FINDING
OMAR SHARIF
By 1993 I decided to mortgage my house to make this film. I had no crew of my own, no formal training as a filmmaker, nothing but a story I believed the world needed to hear and a refusal to let it go. I was a journalist, not a director, and I was about to stake my home on a documentary nobody had asked for, about a country most of the world had already made up its mind about.
What I most certainly didn’t have was any “star quality,” neither myself nor anyone I was planning to interview. I didn’t have a single name that anyone outside Lebanon would recognise and be magnetised by. I knew that without one, this film could do everything right and still vanish the moment it was finished, unseen by exactly the people I most needed to reach.
My father was the one who said it first. “Why don’t you ask Omar Sharif to be in the film?” I remember almost laughing at him. This was my first film. Who was I, that a world famous Hollywood movie star, of the calibre of Omar Sharif, would ever agree to be in it?
Initially I, like most people, including you right now, was thinking, isn’t he Egyptian anyway? No, and yes, my father said. His parents came from a town in Lebanon, Chtaura, not far from where my dad was from, and had moved to Egypt, where Omar was born.
I agreed to go after Omar, but then I was faced with the problem of how I was going to get to him. To cut a long and truly exciting story short, which you can read in various articles written about it, my sister Grace, a corporate and entertainment lawyer and the film’s executive producer, was determined to get Omar, and somehow she tracked down the number of his personal assistant in Paris. I was filming in Beirut but immediately hopped a plane to make the call in case his assistant granted me a meeting with him. I had to be there.
No such luck. When I got to Paris and called his assistant, she told me he was on a film shoot in the south of France and wouldn’t give me any details of where and when he might return.
Dead end. Well, I didn’t let that stop me, and with the aid of a fellow Aussie who was living in Paris, we spent that night calling hotels across the south of France with merely the Yellow Pages, a landline and a great story on our side.
By 11pm, and at least a hundred calls later, we finally got a break. My friend, in fine French accent, claimed to be from the production company making the film, and asked the night manager at a hotel in Avignon whether he had any details about the Omar crew, as we were trying to chase them down to update them on a change in production schedule. The manager complied and told us they had been at the hotel but had left that day for Aix-en-Provence. He gave us the name and details of that hotel. We thanked him, hung up, and immediately called that hotel to confirm the crew was there. They were. Eureka. I booked a room and boarded a flight six hours later. Nothing was going to stop me now.
As the taxi from Marseille airport approached the hotel, I gazed upon the fifteenth century chateau in breathtaking awe. I closed my mouth, retrieved my bag, and headed for the quaint reception desk. The receptionist who greeted me was friendly. I told her I was there for a meeting with Monsieur Omar Sharif, and would she please tell me his room number. She would not. So as she turned to fetch my key, I peered over the counter at the open register and spied his room number myself, stepping back into place before she turned back around.
As soon as I reached my own room, I called his. He answered. I told him who I was, and he agreed to meet me in the bar at five.
When he walked in, it was as though the lights all came on and a prince had entered the room. I rambled for a few minutes, not making any sense, until I finally ran out of words. He smiled, and started asking questions. I told him my story. He was moved.
He agreed to join the project.
Omar isn’t Lebanese, not really. Everyone assumes he is Egyptian, and he is, unquestionably. But he told me, that afternoon in the bar, that he loved Egypt and he loved the Egyptians, and that Lebanon was in his soul, and he had never been able to let it go.
That is why he said yes. Not for the fee. His agent wanted US$50,000 a day, and there was no way I could have afforded that. I never had to find out, because he wouldn’t take a cent.
I had mortgaged my house to make this film. Omar Sharif gave me four days of his time, for nothing, so that I could get it back.
He didn’t just appear in the film either. He recited Gibran Kahlil Gibran poetry, shared his own personal stories and reflections, and lent his voice to it almost as a narrator, which was far more than I ever had the right to ask of him.
I did get my house back. But that isn’t why the story has stayed with me all these years. It has remained one of those indelible experiences because one of the most famous men in the world at the time walked into a hotel bar to meet a stranger with no money, and by the time he walked out, he had decided Lebanon, and this unknown journalist’s obsession with it, was worth his name and his time.