on that project.
But I remember I showed some footage to Abby's people at Fork Films, and then I kind of told them about my background, cliff note version, not the version we're talking about today.
And they were really into it.
And they said, you know, but ultimately, the decision comes down to Abby.
And then I met with Abby and a lot of the other investors looked at me and basically said, you know, you don't really have a track record.
You don't have this and that and the other.
But Abby sat down with me and to her credit, she was like, no, you're going to do this.
I can tell.
She knew that I was a tenacious motherfucker and that no matter what, this was going to get done.
And she didn't need a track record to tell her that.
She just was really good.
I guess at reading people, but she was on board, and so she became one of our, what, an investor about, I think it was the first year that we were doing it.
Without her, she was our first big investor.
Without her first initial kind of, you know, funds, this film would, I'm not saying this film would have never gotten made, but it would have taken a lot, it would have been a lot harder, and so I gotta give credit where credit's due.
What was the budget on the film?
I think, so... Or how much did you have to raise?
We had to so I'm going to include the things that we didn't pay because we have a lot of people and one of the things I hate about this film being canceled is most of the people who worked on this project worked either for free or deferred or at a reduced rate where they were going to get paid back after we sold the film.
Right.
So I'm going to include the money that we actually have not paid out yet.
Into that number.
So it's over a million dollars.
And what did Abigail give to you?
Can you say that?
I don't know if I can.
I'm not sure.
It was not, I would say this, it was less than a third, way less than a third of the budget.
Way less than that.
So I think some people think she came in for the full amount, but it was like I don't know.
It was not a huge amount for the whole budget, but at that particular time, it was fucking quintessential for us to move forward.
So the thing is, I think a lot of people, when they date people and they break up with them, they're like, Oh, that guy's a fucking asshole.
It's like, I've always kind of come to the view of like, I'm friends with all my exes.
And, you know, I dated you for a reason.
You're a great person.
We just weren't great together.
And I try to be fair with people.
And so I know a lot of people are kind of coming after Abby and right now, and I think, I mean, you know this, but being canceled is kind of like having kids in the aspect of when you, you can read books about being parent, about parenting, and you can see your friends raise their kids.
But until you push that watermelon through that cheerio and you're responsible for human life, you have no fucking clue.
And I had seen Joe Rogan get, you know, air quotes canceled.
And I had seen Dave Chappelle get canceled.
And I was like, those people have fuck off money.
Like it's kind of, they're going to take a hit, but they'll be fine.
But I, what I didn't realize then and what I realize now, is just the extent of it and how the mental and emotional toll it takes when you have people that you trusted turn on you.
When you have your reputation being unfairly besmirched and people taking it at face value and how isolating it can be and how just devastating it can be.
And I say this as someone who has lived Quite a full life where I've been in situations that most people would say would be very full-on insanely kind of like Stressful throughout my whole entire life.
I've had a lot of, I mean, being kidnapped, being a firefighter.
I've had a lot of really intense experiences and I've never had bouts of depression and I've never had suicidal tendencies.
And I did with this.
And so I know people will probably listen to this and think being counsel is not a big deal, but I'm not, I don't have a lot of resources.
And I come from working class.
My dad was a firefighter.
I was a firefighter.
I don't come from money.
I'm not a trust fund kid.
So it was emotionally and mentally devastating, but financially just wrecked me.
And so when I see people kind of going after Abby right now, I think a lot of people would think that I'd be like, yeah, but I'm the opposite.
I, I worry about her because I know the toll it takes.
And I don't think that anyone, anyone deserves this.
I don't fucking care who you are.
Like people are human.
They make mistakes.
And the reason why initially when Abby put out the film, the reason why I was pretty, I didn't, I wasn't angry at her initially because I knew what we were all going through emotionally and Initially, I was a little upset and my best friend pointed out, and she's very good at this, she said, you know, most people are not wired like you, Meg.
You're very good under pressure.
And you've got to be patient with other people.
And Abby will probably come around, but like, you know, give her some space and maybe she'll come back to the film.
But most people don't handle things like you do.
So like, have a bit of grace and a bit of kindness and just give her some space and maybe she'll come back to the film.
But then she issued that apology.
And that was kind of the nail in the head or the nail in the coffin.
And also, I guess also nail in the head.
But my point would be that Abigail Disney invested in this film when everyone else kind of told us no and gave this film life.
And for that, I will always hold her in high regard.
She's not a bad person.
What she did, I think, was very cowardly.
And I think a lot of people in her position would probably have done the same thing because they don't know what it's like to have that kind of pressure on you.
So I understand it.
I don't agree with it.
And I think if you're an industry leader like Sundance and Abigail Disney, I guess I just expected more of Sundance and more of some of our industry leaders.
And I've just been disappointed.
But I also don't think that those institutions or the people that work there Or Abigail deserve the treatment that I got because I think that some people are starting to kind of go after Abigail like that.
And I just would stress that.
Please don't for me like just no one deserves this kind of shit.
It's really you have no idea what it's like and unless you're until you're in the eye of the storm and it's it's fucking shit.
It's really shit.
Well, let me demur, however, slightly from that incredibly patient and compassionate response to this fake controversy that has been aimed at you.
I mean, we've already established in your world there are not a lot of bad people.
And I basically agree with that, but you know that in your experience that extends even to people who are decapitating and disemboweling innocent villagers by day and then keeping you captive at night.
So yes, you know, I don't mean to Somebody said... Go ahead.
They told me my film was... What did they say?
