THC: In a movie like this, it seems like you've got to take measures to make sure that you're not offending anyone. What did you do to make sure that you were accurately portraying, historically and culturally, the actual situation in the Middle East?

DR: First of all I did a lot of research, and I also got a lot of Arab advisors to help me. We had a mullah serve as an advisor during the whole project. We had a lot of people advising that were in Iraq at the time of the Gulf War, refugees that came to America, and most of the scenes in the movie of cruelty and murder, even some of the conversations, did actually come from real life. Also, I got a lot of inspiration from news accounts of the conflict. The LA Times had day-by-day book on the war--their front page every day it went on, and some of the visuals come from that. Like they had a cow standing in the middle of a burning field, and a the Bart Simpson sticker on the hum-vee, those images are from the LA times.

HC: So you tried to tell a true story in this movie?

DR: Well, true in a way. It is a movie. It's more like a composite of different experiences that I heard and that intrigued me. For example, there's one scene, you might remember, where there's these two Iraqi hairdressers. And they say, "You know, we don't care if we do it in America or Iraq. We just want to cut hair." I met those people, they were refugee immigrants, and they auditioned for the movie. Unfortunately they were terrible actors, but I added the line.