The Brüno shoot in Jordan is John Kiriakou’s account of the work he did as a script adviser for Sacha Baron Cohen on the film Brüno — one of several film credits, alongside The Kite Runner, Kill the Messenger and From Paris with Love.[1]
The brief
The approach came by telephone through a production shell company, and began with a non-disclosure agreement; nobody outside the production was to know that the Austrian fashion journalist was Baron Cohen in character.[2][3] The request was specific: to put the Brüno character in front of bona fide terrorists — Baron Cohen was thinking al-Qaeda or Hezbollah — show them Polaroids of men having hardcore anal sex, and ask whether this was a form of torture and whether the men should be sent to Guantánamo.[4][5]
Kiriakou’s professional advice was that it was a bad idea, and his general rule was that one should not mess with the religious types: “they’ll kill you, they’ll kill your crew, they’ll go out onto the street and kill people who remind them of you.”[5] He also talked Baron Cohen out of Syria, and out of Libya — Baron Cohen said that as a Jew he would fear for his safety there — while suggesting Morocco or Algeria instead. Baron Cohen went to the Syrian consulate in Newport Beach anyway, against Kiriakou’s explicit instruction to let him handle it, and was told by the consular officer: “I know who you are, I know what you do, and you are not welcome in Syria.”[6][7][8]
The Damascus telephone book
Kiriakou’s solution was to avoid religious militants and approach political ones who had retired. The genuine hard men of the previous generation — the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP General Command, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Abu Nidal Organisation, people who had hijacked and blown up aircraft, shot up airports and worked with Carlos the Jackal — were almost all in Damascus, in their seventies, and doing nothing at all.[9]
Asked how he would reach them, Kiriakou guessed they would be in the Damascus telephone book. He went to the Library of Congress, which holds a copy in Arabic, and found four of them. He telephoned and told them the production was a documentary about the Middle East peace process and the role of freedom fighters and activists — “and I made all this up.” They agreed to appear.[10][11]
Blown before landing
Kiriakou warned that filming in Amman meant the Jordanian intelligence service would have to be brought in on the joke, because four bona fide terrorists flying into the city on the same day to visit one hotel room would be noticed. Baron Cohen refused to let anyone in on it and said he would risk it. He was met at the airport by a driver holding a sign with his own name on it, driven through the gates of the royal palace, and greeted by the king — standing beside the director of Jordanian intelligence — as his biggest fan.[12][13][14]
The scene that did not happen
The plan required the four men to lunge across the table and attack the interviewer; the cameraman told Kiriakou, sitting behind the camera, not to move if they did, because the fight was wanted on film.[15] Instead the old men put on their trifocals, examined the photographs, passed them along, and set them down. “Oh, not good. This haram. Not good.” Then they looked at the interviewer, lit another cigarette, and waited. More photographs produced only “this not Islam, not good.”[16][17]
They were paid about a hundred dollars each and left. Baron Cohen’s assessment was that they had not cared; Kiriakou’s was that the scene was a bust. The entire Jordan section was cut from the film.[18]
Jerusalem
The violence the shoot had been designed to provoke arrived elsewhere. Kiriakou flew home; the production went to Jerusalem, where Baron Cohen approached the Western Wall in a leather waistcoat with no shirt, pink hot pants and thigh-length boots, and was set upon by yeshiva students. He was beaten badly enough — black eyes, a swollen face — that filming stopped for a week, and it was the only time in the production that he dropped character, protesting that he was an actor and it was a joke. They did not care.[19]
Kiriakou’s conclusion about his client is unreserved. The work was daring and gutsy, and he has concluded that Baron Cohen is a genius — a term he says he does not use lightly — on the ground that even where the gag failed, as in Jordan, nobody else would have thought of it.[20]