If empathy was an extreme sport, that is jihad rehab.
That's really great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So yeah, I'll put you into the Empathy Olympics.
You're my athlete.
Well, at least I get some award.
I'll take it.
I'll take it.
I'll take it when I can get it.
So, I read Abigail's apology letter, and people should know there's a New York Times article on you.
I think, is it Michael Powell who wrote that?
Yeah, Michael Powell.
That dude, solid fucking dude.
Like, here's the thing, I, throughout this whole process, I don't know if you've experienced this, but when I was initially being attacked, the journalists, I put this in air quotes, you can't see, but I put just it in air quotes, the journalists that were writing about it would contact me and with like two or three questions they wanted written answers to.
And it was like, now that your film's been canceled, do you like consider the fault that you did or wrong?
And it was clear that they were had already written a narrative that they just wanted a soundbite for.
And for me, it was an experience of realizing that most people that I had to deal with, I wouldn't consider good journalists.
Yeah, and you really kind of got lucky at the times in my view.
I mean you could well have suffered that fate from the New York Times.
So here's what happened with the New York Times.
So I had a friend who used to be the head film critic at the Atlantic and before Sundance, while I was still editing the film, I sent him a copy of the film and I said, Chris, I want you to rip my fucking film apart because I don't want to hear any of this shit after the premiere.
So I want you to rip it apart now so I know like where the holes are that I can patch up.
So I sent him the film and he wrote me back and he was like, A, I can't believe this is your first feature film because it's fucking extraordinary.
He's like, B, I have like two small, small notes, but that's about it.
But he was really impressed by the film and really taken aback by it.
And then about two months after Sundance, he called me and he said, this always makes me laugh, he's like, So are you counting your millions from your Sundance sale and swatting away jobs?
I was like, oh, clearly you haven't been following this story.
So I told him what happened.
And I told him about all the stuff that wasn't online, like the lawyer threats and, you know, writing to the reviewers, threatening not to sue them unless they change the reviews and all that kind of stuff.
And I told him, you know, I said, everyone wants me to like do an op-ed to address this, but honestly, I just don't think that's the right thing because no one is believing anything I say.
And I tried to talk to journalists before and everyone just wouldn't listen to me.
And I'm, and I just, you know, I don't think an op-ed is going to change that.
And Chris was like, you need like a proper journalist to investigate this.
Like someone who is a actual investigative journalist who is like old school OG journalist.
And I was like, cool, but I don't fucking know anyone like that.
I doubt anyone.
Because the problem I ran into, and I tried to do that before, is every journalist told me the same thing.
They said, we can't write about a film that no one can see.
That just doesn't make sense.
What are our readers going to go watch?
This doesn't make sense.
We can't write about this film.
And so Chris said he knew a handful of people and he said, but there's one guy I think would be probably the best to tell this story because he is very just the facts.
He's not an opinion writer.
He's a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist.
And I was very hesitant and I kind of said like, well, I'll just see what he says, you know, maybe I'll do it, maybe I won't.
So Chris introduced us and I sent him a link to the film and then he didn't watch it.
I sent him another link to the film, and he didn't watch it, because there's a time expiration on the links.
And then I sent him a third one, and if I remember correctly, I said something like, you know... Because I felt like when I sent him the third link to the film... You're a stalker.
Yeah, I was like, I feel like that really geeky girl in high school that keeps on asking out the captain of the football team, like at some point this is going to get fucking awkward.
So he finally watched it, and then I think he went online and looked at all the vitriol against the film, and then he kind of contacted me.
His first sentence was like, I don't understand this.
And so he jumped on a call, and I gave him a little bit of background.
And he said, I really want to do a story on this.
I really want to dive into this.
This is very interesting to me.
And I said, I'm not sure I want to do this.
And then I basically said, I need to know who you are as a person.
And so I did the thing that I let my subjects do to me.
I said, I need to interview you.
And looking back now I feel like a complete asshole because I had no idea who Michael Powell was and I didn't know his like esteemed like it's basically like saying like you don't trust Woodward and Bernstein or Walter Cronkite like I was just like I don't know what the fuck you are you could be another journalist gonna fuck me over.
So yeah I interviewed him and I was like you know.
Why did you get into journalism?
And what did you what do you think about XYZ?
And we talked to him for a really long time.
And then he just he's just a real stand up dude.
He is like, I mean, I know a lot of people have issues with the times and I think there's reporters over there that are questionable, but he's definitely one of the good ones.
And he He interviewed me.
He flew out to California and he interviewed me for I think a total of 18 hours.
Because obviously this is a very long story.
And every time I said something, he was like, do you have proof of that?
And it was very thorough.
Like he wanted the receipts.
Like he was like, I'm not going to write anything that I can't prove.
And so, yeah, talked for like 18 hours, and then he like went away.
And that was in May.
And he just took a really deep dive into this.
And I think they published it in late September.
So he's working on this for a pretty long time.
And that's why a lot of people like, oh, I think they're acting like he just met me yesterday and wrote this.
But it was like, it's pretty involved.
Yeah.
So he's a solid dude.
Yeah.
And so you got lucky there.
I recommend people read that article.
And that's the first thing I saw about this controversy.
But then it links to Abigail Disney's apology letter, which originally was an email she sent privately to a bunch of people who were aggrieved or
Pretending to be aggrieved by your film and then it then she made it public at a certain point and it is I see why she's getting attacked because You know, it's it's a fairly abject capitulation to the mob Especially given what your film is.
