Irish Department of Injustice, and the Mafia of The Devil's Double Movie.

In this video I answer the most popular questions that I have received through my website, emails and social media.
There are many perceptions of me, that I have made millions from my books and the movie, not true.
That since I fled Iraq my life has been safe, not true, either.. That the government of the country where I reside have provided me with protection and security, that's not true either, I have my own private security.
In my twenty one years in the West, I have not found democracy nor a country to call home and grant me citizenship, and so I am still stateless.
The reason?
I could not and would not sell my soul, One man forced me to become something I wasn't and ruled my life, when I broke free of him I vowed never to be forced to do anything against my will again, be it by a single person or a country.

Dominic Cooper does double duty in 'Devil's Double'

The actor gets to portray Uday Hussein and his body double thanks to high- and low-tech methods.

By Mark Olsen, Special to the Los Angeles Times.

Dominic Cooper stars as Latif Yahia (left) and Uday Hussein (right) in
"The Devil's Double." (Lionsgate, Lionsgate / July 24, 2011)

In "The Devil's Double," which opens in Los Angeles on Friday, actor Dominic Cooper does double duty. Not only does he play Uday Hussein, the notorious sadistic playboy son of Saddam Hussein, he also plays Latif Yahia — a man whose resemblance to Uday earned him the unwelcome job of his body double.

Audiences have long loved a twin-type story — and given the economics of modern Hollywood, getting two performances out of one star must seem like a good deal. Although making it appear as if the same person is doubled on-screen is one of the oldest camera tricks around, digital technology has given filmmakers more options than ever to work their sleight-of-hand.

In last year's "The Social Network," for instance, two actors were used to portray the bodies of the Winklevoss twins — but digital head-replacement effects gave them identical faces. Actress Sarah Michelle Gellar is set to make her return to series television this fall with "Ringer," playing a woman on the run who assumes the life of her twin sister. Comedian Adam Sandler will play male-female twins in November's "Jack and Jill."

In making "The Devil's Double," director Lee Tamahori found that constraints of time, money and story meant that rather than strictly going for the shiniest new tools available, crafting Cooper's on-screen double would require a mix of old and new techniques and figuring things out as the production moved along.

The film is loosely based on the real-life story of Yahia and creates a garish portrait of late-1980s Baghdad that is equal parts seductive and repulsive. Cooper's dual performance becomes a vivid exploration of identity, as an innocent man loses himself inside the disorientingly glamorous and dangerous world of a depraved monster.

Michael Thomas' script specified that Uday and Latif be played by the same actor, making the casting especially important, while also pointing toward the visual effects problem-solving that would be needed to put the two characters on-screen together.

"That was going to be the big challenge of the film," Tamahori said. "Everything else was kind of a no-brainer, but there's really no road map for doing these twin-shot movies. You can talk to the technical people about how to do it and we looked at what other people had done, but I was adamant that really the most important thing was to separate the two characters so completely that people would believe they are watching two characters, not one actor playing two parts."

"The Devil's Double" returns Tamahori to the international indie roots of his 1994 film "Once Were Warriors," after excursions into Hollywood filmmaking on titles such as the James Bond movie "Die Another Day." The fast 52-day shooting schedule on "Devil" and relatively low budget (less than $15 million, according to Tamahori) meant that some obvious solutions for putting Cooper (whose films include "Captain America: The First Avenger" and "Mamma Mia!") on-screen with himself wouldn't work.

"I thought going in that it was going to be a full-blown VFX picture with head replacements and motion-control everywhere," said Tamahori, referring to a kind of computerized camera control. "We had a very tight schedule, and I was trying to throw the entire bag of tricks at it. I wanted a motion-control rig hired for the entire movie, and that was just too expensive. So we went on a kind of two- or three-track approach of trickery combined with good old-fashioned acting."

Foremost was to make strong distinctions between Cooper's portrayal of the two characters. For Uday, he used a higher, slightly wheezier voice, which an on-set voice coach monitored to ensure he didn't slip into while talking as Latif. False teeth, makeup and some prosthetics were also used to change Cooper's appearance between Latif and Uday.

