[eslachance]

I finally was able to hunt down the actual clip they're talking about, "Innocence of the Muslims". There is a 5-minute trailer here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWkq2HPgoM

I'm absolutely appalled that this thing supposedly cost $5M to produce, though. If the trailers are any indication, this is the worst piece of garbage (quality-wise) that I've ever laid my eyes on. I've seen $20,000 movies that looked better than this thing. I'm not talking about the contents, I'm talking about the quality! I mean come on, the sound is lame, the bluescreen scenes are absolutely horrible... I could probably do just as well in my back yard with about $5000 worth of equipment and a few friends! Well, if I had 59 friends...

[pruman]

Well, I would recommend you don't make a better version of a film that inspires murderous religious zealots to randomly take life. Stick to stuff that just makes snobby film critics spew their lattes in disgust.

[ceejayoz]

Sounds like they had some donors they could soak with unreasonable expenses.

[yread]

One of them seems to be the infamous Terry Jones http://www.tampabay.com/news/world/gainesville-pastor-terry-...

[gojomo]

$10,000 in production costs, $4,990,000 million in post-production security.

I watched a 13m51s 'trailer' that was linked from one of the NYTimes stories. It's hilariously awful, and further: some of the most-likely-to-offend, specifically anti-Muhammad/anti-Islam lines are clumsily dubbed in with different voices than the main actors.

Thus I suspect there's a chance that even the actors didn't know completely how their performances would be used: they might have thought it was some other period drama, that then via redubbing it had its offensiveness "turned up to 11".

[eslachance]

Your suspicion turned out to be correct. At least one of the actresses in the movie spoke out about the fact that they were actually cast for "Desert Warrior", a movie with absolutely nothing to do with Muhammad. They never even spoke the name! Everything was, as we can clearly see, dubbed in post-production.

At least one source: http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/12/world/anti-islam-film/index.ht...