I mean, this is just this is not even a close call, right?
I mean, it's just like I could imagine some film that Where, in response to blowback, her letter could be appropriate, right?
But she has just caved so fully in the face of what is, upon analysis, a completely dishonest campaign against your film.
And in addition to that, she's essentially vowed to fund the projects of the people who, you know, cancelled you.
Attack the film, yeah.
That's what I, last time I heard that's what she was doing.
Yeah, it's just, so that part's amazing.
So, and it's, you know, in her case, it's not, I don't know if she's a billionaire, but she's... She's at least a couple hundred millionaires, for sure.
She's wealthy, you know, she's a Disney heir and she's spoken about that.
And so, if that kind of wealth doesn't give you courage, right?
I mean, it's like she's not in the position you were in where getting besmirched in one way or the other stands a chance of having catastrophic financial impact on you, right?
Yeah.
I mean, I put her in the same category as like Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, where it's They will definitely be hurt by being cancelled, but they're not going to be homeless.
I live in the Bay Area now, and I just haven't been able to get work since Sundance.
And the Bay Area is a very expensive place to live, so I'll be moving in January, because I just can't afford to live here anymore, unfortunately.
I really love it here, but if I can't work, I can't live in this expensive place, so yeah.
Well, so I want to talk about that because these are the consequences of being... A normal person and being an army?
Yeah, hurled from the ramparts of the Sundance Film Festival, right?
In another universe, your film went to Sundance and it may have even won the top prize there, right?
Yeah.
Certainly, that was possible.
But it's just amazing to have been a Sundance selection, and you were almost guaranteed to have your film distributed after Sundance.
Yeah.
I remember talking to our PR guy at the time, and he watched the film, and he said, because he's one of the top PR guys for documentaries, and he does all the Oscar campaigns, and he basically said, I've watched all the films at Sundance because everyone's trying to get him to rep their film.
He only takes on a handful of them.
I watched all the film at Sundance and yours was the one that actually has just stuck with me.
I still think about it now.
And he was talking about like, you know, this is going to be an Oscar film.
We're going to do an Oscar campaign for this film.
And it's that kind of like, It's the kind of film that you watch, and it just sticks with you, which is the kind of film that usually gets at least shortlisted or nominated for an Oscar.
At the time, I was like, this will never get nominated for an Oscar because I'm sure there's a lot of people who aren't going to like this film.
But again, from the right, it was funny because when that same guy, who was our PR guy, about Four days after the announcement at Sundance, when the initial vitriol started, he called me and he said, I think you should pull the film out of Sundance.
And this is the very, very, very beginning.
And I was so taken aback by this.
I was like, what are you talking about?
This is the golden ticket.
We can get through this.
And he was like, my advice for you is to pull the film from Sundance.
And at the time, I just thought like, like, you're my PR guy, your job is to help me handle this.
And then months later, I talked to him, because obviously hindsight is 20-20.
And I was like, what did you know then that I did not know?
Because I didn't know it was going to get this bad.
And he said something to me, he said, these last couple years, I've worked on some films where they were Directors who weren't of the community that was the film was about and I've seen them be attacked and it's relentless and I just didn't want to do it again.
He worked on a film I guess and an activist group went after that film just for the whole entire year was on the film festival circuit and he's just like I didn't I didn't want to do that again.
It's fucking exhausting.
He's like and your film.
Really did change the industry to where the conversations that I'm having now is both film festivals and buyers are very hesitant to take films that were directed by people not from that community because of the jihad rehab effect is what he kind of termed it as and I was like, wow, that's pretty alarming.
But yeah.
Yeah, that is what's so insidious about this.
It's just... I mean, there are people walking around thinking that cancellation really isn't a thing, right?
That it's always... I was one of those people.
I feel like shit now because I definitely heard people talking about... Before this, I heard people talking about cancellation.
And I, having not been through it, I was just like, Oh, like some people are mean to you on Twitter, you know, growth, thicken your skin.
And I only thought that cancellation happened to famous people.
Cause that's the only people I heard about, right?
I heard about Joe Rogan.
I heard about Dave Chappelle, you know, Louis CK and all that kind of stuff.
And, uh, I did not know.
I didn't know what it was in its entirety.
And I didn't know how devastating it is if you're a working class person, right?
Like if you don't have a war chest, if you don't, if you cannot hire the PR team and do all this, like it's impossible to fight.
Like everyone was just like, why don't you put your story out there?
Why don't you tell your side?
I'm like, I've been trying.
For fucking months, but no journalist will talk to me.
And no one will publish anything.
And unless you have the kind of war chest where you can hire a crisis PR team and lawyers and whatnot, you can do like so for example, there was a in initially there was a An article in Documentary Magazine that was written by one of the people attacking the film and there was, I counted, there was 42 factual errors in it.
And I send that to our PR person at the time and they're like, you cannot, cannot put all these in the request to change because basically they would have to change the whole entire article.
So like pick the 10 most egregious things and we'll send them the stuff to like either retract it or correct it.
And one of the lines in the article was, and I quote, the men professed their innocence throughout the entire film.
And I was like, dude, if you watch the first two minutes of the film, you know, that's not true.
And because you have Khaled talking about building bombs for Al-Qaeda and teaching people how to make bombs.
And so we wrote a documentary magazine to correct it, and they didn't.
And it's still in there today.
And so we made them aware of this factual inaccuracy.
And to me, that said one of two things.
The writer either didn't see the film or pretended they did, or they did see the film.
