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Omar
Naim’s Final Cut is first thrust at the big
time US-based Lebanese film-maker scores star cast
and acclaimed production team with major Hollywood
studio.
SAN
FRANCISCO:
How does one top writing and selling an imaginative
screenplay to a major Hollywood studio, getting the
go-ahead to direct, landing megastar Robin Williams
in the lead, and securing an acclaimed cinematographer,
editor and technical team?
In Omar Naim’s case, you do it all before your
26th birthday.
The young Lebanese-born and now Los Angeles-based
wunderkind, who is currently in post-production, spent
most of July and August on location in Vancouver directing
his first feature-length film, The Final Cut, with
a stalwart cast including Williams, Academy Award
winner Mira Sorvino and James Caviezel.
“The experience was surreal at first,”
admits Naim, with an animated laugh. “It was
both frightening and exciting. It was the biggest
thing I had done in my life. But I quickly got all
that out of my mind and got down to the business of
making a movie.”
By all accounts, and despite his young age and relative
inexperience, he did it effectively.
“All actors are ultimately young and like to
play; that’s why they’re actors,”
Naim jokes. “But you learn very quickly that
age doesn’t matter, what does is to prove your
competence.”
While tales from Hollywood suggest movie sets can
be anything but agreeable, with egos and budgets often
escalating out of control, Naim says filming The Final
Cut was remarkably incident-free.
“The 35-day shoot,” he says with a hint
of disbelief, “was so harmonious; it was really
very organized and there were no problems whatsoever.”
For anyone who has met or spoken to Naim, none of
this comes as a surprise. His confidence and knowledge
belie his age. Remarkably focused, lucid and poised,
the young director showed signs of independence and
determination before he turned 10. His passions, vision
and even obsessive tendencies, he admits, were shaped
largely by his upbringing and the great works of literature,
theater and film to which he was exposed.
Naim remembers growing up surrounded by artists, musicians
and writers. His parents were both in theater and
film, his mother is celebrated Lebanese actress and
playwright Nidal al-Ashqar.
“My brother and I were constantly in the presence
of culture,” recalls Naim, whose brother is
now a Paris-based writer and musician.
Naim’s first film-going experience came when
he turned 14, and he was hooked. For him, these big
screen productions brought together the possibility
of encouraging two abilities he had begun to nurture:
writing and visuals. And, like everything else that
captured his attention, Naim became obsessed, immersing
himself wholly in films, learning and soaking up everything
there was to know. But, instead of pursing genres,
as most novices would tend to, he fell in love with
directors like Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Oliver
Stone and Spike Lee.
“Then I went to college and discovered and fell
in love with so many others who at the time were relatively
obscure, like Atom Egoyan and Emir Kusturica,”
he says. “I discovered film on my own but my
parents were … supportive. They only warned
me of the hard work ahead.”
Thanks to the Fares Foundation, Naim studied film
at Emerson College in Boston. During four years there,
the young director learned everything there was to
know about writing and being behind a camera. He transformed
that knowledge into a number of short films, including
his 1999 thesis, a 28-minute documentary called Grand
Theater: A Tale of Beirut. In it, Naim turns his camera
on Beirut’s historic Grand Theater, which was
caught between the warring sides in a violent no-man’s
land, allowing it to fittingly serve as a metaphor
for the tragedy and absurdity of the civil war.
The film, which won awards at Emerson and played at
a number of international festivals provided something
that would ultimately be indispensable for the young
and increasingly determined director: experience:
“I learned everything making that film, from
inception to print.”
In fact, the idea for the screenplay for The Final
Cut was planted as Naim finished work on his documentary,
during the many, many hours of editing work required.
Shortly after, he got down to writing and about one
year later, had his first draft.
“The Final Cut is about editing and memory,”
he explains, adding that his Lebanese background also
inspired the film’s storyline, albeit indirectly.
“It’s the Lebanese notion of mass memory,
and people’s very subjective memory and view
of the world,” he explains. “This subsequently
dictates how society functions. I extrapolated that
into sci-fi theory.”
The first draft turned into a second, then a third
and finally Naim was ready to show it to his family
and friends. Then he rewrote it again.
A friend had told him about a project in France called
Equinox, to which screenwriters from all over the
world submit screenplays. Out of the hundreds the
group receives each year, 10 are selected and the
screenwriters are flown in to workshop with a group
of experts over a week, honing and fine-tuning each
script.
When Naim’s script was accepted, he knew he
had something. However, when he arrived in Bordeaux,
he also learned what he didn’t have: an agent
and a producer.
“I went there and my script was really well-received,”
says Naim. “But, I was the only one there without
an agent.”
The Equinox group proved very beneficial, however,
and put Naim in touch with his future agent and producer.
“I made it clear from the beginning that I was
not interested in anybody else directing,” says
Naim. “I was prepared; I came with lots of storyboards,
just like at university, and they knew I was prepared,
and that I knew what I was talking about.”
Once back in the US, they began shopping for a studio.
Lion’s Gate was interested so they went looking
for actors.
“When
Robin Williams expressed interest in the script, I
met with him,” recalls Naim, admitting that
the experience was daunting at first. “He loved
it; he told me what really struck him was the sense
of mortality, something he hadn’t explored as
an actor before.”
With Williams on board, everything was pushed forward
very quickly. Within weeks the rest of the cast and
crew were assembled and were on their way to Vancouver.
The Final Cut, which was shot almost entirely on 35mm
film, takes place in a society where a technology
called a Zoe implant exists. The Zoe is implanted
in babies while they are still in the womb and records
that person’s entire life, through his or her
eyes and memory. When the person dies, a cutter is
called in to take that tape of a person’s life
and somehow edit it down into a two-hour film. This
film is then played to reveal a person’s life,
albeit a very abridged version of it.
Williams plays Alan Hackman (no pun consciously intended),
one of the cutters, who specializes in arduous cases,
such as taking an essentially nefarious life and editing
the tape to highlight only the good, or most of the
good.
“So the film is really a character study, it’s
about Alan’s projects, his life and how he deals
with things,” says Naim. “The Final Cut,”
he adds, “bridges many genres.”
After that, maybe even before, Naim plans to start
transferring the many thoughts now permeating his
gray matter onto paper.
“I’ve got lots of ideas,” he says,
laughing as if he has been found out. “And,
as soon as editing is finished I’ll start writing
again.”
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