"I had the feeling I was working with two actors," said actress Ludivine Sagnier, who plays a girlfriend of Uday's who becomes involved with Latif.

For scenes in which Cooper was to appear in both roles, Tamahori would shoot him with another actor filling the opposite role. Then Cooper, and sometimes the double, would change costumes and do the scene again for the other role. Shooting digitally meant that Tamahori could immediately get an idea of how the sides matched up.

Tamahori was surprised to discover that the sound recording was often as important and difficult to match as the image. So that Cooper could properly seem to be exchanging dialogue with himself in the finished version, Tamahori and his technical team decided to record a handful of takes of the first side of a scene, then stop to decide upon the best one right on the set.

A sound edit would then immediately be made of the dialogue so that Cooper — sometimes wearing an earpiece to hear his recorded voice — could go ahead with the second take knowing how to respond to the timing of the lines, heightening the reality of his interactions with himself. (A similar on-the-spot technique was used for some scenes in "Moon" when Sam Rockwell played a man trapped in a space station with a clone of himself.)

"The technicalities of it for me were unlike anything I've ever known," Cooper said. "One of the things I find most enjoyable about acting is that ability to react and respond with another actor, to develop and unravel and make a scene progress. And here I would do it as one character and that would be set in stone. The most helpful thing was I knew all the thoughts going through my head as I was acting it the first time and I could kind of respond to the memory of that."

David Cronenberg's 1988 film "Dead Ringers," in which Jeremy Irons played twin gynecologists, was among the first to use computer technology to exactingly replicate camera moves when shooting both halves of twin-effect shots. In "Devil's Double," a full motion-control setup — where the entire camera body can without human contact physically move and pan or tilt and then the sequence can be repeated — was used for the most complicated shots, such as when Uday brings Latif to a full-length mirror to admire their likenesses.

More frequently, though, Tamahori and cinematographer Sam McCurdy used what they came to think of as a half motion-control set-up, whereby the camera could be moved on a dolly or tracks by grips and then brought to a stop, with the camera operator executing a pan or tilt once the camera had come to a fixed position. A computerized mount known as a memory head was then used to perfectly re-execute the operator's move on a second pass. This technique was faster — and cheaper.

Among the most complicated shots to achieve in any "twin" film is to have the two characters appear to touch. In "Dead Ringers," the twins touch only once, and they are not moving in the shot. In "The Devil's Double," the two characters touch several times, one being a scene in which Uday places a gun into Latif's hand. That was one of only three instances in which a digital head-replacement effect was used in the film.

As the production progressed, Cooper and the filmmakers modulated their approach to each shot.

"I was always learning," Cooper said. "It would change, sometimes I'd have another actor, sometimes I wouldn't, sometimes I had an earpiece, it was all how I felt at that time and what was most useful for that shot and that moment.

"There were moments where we were all shouting at each other, 'Maybe this would work,' 'No, this,' and it was just a fantastic, vibrant, very un-technical environment," he added. "I had no idea really what I was getting myself involved in, this technology that no one knew a huge amount about. I think we were all kind of amazed it worked at all."

calendar@latimes.com

The Devil's Double Official Trailer. from Latif Yahia on Vimeo.

Sundance Film Festival
by Jen Yamato || 01 28 2011 4:30 PM

The Devil’s Double: The Outrageous, Over the Top Iraqi Scarface You’ve Been Waiting For

Tired of those run-of-the-mill biopics and staid Iraq war dramas that avoid sensationalism out of respect for their subjects? Want a peek into the orgiastic, debauched, ultra-violent underbelly of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? Director Lee Tamahori brought all that and more to an unsuspecting audience — and conjured his own comparisons to David Fincher’s The Social Network, naturally — with The Devil’s Double, the guiltiest thrill of Sundance 2011.