And again, they're not a journalist, they're just activists, and they're trying to paint a picture of the film that's not true.
And the thing that was really harmful is those publications are taken at face value with their facts.
And so when you have a publication like that, writing about your film in that way, I think that was one of the huge things that was the nail in the coffin of this film to where you have false things being written about the film, putting out on blast, an email blast on these publications, and then you have an entire community come after you because they think that you've made a film that is one thing when it's actually not.
And so fast forward a couple of months, we had an article done in The Guardian about us that was completely false.
And like they said, you know, the men's lives were in danger and that I had done all this really unethical stuff, Like they said in the article that I hadn't contacted their lawyers.
First of all, they don't have lawyers while they're in Saudi Arabia, but I actually did reach out to all three of the men's lawyers.
And I heard back from two.
I had long conversations with two of them, but there was always really inaccurate factual things I made.
I told The Guardian, like, listen, I'd really like to have a conversation with you, the journalist and the editor-in-chief, because you're writing things that aren't true.
And I'd like to give you this interview so you get all the facts.
And the Guardian said no.
Literally, they said, we want you to answer, in writing, these six questions.
We're not going to give you the interview, and if you don't answer these six questions within 24 hours, this is the paragraph we're going to put out.
Was the organization CAGE at all involved in engineering that?
Yeah, there's two people attacking the film.
One is a group of a handful of... Oh, I didn't say this.
I should have said this before, but later I found out through Sundance That the people who were initially attacking the film, the there was like six Muslim filmmakers, and they had written letters to Sundance kind of like pushing them to pull the film from the festival.
Those people were also people who had applied to Sundance and not gotten in.
And so there was a little bit of that going on.
And it was like, you know, they think I'm sure the thought was like, and I shouldn't say I'm sure their thought was because there's people tweeted this.
Basically saying, like, how dare Sundance program this person's film when my film as a Muslim would be way better to be programmed there.
So I think there's... But that's related to Cage or that's related to... So, yeah, the other group is Cage.
So I didn't know anything about Cage.
I never heard of Cage before this whole entire thing.
Oh, Cage.
Cage has covered itself in glory.
They were, I mean, they're essentially...
a kind of stealth Islamist organization, I mean, pretending to be a Muslim civil rights organization, but they have said, basically, they keep alleging that, you know, every time a jihadist, a local jihadist in the UK becomes prominent in the news, the cause of that person's
derangement is how they have, just what sort of mistreatment they've received at the hands of British society or the British government, right?
So you have like, you know, Jihadi John, the poster boy for ISIS for a while, who was, you know, beheading Westerners in orange jumpsuits.
He was British and, you know, speaking with an English accent and I think it was the head of Cage, or certainly somebody from Cage at the time, was on television talking about what a wonderful person this person actually was.
And the only reason why he was standing in the desert in Syria or Iraq, wherever he was, was because he had been so mistreated by the British, the odious and Islamophobic British government.
And so, yeah, so these are the people who are Now, condemning any film that even discusses the phenomenon of jihadism, however sympathetically, as your film does.
I think the way it was described to me, so I didn't know about Cage at all before this, and when they initially started going after the film, I couldn't understand it because I was like, why would a group of ex-Guantanamo detainees not be in full support of this film?
Because it really does not make Guantanamo look great.
In fact, my one friend told me, They're like, if any film can get Guantanamo shut down, it's this one.
So I didn't understand it first.
And I started doing research on them.
And then part of that research was, I mean, I'd sent the film to a lot of experts like Lawrence Wright, and people who are really, really know this subject quite well.
My understanding after talking to them and doing a deep dive on the internet was, Cage is pushing a narrative that basically says everyone in Guantanamo is completely innocent.
They never did anything wrong, and they are completely just normal people who were just caught up in this.
And that is true for some people.
There are definitely people who were sent to Guantanamo who were just wrong place, wrong time, and completely got fucked over by everything.
But there are also people who weren't.
And one of the things when I was interviewing all these guys, I did speak to people in Saudi Arabia who were, in my opinion, from talking to them, wrong place, wrong time.
But I specifically chose people in my film who, from their own volition, talk about their involvement with these organizations.
And so it was told to me that Cage kind of pushes this narrative, right, that's saying everyone in Guantanamo is completely innocent and never did anything wrong.
And it's true, like no one in Guantanamo has actually been convicted.
I think that's pretty common knowledge.
But then he said that any kind of narrative, any book or movie that challenges that narrative, they attack ferociously.
And he said, what's so damning about your film is all on all these other documentaries and whatnot, you had people who were experts talking about, you know, these people in Guantanamo, but your film, it's kind of from the horse's mouth, these from men from their own, like, mouth tell you what they did.
And so it's really hard to argue that.
And so how they're kind of, like shaping the narrative, they're saying, Oh, these men were forced to say that, or like, they didn't really do anything, they're just being forced to To confess to these things and and so so yeah, so cage kind of came they went really hard in the paint against the film They did a lot of very shady things including like putting out lies about the film and about how the film was made and about the people in the film and It's it's been very successful It's a bit been very successful campaign.
So when I talked about like, I think right now, you know, the, the criticism of the film has evolved over its over a course of time.
And right now it's all about like, the men are in danger because of the film.
Now the film premiered in January.
It's now October.
I've been in contact with the guys.
Throughout that entire time, I literally just got a message from one of them the other day, yesterday.
And I don't know if you know about the Saudi government, but if the Saudi government was going to do something, they wouldn't have waited nine months to do it.
And also, these men are actually in a different class than your normal Saudi citizen.
