{"id":10931,"date":"2012-02-15T16:07:35","date_gmt":"2012-02-15T16:07:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tat.reddaisytrading.co.uk\/index.php\/2012\/02\/15\/riz-ahmed-talks-black-gold\/"},"modified":"2012-02-15T16:07:35","modified_gmt":"2012-02-15T16:07:35","slug":"riz-ahmed-talks-black-gold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/2012\/02\/15\/riz-ahmed-talks-black-gold\/","title":{"rendered":"Riz Ahmed talks Black Gold"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Brit actor returns to the big screen in Arabian epic<\/h3>\n
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BRIT actor Riz Ahmed will be somewhat of a regular on the big screen in the coming months. <\/strong><\/div>\n

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The Arabian epic Black Gold<\/em>, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud will see the actor burst back onto our screens later this month. Just weeks later he will team up with Michael Winterbottom (the two worked together on the award-winning 2006 docudrama \u2018The Road to Guantanamo\u2019) for Trishna<\/em>, a modern re-working of Thomas Hardy\u2019s Tess of the d\u2019Ubervilles, while a May release of singer Plan B\u2019s directorial debut ILL Manors<\/em> will round off a busy three months. <\/div>\n

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But first up is Black Gold<\/em> \u2013 a big-budget, epic film about the birth of the Middle Eastern oil industry. Renowned Tunisian Producer Tarek Ben Ammar held onto the movie rights of Swiss writer Hans Ruesch\u2019s novel \u2018South of the Heart\u2019 for over 30 years hoping one day he\u2019d fulfill his dream of bringing the epic story to the big screen. <\/div>\n

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As an Arab himself, Ben Ammar saw that Ruesch\u2019s tale had all the classic ingredients to make a film with global appeal that would also offer a positive portrayal of the Arab world and Islam.<\/div>\n

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Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, Ben Ammar finally brings the story to the big screen later this month, and with a cast including Antonio Banderas, Freida Pinto and Riz himself, there\u2019s huge excitement for a film billed as the Middle East\u2019s biggest-ever production. <\/div>\n

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The Asian Today caught up with Riz to talk Black Gold\u2026<\/div>\n

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Riz, tell us about Black Gold \u2013 what type of film can we expect?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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I think it\u2019s a really refreshing story in some ways. It will be a historical insight for people.\u00a0 It\u2019s good to see a story about the Middle East being told from the point of view from the indigenous people of that region. I think we\u2019ve had fantastic Arab epics in the past and some of those films are classic and they\u2019ll always stay classic but I think it\u2019s really interesting and really timely to have something where our main protagonists are actually Arabs and Muslims themselves.<\/div>\n

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One thing that really strikes you about Black Gold is the scale of the production. Would you say it\u2019s the biggest film in terms of production that you\u2019ve been part of to date?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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It\u2019s a huge production. Everything I\u2019d done up to that point had been low-budget, UK independent kind of stuff.\u00a0 When I first found out about the project and that Jean-Jacques Annaud was directing it, I was actually quite scared because he does massive films like \u2018Seven Years in Tibet\u2019 and \u2018Enemy at the Gates\u2019. He makes crazy, huge, epic kind of scarily big films. So it was all quite daunting but all really exciting and\u00a0cool.\u00a0 <\/div>\n

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When I got to the set, I realized that a lot of the team were people that had worked with Jean-Jacques before a few times, that put me at ease because even though it was a big scale production, it was a tight family of people working together which was cool.<\/div>\n

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Let\u2019s go back to the beginning. How did you get involved in the film?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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The audition process was really interesting. <\/div>\n

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When I first mean Jean-Jacques I was just struck by how articulate and insightful he was. He struck me as a real intellectual with a kind of sympathy for actors. He gave me a chance to do it a few different times and try a few different ways.\u00a0 <\/div>\n