Based very, very loosely on the life of Latif Yahia, an Iraqi lieutenant enlisted to double for Saddam’s out-of-control elder son Uday, The Devil’s Double stars Dominic Cooper (Mamma Mia!) in a bravura dual performance as both the monster and his innocent stand-in. Forced into indentured servitude under pain of torture and threats to his family, and transformed into a perfect doppelganger through plastic surgery and mimicry lessons, Cooper’s stoic Latif watches disapprovingly as Uday rapes and murders his way through life in a coke-fueled psychopathic haze, a pistol-waving, sex-obsessed, wild-eyed, magnetic thug with a penchant for schoolgirls and no interest in becoming the responsible heir apparent to his stern, menacing father. Whenever Uday is incapacitated or lazy, he sends Latif to make speeches to the troops; eventually, when Latif has had enough, he takes Uday’s favorite mistress (Ludivine Sagnier) as his own. The two men are brothers in Uday’s perverse way of thinking, and the only way Latif will ever escape his enslavement is in death.

Though he plays fast and loose with the facts, Tamahori claims to get the most important details right: The well-documented horrors of life inside the palace walls, where even honored guests and confidantes of Saddam were in danger of Uday’s explosive, violent rage; Uday’s proclivity for abusing his power to kidnap, rape, and murder young girls. (A brief scene in which Latif comes across the sight of two Saddams playing tennis is a comically bizarre break from the brutality.) The Devil’s Double is a portrait of a monster, no doubt, and yet the movie indicates he’s nothing in comparison to his father.

That sense for the corruption and danger that hung in the air during the Hussein family regime is what lingers most, even after Tamahori’s tale flies off the rails and enters almost legendary WTF? status. First comes the melodramatic love triangle, brought to the edge of campiness by Ludivine Sagnier’s anti-subtle turn as the sultry minx Sarrab (perhaps the film’s most egregiously ridiculous bit of non-ethnic casting, but hey). Then there’s the bombastic lovers’ escape, in which Sarrab and Latif literally ride off triumphantly on horseback. But nothing compares to how Tamahori ends it all by channeling his own James Bond past, transforming the epic-scale gangster pic into an all-out spy actioner, slo-mo shoot-outs and sexy hero shots and all. (Or, as an astute writer pal put it, “It’s a real life version of Medellin.”)

Tamahori took the stage after his Sundance premiere to answer a lot of questions. Portraying Latif Yahia’s story in its factual details was never the plan, for starters. “I’m not a great fan of truth in film,” he explained, lauding Michael Thomas’s “odd and twisted” screenplay.

Though many of the scenes of torture, rape, and killing in the film came from actual documented events, the real Uday’s crimes “are all worse than we possibly could have portrayed.” (Tamahori sent a ripple through the crowd when he suggested, unflinchingly, that the unruly, power-hungry children of despots across the world should be lined up against a wall and shot.)

And finally, the first person to compare Lee Tamahori’s The Devil’s Double to The Social Network was, of course, Lee Tamahori. While Fincher pulled a digital facelift to allow his two Winklevii to share the screen, Tamahori and star Cooper (whose impressive turns as Uday and Latif are like night and day) used a variation on the technique to shoot the film’s many Latif-Uday scenes, filming a master shot in one character first, then editing for sound and throwing Cooper back in to play the second part in the same day.

Will Tamahori’s The Devil’s Double earn Social Network-level plaudits when it’s eventually released? (A deal with Lionsgate is reportedly close.) Probably not. The material’s just too insane. But let’s be real: That’s exactly why it will appeal to many. Because as much as The Devil’s Double is about the innocent man who lived to tell the tale, it’s the most revealing, rape-y, torture-filled, excessively gaudy inside look at Iraq’s unstable family of thugs that we’re likely to ever get. The film itself falls prone to the sensory indulgences of its maker, but at a certain point it no longer matters whether that’s by design or not.

Lionsgate takes North America on Sundance hit Devil's Double

27 January, 2011 | By Jeremy Kay

The studio has closed a deal for North American rights on Lee Tamahori’s widely admired thriller, ending several days of conversations between the film’s representatives and multiple suitors.

