Filming "Paradise" amid hell of the West Bank

Hany Abu-Assad has been based in Amsterdam for the past two decades, but he keeps going back home to Nazareth to make movies.

The latest and most acclaimed of his pictures, "Paradise Now," won prizes at European festivals earlier this year for its compelling portrait of a pair of suicide bombers from Nablus who plan to strike Tel Aviv. It opens today for a regular run.

"Nablus is like a big jail," said Abu-Assad during a Seattle visit. "It can make you crazy and aggressive. The Israeli army behaves a little bit better in other places, but they're quite harsh to people in Nablus."

Filming in Nablus became so difficult that the filmmaker, his cast and crew were forced to move to Nazareth to complete the picture. New sets were built to match the sets in Nablus, and new technicians were hired when half a dozen European crew members left the movie. Abu-Assad felt he had to relocate for the safety of everyone involved.

"The violence was escalating every day, especially the missile attacks," he said. "Too many people were in danger. Three people died in an explosion that was quite close to us."

When the location manager on the film was kidnapped, Abu-Assad appealed to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to help free him. In the summer of 2004, just months before he died, Arafat arranged for the location manager's release, and the filmmakers were able to get on with their work.

There also was a misunderstanding about the way the script portrays the Palestinians. Some Palestinians were so afraid the film was against them that they showed up with guns on the set. Abu-Assad claims his intention was always to try to comprehend the phenomenon of suicide bombing, and to dramatize what would cause such extreme behavior.

"I had the idea before Sept. 11 and the intifada," said Abu-Assad, who collaborated on the script with Bero Beyer. "The first script was finished in 1999, but it was created completely out of our imaginations. We needed to do research. We found an enormous amount of material that suggested that every suicide bomber has a different story. The final script turned out to be very different."

Although the movie has many humorous touches, including an episode about the difficulty of removing sticky adhesive from a would-be bomber (it's reminiscent of the chest-hair-ripping scene in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin"), Abu-Assad estimates that 60 percent of the funny stuff was left on the cutting-room floor.

"The movie is really a tragedy," he said. "You can go too far with humor. You can make yourself ridiculous."

To suggest the emotions he wanted to evoke, Abu-Assad hired as his cameraman Antoine Heberle, whose cinematography credits include "Under the Sand," François Ozon's disturbing 2000 drama about a widow who refuses to accept her husband's death.

"Watching that film, you felt this bit of unknown in the pit of your stomach," he said. "It was something mysterious inside. I wanted to capture that sense of fear. There is no suspense in daily life, but you can create it on film."

Originally an airplane engineer, Abu-Assad said he'll eventually move back home to Nazareth. He was 19 when he moved to Holland, got his engineering diploma at 26, then quit at 28 when he decided to become a filmmaker. He feels that art and engineering are not that far apart, though there are significant differences.

"You need imagination and creativity to build planes, but at the end you can't take risks," he said. "You have to be secure. But in art there's always a risk, and you can't guarantee results. Art can leave you with bad reviews and half a year of depression."

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com