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The audition went well in London and then he called me to Paris for a screen test. When I arrived I realized the scale of the film that this potentially would be.\u00a0We were in this massive studio with 50 ft walls painted green-screen and there were horses on one side. It was like we were going to get on horses for an audition for a screen test.\u00a0 On the other side they had built an old souk medina type of thing. Somewhere else there was a palace lounge in this massive studio space. I had to ask someone \u2018this is still the audition right?\u2019 and they were \u2018yeah it\u2019s the screen test\u2019.\u00a0 I just couldn\u2019t believe it. I was doing a rehearsal with Tahar Rahim and I\u2019d just seen his film \u201cUn Prophete\u201d recently before the audition. So I just turned to him and went \u2018Ajeeb habibi, Ajeeb\u2019, which is a line from Un Prophete. He just burst out laughing and he couldn\u2019t carry on the scene. I felt a bit bad but Jean-Jacques seemed to like it and he was like actually maybe there is a good energy between you guys.<\/div>\n

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You play the character of \u2018Ali\u2019 who is the main character Auda’s half brother<\/strong>. Tell us a bit about him<\/strong><\/div>\n

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My character Ali is quite different to the rest of the characters in the film because he\u2019s western educated and he\u2019s quite cynical and he doesn\u2019t really feel like he belongs in the traditional conservative monarchy of his father King Amar.\u00a0 He\u2019s quite critical of their ways and particularly the way that they obey a very narrow-minded religious authority, the Uluma. Because of that he\u2019s almost like this Shakespearean fool in that he slightly sits outside of the inner-circle but when he\u2019s let in it\u2019s a chance for him to say what he thinks and to kind of undercut everything with his sarcasm.\u00a0So he\u2019s sometimes almost an outside eye on the other people in the film and their community and their values.<\/div>\n

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Much of the film is shot in stunning desert locations in Tunisia and Qatar. These<\/strong> scenes must have been tough<\/strong><\/div>\n

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They were really tough but also pretty amazing. There was one scene in particular which we shot in Qatar by the coast. They have these sand dunes that go directly from the desert into the ocean. It\u2019s just an amazing sight in itself. I\u2019ll never forget that day when we charged down the top of the hill with about 50 camels and 200 guys down a sheer slope of a sand dune and just ran down right into the sea in all our clothes and our crazy prosthetic sunburn makeup.\u00a0It\u2019s a pretty beautiful kind of sight to see and even better to literally throw yourself into that kind of environment.\u00a0 It\u2019s a lot different to London so I\u2019ll remember that.<\/div>\n

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Producer\u00a0Ben Ammar said he wanted a film which had a positive portrayal of the Arab world and Islam \u2013 do you think he\u2019s achieved this in Black Gold?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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Definitely. It\u2019s a film where all the heroes are Arab and Muslims, the story is told from their point of view and it\u2019s authentic. So hopefully the audience will agree with us<\/div>\n

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The film also stars Freida Pinto, who\u2019s also your co-star in another forthcoming movie \u2018Trishna\u2019. Now I\u2019d ask what it was like filming back to back projects with Frieda, but you didn\u2019t actually meet on the sets of Black Gold did you?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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That\u2019s right. We didn\u2019t have any scenes together on Black Gold<\/div>\n

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I can\u2019t not mention Antonio Banderas \u2013 what was he like to work with?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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I actually didn\u2019t have any scenes with Antonio either!<\/div>\n

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Looking ahead <\/strong>you\u2019ve got a busy few weeks coming up with the release of Black Gold and Trishna \u2013 what does the rest of 2012 hold for you? Equally as busy?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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It\u2019s going to be really busy year with those two films. I\u2019ve also got Mira Nair\u2019s Reluctant Fundamentalist, I\u2019m in Plan B\u2019s directorial debut and I\u2019ve also got a new album coming out.<\/div>\n

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Finally Riz, why should we go and see Black Gold?<\/strong><\/div>\n

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It\u2019s unlike any other film you\u2019ll see this year. It\u2019s got huge action scenes, amazing landscape, romance and love as well as a lot of humour from my character. It\u2019s a 21st<\/sup> century version of those classic, sweeping epics for the whole family.<\/div>\n

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Black Gold releases in cinemas 24 February 2012<\/em><\/div>\n

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Brit actor returns to the big screen in Arabian epic BRIT actor Riz Ahmed will be somewhat of a regular on the big screen in the coming months. The Arabian epic Black Gold, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud will see the actor burst back onto our screens later this month. Just weeks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11753,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}