Lionsgate is understood to have agreed to a substantial seven-figure MG and p&a commitment and is planning a significant theatrical release and awards campaign centred on British talent Dominic Cooper’s breakout role as Uday Hussein and his body double Latif Yahia. Ludivine Sagnier also stars.

Paradigm Motion Picture Group and CAA jointly handled North American rights and Corsan international sales head Pascal Borno closed a deal with Icon for Australia and New Zealand at the festival.

Lionsgate beat several rival bids and entered exclusive negotiations with the representatives in the small hours of Wednesday [26]. As first reported on Screendaily, Relativity and Summit both circled the project but did not pursue it aggressively. Several other buyers are believed to have come in with bids.

Corsan head Paul Breuls produced The Devil’s Double with Catherine Vandeleene, Michael John Fedun and Emjay Rechsteiner.

Sundance 2011: Exclusive Interview With 'The Devil's Double' Star Dominic Cooper

By Matt Patches , Special to Hollywood.com
Tuesday, January 25, 2011

In 2010, Dominic Cooper made a big splash opposite Carey Mulligan in the Oscar-nominated An Education. The role showed off his suave, dapper side, but in his latest film, the Sundance debut The Devil's Double, Cooper really sinks his teeth into a role (or in this case, roles) and pushes himself to the extreme.

The Devil's Double tells the story of Latif Yahia, an Iraqi military officer recruited to become the fiday, or body double, of Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical son Uday. Cooper plays two distinct roles in the film: the conflicted Latif, who struggles to take on his new job, and the murderous party animal Uday. The film is insane, to put it lightly, and the crazed tone is in part to Cooper's disappearance into the two men's stranger-than-fiction world.

The Devil's Double is a wild ride and a real departure from previous work? How did you get involved with the film?

I read it, with the understanding that someone else had the part that it might fall through. I read it knowing that it had been around for many, many years, many directors had been attached, It was a script that stuck in my head. I was fascinated by how little I knew of something that affected so much of my life and the world, and ultimately, it was this mad gangster movie and the opportunity for an actor to play both those roles.

I was unsure about the person I heard doing the part at the time, it didn’t make sense to me. I managed to get into a room with Lee [Tamahori, director] and I auditioned for hours with him. I brought into the room something I thought this person was and who the other person was, and next thing I knew...I was doing it. It was the most exciting moment in the work I’ve done so far.

Were there resources to help you better understand how this world operated? To give insight into living out both Latif and Uday's lives?

No, there was nothing to like that. The difficulty for me was to understand and have compassion for this person, which I think you have to do when you’re playing someone. When you’re inhabiting someone, looking through their eyes and understanding their complexities.

With this guy, I couldn’t. I couldn’t understand him - he was a madman, a berserk man that needed help. Everything he did was disgusting and atrocious. It wasn’t necessarily about him, they became more fictional characters. I think that was important for me and Lee both to kind and reach a point and use this as an incredible story but we don’t know what they said we don’t know the relationship they had. We’re making a film. And this is not meant to be stooped in the real truth. Lee said the only truth in this film is that the US got him. That's the one fact that we know of this story.

That's evident in the film. You're constantly wondering what's real because the tone jumps from gritty realism to over-the-top, often comedic levels. Uday is executing these insane operations and one minute you're laughing, the next, you're horrified. How did you balance the tones of the film?

That’s why you need to be in the hands of a genius like Lee, with this kind of material. An actor doesn’t know that. That’s why I have to rely on him for the tone and sensibility of the piece. I don’t know what he’s going for. I can kind of get a vague understanding. I didn’t know he was making a outrageous, horrific gangster film. What I knew is that he made the most stunning debut film with Once Were Warriors, and I knew that, if any one can handle that kind of material and those people, and can understand how those gangsters type tribal people. then he is the person to do it. And my job is to come up with something that fitted with that environment. And although sometimes humorous because you're so baffled and amazed that this human exists.

Were there moments where you wanted to pull back but Lee pushed you to go further?

