Standing in for Osama Bin Laden on Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty

If war truly is hell, then what can be said of making a war movie?  In May of this year, I found my special little place in Hollywood hell when an email from a Jordanian casting director landed in my inbox.  Because I had a close friend on the production, I was enlisted as a background soldier in Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty.  For the record: I'm not an actor, or a soldier.  I am white, however, and that was good enough for them.

I'd just wrapped a feature-length documentary in Johannesburg, had some down time, and since Bigelow was putting the hunt and hit of OBL to the big screen, I figured this was the closest I'd ever get to being a part of what could be my generation's Apocalypse Now.  "Never get out of the boat." Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were going all the way...

A week later I was on a jet to Amman, lucky enough to get a row of coach class seats to myself aboard Egypt Air Flight 986.  Three weeks later, not only had my luck had run out, I was also cured of my childhood dream of being a soldier in a war movie.  I ended up working as both the production's stand-in, and also as one of the pilots infamous for crashing a highly-classified stealth helicopter used in the raid. As the stand-in, my job was to shadow the Director and Cinematographer, and even though Bigelow and DP Greig Fraser most likely grew loathsome of my lurking presence, I took away the equivalent of the Masters in Film Production I vowed never to go back to school for.

As for the rest of my experience, there's a much longer (and harder) story to tell...fortunately, it's not fit for this blog.  For now, here's the new teaser trailer for ZD30 (that I'm most certainly not in):