So what I mean by that is when they're released from Guantanamo, My understanding from talking to a lot of people who deal in this area and who are Guantanamo experts are, if the men who are released from Guantanamo are sent to third-party nations, meaning they're countries that are not their own, there are some stipulations that have to be agreed to contractually between those two governments.
One is, you have to have a way to monitor these people, right?
We just don't want to send them away and then release them back into the wild and let them do whatever they want and not know about it.
The second thing is, they have to have a way to reintegrate them back into society, whatever that is, if that's counseling, if that's job opportunities, or whatever form that takes.
And the third thing is that country has to promise not to torture or kill these people once they're handed over.
Because it would be a really bad look if we just handed someone over to, let's say, Saudi Arabia, and then they just beheaded them the next day.
It wouldn't look good on us.
So these guys are actually given a little bit more protection than your average citizen because they're not really allowed to torture or kill them contractually.
I'm not saying that that's not possible, but it's just something that is actually part of the agreement of taking these men in.
So what are the options for the film going forward?
You've hit several brick walls, but what can you do to get this film distributed?
One option presents itself.
You mentioned Louis C.K.
at one point, and he's quite famously rebooted his career by simply releasing his material on his own website, right?
a sufficient platform from which to do that.
But you're now on this podcast.
I know people.
You, I'm sure, know other people.
I know, Sam, I'm a nobody.
I know a handful of people.
Well, there's some scenario where you could get just a grassroots response by just releasing this film for...
You could sell it from a website for $9.99 and some considerable number of people would download it.
That's one way to distribute it without relying on a distributor.
And there's everything from that to eventually getting it on Netflix or some other platform by just persuading the people who need to be persuaded that they should take the film.
What doors are ajar for you at the moment?
Yeah, I think when the New York Times came out, my initial hope was that this story being on the front page of the biggest newspaper in the world, that that would maybe give some of the distributors like Netflix or Hulu or HBO, that would maybe give them the courage they need to maybe not buy the film, but at least give it a Fair shake or, you know, a second look or first look if they didn't see it already at Sundance.
Unfortunately, that has not happened.
And that's been pretty devastating because I because when you're talking about because the second option is like, OK, if if a traditional distributor with those kind of resources is not going to pick up your film, then the backup plan would be self-distribution.
And I have since talked to some people in the film industry who've done self-distribution.
And they all kind of said the same thing.
They said that you need a team to do it.
It's quite involved.
It takes a couple months to pull off.
And you also need resources.
So for example, one of my friends that I talked to, he said, if you're doing self-distribution, the first step and the most important step and what's going to bring the most people to your film is going to be having a badass trailer, which costs anything between $12,000 and $25,000 to get made.
And then you're going to have to have a poster and you have to hire a legal team to basically put all these contracts together when you're doing self-distribution.
And then it's it's it's quite involved with both people and resources.
And it's definitely been done before by a lot of people self-distribute, but it's not something that's cheap.
And when I ask when I ask some people just the numbers that they were giving me for like the trailers could be twenty five thousand dollars, the posters a couple thousand dollars.
And so that is all quite prohibitive to me because I don't have Disney money.
I don't have a war chest that I could just self-distribute this and pay for all that myself, especially with all the credit card debt that I've managed to rack up.
But I also feel like, for me, this film is so important that it needs to get out there.
So I'm still kind of trying.
So like the other day, I made a GoFundMe page for the film to try to raise money for a trailer and a poster and just doing all this stuff because I do think that the film has had such a Impact on people.
So that's one thing I'm like, I haven't given up.
I'm still chipping away at it.
Like, so for example, when a film gets into Sundance, because it's considered the It Film Festival, it gets into almost invited to just loads of other ones.
And to Oscar qualify a film, you need to do one of two things.
You need to win an award at a film festival, which we were probably going to do because most films that get into Sundance wind up winning awards at some festival.
And so they're automatically qualified to be considered for the Oscars.
The other way to do it is to four wall it, which costs a lot of money.
It's basically you have to play the film and rent it, rent a theater out for a week in one of, I think it's like four or five cities.
And he has to play the entire week at that's in that theater has to play three times a day.
And that could be anywhere from like 15 to $20,000, which again, I don't have, but for me, it was imperative to Oscar qualify the film because I hate Rewarding bad behavior.
And I hate bullies.
And I didn't want to cede any ground to these people who had taken away the film's festival run, i.e.
then it's Oscar qualifying chances.
So I was able to find a theater in LA, who I think took pity on me.
And it's like some obscure place, like I think Glendale or something.
And they agreed to rent me the theater for a week for $4,000.
So I was able to raise that money to do that, to Oscar qualify it.
So I'm chipping away at this, but it's like, what's that triad?
It's like cheap, fast, good, pick two.
And so to self-distribute a film, and you're talking about Oscar qualifying it, when you're talking about posters, when you're talking about hiring lawyers, when you're talking about building a website, All of these things take time and resources and bodies.
And right now, pretty much everyone's left the project, and it's just me.
So like the other day, I made the website for the film, and then the other day I made a GoFundMe page to try to start raising money to... Where is the GoFundMe page?
I just want to look at that.
Yeah, if you go to my website, gheadrehab.com, and you click Donate, it then takes you to the GoFundMe page.
And we have $3,000 so far, which is that's enough for a post.
We can get a poster made basically is what we're at.
So we're chipping away.
We can hire someone to design a poster for the film.
And then, so here I have like what happened to the, like a little bit about the film, a LinkedIn New York Times article.