I think it was a matter of bringing it down. He kept me very still, that was very helpful. It was his actual energy on set that was so inspiring. It was a short shoot, relatively cheap, and we had a lot to do. Technically it was difficult because of the doubling up of the scenes.

What was the process of shooting two roles in one scene? Were you constantly repeating the setups and blocking?

Yes, and that was why you only really got three takes on anything. Some people like to go on and do take after take, I couldn’t do that. There wasn’t time. It wasn’t stressful, I loved it. And you watched him and he had to create a new environment. It would be like...Lee wasn’t allowed to use this position or camera angle. And he was completely reconfiguring his ideas and I always think that creates the most creative inspired work and its constantly moving. Watching him with the amount of decisions he had to make, [laughs] I kind of felt my job is kind of easy.

What challenges did you face embodying two separate roles, bouncing between characters on a whim?

I needed to make one who is watching it believe it is two different people no matter how much reconstructive surgery one of them had had and how much they needed to look the same which they did, it was difficult to decide who was who. I needed them to be clearly two different people, I got help from my wonderful dialect coach, I got help with the make-up lady. It was about making a vocal difference and physical difference and the way in which the two characters thought differently.

Into the film, you slowly realize there's a third character you're playing. Was that intentional?

Oh, definitely. The one that Latif had to transform into. I wanted here to be an intricate difference in the way he went to perform as Uday. I wanted him to be slightly different still. Not quite succeeding whole heartily in becoming him - there was still something holding him back. That’s why when you see him practicing in the mirror there’s still this tentativeness about him. He was not a showman, not an actor. There was no reason he should have been able to manipulate who he is. He did it to the best of his ability and I needed that to be clear.

What's next for you? Anything in the can?

My Week With Marilyn with Kenneth Branagh. And Captain America.

That must have been a bit bigger than what you were accustom to.

It was massive - and intriguing.

You play Howard Stark in the film, a character with a wealth of comic mythology. What does your role in the actual film entail?

He moves the story along. He transforms him into Captain America. He’s Iron Man’s dad! He was a playboy, it was fun. How much he winds up in the film, who knows. But I hope he has an affect on it.

Sundance Review: "The Devil's Double" Delivers the Horror of Uday Hussein

By Sharon Waxman

How much do we want to know about the world that ended with the hated war in Iraq?

Uday Saddam Hussein, older son of the Iraqi dictator, was so grotesque a character that when fictionalized in “The Devil’s Double,” the viewer is tempted to imagine that liberties were taken.

But, no. Uday really was that man: the schoolgirls snatched off the street and raped; the brides taken in their gowns for a night of his pleasure; the torture of athletes when they lost – or when they won if they stole too much of the national spotlight. The drugs. The sex. The hanging upside down of innocent people for peceived slights.

He is a villain of epic, operatic proportions, and Dominic Cooper – in his first leading role of consequence - makes Uday a strangely compelling, sometimes mesmerizing and consistently entertaining monster.

The story of Uday is told through the eyes of a man forced to bear witness to this regime-sanctioned psychotic, Latif Ahmed, who became Uday’s body double.

Cooper ably plays both roles – the former, who charges through each scene on the verge of hysteria and/or violence. And the other, a quiet observer who seethes through the depravities he must silently accept, lending every scene an underpinning of morality. (Resistance would have meant death to his family, torture for him.)

Before the screening began I ran into an agent who described it a “Three Kings meets Scarface meets Goodfellas.”

That about hits it. Back in 2003, on the day that Uday and his younger brother Qusay were murdered, I wrote an essay about the stories that swept through Baghdad about them, having recently returned from a reporting stint in Iraq. (It’s still posted here.)

At the time I wrote: “Doesn’t anyone see a television movie in this?”

Director Lee Tamahori did see a movie in it; and some critics and buyers who saw the film felt that it played too much like television – melodramatic and unidimensional.

But on second glance, the story gives us a moral center in Latif and a context for thinking about the consequences of our foreign policy – not just the 2003 invasion, but the choice not to topple Saddam back in 1990, and our support of that regime through the Iran-Iraq conflict.

