From Entertainment Weekly
By Jeff Labrecque on Oct 2, 2013 at 6:55PM
The writer/director of Innocence of Muslims, the anti-Islam movie that provoked deadly riots and demonstrations in the Middle East when a 13-minute trailer appeared on the Internet in September 2012, has been released from a California halfway house after serving almost a year in detention for probation violation. Though Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a.k.a. Mark Basseley Youssef, a Coptic Christian who emigrated from Egypt, feels horrible for what happened — “I felt I did a big mistake,” he says. “Some people died because of my movie” — he’s moving ahead with projects that will help spread the message that he insists is at the center of his controversial film.
“My movie was not a religious movie,” he says. “It’s a political movie against terrorism, which has a root. We have to dig; we have to dig the root out to be terrorism free. Believe me, I grow up in this culture and I know how they think. That’s why I try to deliver my information. Somebody get mad, so what.”
Nakoula, who published a book outlining his views in August, is about a quarter finished with a script for a two-hour movie about the unrest and violence against Christians in Egypt during the last three years, and he’s written about 40 hours of what he envisions as a 200-hour TV series about the history of Islam. He also still intends to release the full two-hour version of The Innocence of Muslims, which he says remains safe in a bank vault. “The version that is shown on the Internet, it’s just a little pieces cutting from here and here and here,” he says. “You cannot judge me, judge anything, without seeing the whole thing, and then we can talk.”