And then I have my director statement, which is why I made the film, which I wasn't really sure I wanted to put up there.
Cause it's pretty personal, but I was like, if I'm asking people for money, I should probably tell them who I am.
Because it literally is, Sam, it's just me.
I literally taught myself how to build a website a couple weeks ago.
Let's just assume those problems could go away quickly, then what do you want to do?
Are there any reasons not to self-distribute if all of the hassle can be removed?
The only big thing about self-distribution not being Louis C.K., he has a built-in audience that will religiously buy his stuff and view it, as does Andrew Schultz, who has quite a big following now.
No one's ever fucking heard of me.
I have zero following other than my uncles and aunts.
I'm sure they donate to the GoFundMe page.
You're never going to get as many eyeballs on a film that's self-distributed, unless you're like the kind of Louis C.K.
name, and that's the one downside.
And does it prevent later distribution on Netflix or some other platform?
I mean, is there any negativity there?
Yeah, so basically, the GoFundMe page I made was to be able to self-distribute the film to at least a A couple of cities and theaters because twofold.
Number one, when I was talking about Oscar qualifying the film, you have to Oscar qualify the film and run it in a theater before you put it online.
If you put online before you put it in the theater, then it disqualifies it for the Oscars.
That's one.
Which I'm doing in this month anyway.
So this month it's going to play for a week in Glendale.
Two is I wanted to be able to have people go see the film for themselves in a way that I could do.
Building a website and putting all that stuff up makes it more accessible.
But being able to just put it in theaters, and if you still keep, and let's say it does really well in theaters, and you still keep the streaming and broadcast rights, then maybe a distributor like Netflix is like, oh shit, a lot of people are seeing this.
Maybe we do want it on our site.
And so to kind of keep that, hold that close to the chest, strategically, that's what I was thinking.
But seeing the people's reaction to the New York Times, the kind of silence that has come from the distributors made me lose... I'm starting to lose faith that that could be turned around.
But I don't know.
I think for me, the reason why I'm going to self distribute now is because I think that's the only way at this point to get out there unless something changes.
But if this goes into theaters, if I'm able to like, let's say play it in like five or 10 cities, and it does really well, then typically, the eyes and the ears of the bigger distributors where it could get a bigger audience will perk up.
But yeah, I mean, I just my goal with this film is to twofold number one to get my investors back their money.
And two, more importantly for me, though, is to have as many people see it as possible.
And the reason why I'm still kind of holding out for like a Netflix or HBO to take it is because I know it's going to 10, 100 times more people will see it on Netflix than if I have it on my own website.
Unfortunately.
Okay, well, I really do want to help you.
It's still not totally clear how I should go about doing that, but because you have this GoFundMe page and this process has started, a very clear way I can help you is just to give you money there, which I'm going to do, and I'm going to advocate that my audience do likewise if they have found this conversation compelling.
I'm already kind of like really humbled that you're even talking to me, because I know the people that you talk to on your podcasts are really well-known, very respected people in their fields, and I feel like I'm like a street urchin compared to them.
So just coming on here and talking to you has been a really very humbling experience.
And so yeah, thank you for that.
That's really touching.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you're obviously an extraordinary person, but I didn't quite know that until we had this conversation.
But there's the film itself and the extraordinary injustice of its cancellation, and there's just so much about this situation that reveals what is wrong in our culture at the moment.
I mean, there's just the The failures of courage, great and small.
The righteous dishonesty that is being aimed at you.
And you've got people changing movie reviews that were once effusive and now no longer are.
You've got supporters who are defecting and giving no rational account of what has changed to explain their behavior.
It is the whole shebang in microcosm that people have been worrying about for years now.
Can I say something about that?
About the worrying for years thing?
I did see some of this, a little bit of this, in the broadcast world and in the studio world when it came to advertisers being skittish about certain topics.
And one of the reasons why I operate in the independent space is because I believed that we were above that and immune to it because just the fact that we're independent and like Sundance has garnished a reputation for playing films that are hard and difficult and controversial and platforming those films just for the for the main reason that they would never get made in a studio environment and And so for me, I mean, Sundance has been around for decades.
And for Sundance to apologize for this film, not once, but twice.
Yeah.
It's extraordinary.
It's a kind of a come to Jesus moment for me.
To be honest, because they are the premier institution in my little world, my fishbowl of independent documentary films.
And people like Abigail Disney are leaders in that world.
And there's been films that come before me that have been done by filmmakers who have felt the pressure and apologized.
And kind of did the mea culpa and moved on and some of them should have apologized and some of them definitely shouldn't have, but it was always perceived that that's what you do.
And I didn't realize I think the extent of it until I felt it.
And then I think for me, Cause I had a lot of people on my team pressuring me to apologize.
And when I asked them, what am I apologizing for?
They said, it didn't matter, but you need to show some kind of apology and humility.
Otherwise they're just going to keep on coming after you.
And at that time I was just like, listen, I can, When you're a firefighter and you arrive on scene, you don't just run into the building.
You kind of have to assess first.
And at the time, I was trying to gather information because what was happening completely didn't make sense to me because of all the screenings we'd done before the festival.
And so originally, I didn't apologize because I was trying to understand and grasp what was happening.
And then when I kind of did really understand it, I thought, no.
Like, I had sent my film to Lawrence Wright and Ali Soufan.
I had screened my film post-Sundance with Muslim people, leaders in the community in the Bay Area.
I screened it with a Yemeni student union, and they all had pretty positive reactions to it.
