When the story about this wretched film Innocence of Muslims first broke, I wondered how anyone had managed to get together enough people who were nuts enough to participate in making such dreck and yet sane enough to run cameras, learn lines of dialogue, build sets, refrain from drooling, and all the other things that go into even the lowest-budget Grade Z film. I played leading roles in the no-budget amateur films Mega Rat and Dick's Last Shoot, so I know firsthand that making even the worst film takes at least enough brain cells that I would expect someone to be immune to such crude bigotry.
Thanks to Neil Gaiman relaying the story of actress Anna Gurji, we now know what happened: the cast and crew made a different movie, which was then dubbed. It's quite a story.
Neil Gaiman's Journal: A Letter from a Scared Actress.
My character Hilary was a young girl who is sold (against her own free will) by her parents to a tribe leader known as GEORGE. She is one of his (most likely, the youngest) brides in the movie.
The film was about a comet falling into a desert and different tribes in ancient Egypt fighting to acquire it for they deemed that the comet possessed some supernatural powers.
The movie that we were doing in Duarte was called “Desert Warrior” and it was a fictional adventure drama. The character GEORGE was a leader of one of those tribes fighting for the comet.
There was no mention EVER by anyone of MUHAMMAD and no mention of religion during the entire time I was on the set. I am hundred percent certain nobody in the cast and nobody in the US artistic side of the crew knew what was really planned for this “Desert Warrior”.
...
People who were tricked into believing that we were making an adventure drama about a comet falling into a desert did nothing but take part in a low budget indie feature film called the “Desert Warrior” that WAS about a comet falling into a desert and tribes in ancient Egypt fighting to acquire it.
It’s painful to see how our faces were used to create something so atrocious without us knowing anything about it at all. It’s painful to see people being offended with the movie that used our faces to deliver lines (it’s obvious the movie was dubbed) that we were never informed of, it is painful to see people getting killed for this same movie, it is painful to hear people blame us when we did nothing but perform our art in the fictional adventure movie that was about a comet falling into a desert and tribes in ancient Egypt fighting to acquire it, it’s painful to be thought to be someone else when you are a completely different person.
Like I explained to Inside Edition, I feel awful.. I did not do anything but I feel awful.