So I was like, I don't think I've done anything wrong here.
Because I did vet it post-Sundance, because when you got that kind of reaction, I just thought, I have to do my due diligence.
Maybe I did miss something.
And it was the same kind of reactions we got pre-Sundance.
And so When it came down to it, it's like, okay, you took my film's premiere away from me, you took the film's trajectory away from me, you took my reputation and my name and my career away from me.
Like, fuck, am I going to give you my integrity, the one thing I have left, and apologize for this film, and basically reinforce the lies you're telling about this film.
And it literally was The reason why I didn't apologize is because after I did my due diligence, it was the only thing I had left.
I didn't have money.
I didn't have my reputation.
I didn't have my career.
The only thing I had was my integrity.
And for me, it was worth holding on to for that.
And I think someone told me, you know, about like, all these big institutions like Sundance, and Abigail Disney, kind of bending the knee to this angry mob, and to the pressure.
And That then it falls on like I hate the fact that I'm the first one in my industry not to apologize.
Like it should not be a first time feature filmmaker that is doing this.
It's really hard.
I don't have the resources.
I don't have the track record.
I don't have the kind of like cool I am like the least powerful person in my industry and least amount of influence, and I hate the fact that other people before me who had way more resources and way more power could have done this before me and hopefully set the groundwork for other people to do it.
Unfortunately, it falls on me, and I think I'm reminded of, like, I heard this somewhere, and they said, the only thing more dangerous than a man with limitless resources and more money than God is a man with nothing to lose.
Well, at this point, I got fucking nothing to lose.
So I guess I'm like, I'm not apologizing.
What are you gonna take from me?
I'm literally moving out of my house in a couple months because I can no longer afford it.
So I just I don't want this to be like a woe is me thing.
Because I do think the film for me is something I'm super proud of people who worked on it super proud of and I want to pay those people back and also those people's careers, like the animation in the film.
I mean, we didn't talk about that, but it's fucking awesome.
Yeah.
Like if you, if you watch other documentaries, they there's, they don't have, I mean, it's a really good animation and all the animators in the film are women.
We, we didn't have a lot of resources.
So my co-producer literally went on Instagram and I said, my only stipulation is I want all female animators.
I don't care where they're at or what the background is, but I really wanted all female animators because our production team in the field had to be all male because of just the, there were certain things that I couldn't shoot on my own.
Like, so for example, the wedding that you saw, wedding, the wedding scene, the film weddings in Saudi Arabia are segregated.
So I wasn't allowed to film the wedding.
So I had to be in the parking lot in a car.
With a remote director's monitor and a walkie-talkie and directing the cinematographer and the sound guy remotely on like who to film and who to zoom into.
And so because we had to have an all-male production team, it was imperative to me to have more females involved in post.
And so we had all, I think we had six female animators, two were from, they had, they just started this animation company in Brazil called Hilda Motion.
And it was the one year of their opening their company, these two girls from Brazil, was going to be the premiere at Sundance.
And it was going to launch their company and launch their career.
And they were so excited about it.
And they were just like, you can't believe that we did an animation piece that's going to be a film at Sundance.
And it was going to, you know, launch their business because it's really good animation there.
And there was another woman who she's a trans woman in London who does animation on the side.
And she did the the the line animation.
And all these people, there was one of my favorite stories about the animators, is there was one woman that I interviewed, and then months later, we were talking after the animation, and she did Nodder's animation, the one that's kind of like charcoal hand-drawn type stuff.
And when I interviewed her, she made it seem like she'd been in the industry for a while, but I was mostly sold on her pitch and her She got the characters.
So for me, it was more important that they understood the psychology of the characters and they were able to express that visually than any kind of awards they won.
And so, later on, after the film was done, she was like, Meg, I have a confession to make.
And I'm like, yeah?
I was like, do you remember when I did the interview and I was telling you like, you know, how I was a professional animator and did it?
I was like, yeah.
I was like, okay.
And she's like, well, you remember that time when you were trying to get a hold of me and you couldn't, it took me a long time to get back to you?
I'm like, yeah.
She goes, well, it's because I'm actually still in school and I had finals week and she's like, I've actually, this is my first paid gig.
I'm like, I don't fucking care dude, it was great.
I mean, so it was, the moral of the story is like, it was a lot of people's, I mean, I am not, I am not a big wig in our industry.
I'm not a gatekeeper, but I was a gatekeeper for this film.
And it was imperative to me to find other people that were also talented that just hadn't got the recognition yet.
And this was going to launch their careers as well.
And so one of the cinematographers I worked with, like literally I saw him the other day and he was saying like, you know, a bunch of the people who were on this film who've moved on, like the, you know, bigger wigs were, he was hanging around the other day and he's just like, you know, they all moved on to the other projects.
He's like, this was supposed to be my big shot.
Like this was like the, the one that was going to put me on the map.
And so I'm really sad because by going after me, I don't think they realize they really hurt other people who would be in the minority camp, right?
The like trans woman in the UK, the Brazilian couple in the couple in Brazil, the women in Brazil, and there was one in Poland as well.
And I think that like, All these people were at the nascent stage of their career.
They just hadn't got the acknowledgement yet, but they're all super fucking talented.
And it's just really sad to me because it's not how it's supposed to go.
This isn't how, you know, and I think for me, The hardest thing about this whole ordeal was this was a project that had no resources for what we actually pulled off and there was a lot of people who worked for free or deferred or for a huge discount and they followed me down this path because they believed in me and they believed in this project.
And what was absolutely devastating for me is when this all started kicking off and they were attacked on social media and they were bullied and harassed and like we had, like we had people who, so just to let you know, they took screenshots of our credits at Sundance and they reached out to a lot of the people at our credits and they threatened them and they like, let me see, I don't know if I have it here.
Yeah, so here we go.
So this is one of the emails I got from one of the people in our credits.
So basically, somehow they got her phone number and they called her and this is the email she said.
She's like, I'm sorry if my tone was harsh because she sent me an email before and she said my phone was blowing up with strangers asking me about the film, which I haven't seen yet, saying that I supported Islamophobia and endangered people.
I felt as blindsided as it sounds you are now.
And now I'm hearing people are being fired and resigning.
I'm so sorry about all of this for everyone.
I've been in firestorms before and you will get through this because you're talented, resilient, and not ill-intentioned.
I'd never survive in your industry.
That was just one person on our credits that they reached out to and basically on the phone was like, you're a racist and you're Islamophobic unless you take your name off the film.
And so she asked me to take her name with the film.
And we had like, I think it was like 35 people or something in total that reached out and said, please take my name with the film.
I literally got one just yesterday from a guy who's pretty high up in the industry.
And these people aren't in the credits.
They're in our special thanks.
And he said, take my name off your special thanks.
And it's not like we're giving you a credit that you didn't do.
It's just like, hey, thank you for working on our film.
And they reached out to all those people and harassed them and bullied them.
And then they contacted me and said, I don't want to be associated with this film anymore because it's just causing me too much of a headache.
And that's hard when you're like the captain of the ship, right?
And people trust you and they follow you down a path and then you lead them to the path where it devastates their career.
It caused them emotional strife.
Like I had one of my editors calling me on the phone and she was just like, she was distraught and she was crying.
And I felt like, like, I don't know if it's the firefighter in me, but they were like my team and I couldn't protect them.
And I felt responsible for that because like, they'd followed me down this line.
Shit, sorry, hold on.
They'd followed me down this line, this path in this film because they believed in me and they trusted me and because of that, their lives were kind of blown up too.
So that was the worst part, feeling responsible for other people's For other people like that translator we attacked or like my editor or my cinematographer or my you might the guy who did our score, he said he had five different people call him encouraging him to take his name off the film.
And he didn't he asked he asked each one of them what they thought of the film.
He said none of them had seen the film.
Every single person that called him had not seen the film.
So it's just been this total avalanche and wave of It's like I said before, I didn't understand what cancellation really was until I went through this process.
And that's why I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy, the people attacking the film, I wouldn't wish this on them.
I wouldn't I no one deserves this.
And I think that the documentary field is filled with a lot of really good intentioned people.
And I think that it's also really easy to weaponize empathy when you're when you're in that kind of field.
And I'm sure there are people out there who saw the film and genuinely didn't like it.
And that's fine.
And I'm open to criticism.
But there's a difference between criticism and bullying.
Between criticism and harassment and threatening lawsuits and things like that.
So I'm hoping that if I can turn this around, That it will kind of be a moment in my industry where we can take a step back and say, hey, we need to kind of reevaluate how we're dealing with all this.
And the knock on effect is if you have a film festival as powerful as Sundance capitulating, then eventually what's going to happen is people are only going to program safe films.
Which don't talk about the issues and don't talk about the stuff that's actually hard to talk about, which we need to do.
And that's why we all operate in this independent space, because we're able to... I don't know, have you ever seen that film, Active Killing?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Brilliant film.
Brilliant, yeah.
In fact, I had the director on the podcast.
Yeah, he's so sweet.
He's such a nice man.
But that film would never have gotten made in a studio.
No fucking way.
But the great thing about the independent space it used to be that their people were realized that this was the space where you made challenging work so you can have those difficult discussions.
But if if this space now has been infected with this kind of propensity to play it safe and to avoid conflict.
Then there's no other space for it.
There's no other plan C. This was the space where films like that got made and got platformed.
And without that, I'm very fearful of moving where my industry is headed.
Yeah.
The avoidance of controversy is just a disaster for honest inquiry and entertainment.
And we all make mistakes.
And then when you do actually make a mistake, and it's brought to your attention, you should you sure shit should apologize and do it in a very genuine way.
And for me, that's face to face.
For me, that's in person.
It's not performative.
And the fact that there I've seen other filmmakers apologize, and I see the work they're apologizing for, and I just it baffles me.
But I understand.
I understand why now because the Well, they just want to make it stop.
You want to get your life back and, as you say, your reputation back.
But you certainly have your integrity and your intentions are so obvious and obviously good.
Let's see if we can get the other stuff back because what's happened to you here is deeply unfair and I want to help.
I want my audience to help.
And you and I will stay connected and just let me know what happens.
One thing that's potentially confusing is you've changed the name of the film in the meantime.
It's now called The Unredacted, but the website is Jihad Rehab, and that's not going to change.
Yeah, the website's jihadrehab.com.
If you put in The Unredacted Film, I think it will still take you there, but there's a lot of websites with The Unredacted in it, so we didn't want there to be confusion.
But the title, yes, the title is The Unredacted, but it's jihadrehab.com.
Yeah, so jihadrehab.com.
Donate, and I hope people do, because we should help you.
Meg, thanks for your time, and please keep your chin up.
It's not over.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
And thank you for, I don't know how long we've been talking, but it's been a while.
It's been a joy to have this long overdue conversation with you.