Those decisions helped create this monster. Uday and his brother were finally hunted down and shot. But it took until 2003, and the terror they wrought on their own people was no small price for the residents of this ancient land.

As Tamahori said in the q&a after the premiere screening this weekend, “There’s not much of a message here other than: Despots have children that run out of control and we should put them up against the wall and shoot them.”

Count on this one getting bought, and appearing in theaters some time this year.

SUNDANCE REVIEW: 'The Devil's Double' Is a Vivid Look at the Body Double for Saddam Hussein's Satanic Son

11:37 PM 1/23/2011
by Todd McCarthy

The Bottom Line

Excellent lead performance tops a vivid but one-dimensional look at the double for Saddam's satanic son.

PARK CITY -- An urgent desire to take a long shower is an appropriate response to watching "The Devil’s Double," so unsavory is the experience of being immersed in the world of Saddam Hussein’s Caligula-like son Uday and his double, Latif Yahia.

Undeniably fascinating as a visit to a world you’d never have wanted to have come near in real life -- that of the Hussein family’s inner sanctum -- the film falls crucially short by not providing a window into the mind of the man who was coerced into acting as his double. Dominic Cooper’s riveting double performance and the lurid, beyond-"Scarface" sensationalism are the main selling points for a film to which it will still be difficult to lure a wide public.

A drunken, drug-fueled, gun-toting, short-tempered party boy, torturer, rapist and murderer, Uday, with unlimited funds at his disposal and never properly reined in by his disapproving father, would routinely cruise schools in his Porsche or Ferrari, pick up 14-year-old girls, have his way with them and then have their bodies dumped by a roadside. On a whim, he'd drop by a wedding ceremony and demand to defile the bride on the spot. Intensely psychotic, he threw endless bacchanalian parties, reveled in torture videos and avoided anything resembling official responsibilities.

He was widely despised, of course, and, as with his father, it was thought advisable that he have a double to cover for him, throw off potential attackers and so on. In the late 1980s, toward the end of Iraq’s long war with Iran, it was the misfortune of army lieutenant Latif Yahia to be handpicked to fill the job, the full dimensions of which would have been hard to foresee.

With the fate of his family held over him if he declines, Latif undergoes plastic surgery and dental work to enhance the resemblance, learns to match Uday’s higher-pitched voice and vocal patterns, acquires a double of his wardrobe and is installed in a life of luxury, including a selection of women, while always being on call if needed. Mostly, he's just another member of Uday's sinister entourage, passed off humorously as Saddam's "third son" (curiously little is seen of the dictator's actual other son, Qusay).

Guided through his paces by a wise old mentor, Munem (Raad Rawi), Latif clearly disapproves of Uday and his sleazy lifestyle, but there’s nothing he can do except sullenly go along. Unfortunately, director Lee Tamahori and screenwriter Michael Thomas ("The Hunger," "Scandal") aren't able to make Latif the viewer’s confidant, to effect a viewer's personal connection to his strange odyssey; instead, one is simply left a spectator at a Roman circus.

One way to supply this would have been a Latif voice-over, perhaps in the style of Ray Liotta's in "GoodFellas." Another would have been a deeper, more revealing liaison between Latif and Sarrab (Ludivine Sagnier), Uday's main squeeze, who dares to launch a relationship with his double. Given that there can be no secrets in this world, how this affair is allowed to continue is never explained, but a more intimate connection between the two might have provided the lacking human dimension.

When the U.S. steps in to aid Kuwait, Uday rails against the enemy but sends Latif to the front to rally the troops instead of going himself. Outrage follows outrage until, finally, Latif manages an escape, leading to a dramatic climax that ends the film well before Uday's death during the American invasion years later.

Tamahori makes sure there's never a dull moment, although the succession of mindless disco parties, coke snorting, assaults on helpless women, psychotic rants and unmotivated violence has a cumulative deadening and depressing effect that is never leavened by an artistic vision or historical take on the grim spectacle. Although energetic and visually and aurally dynamic, this feels like a job of work rather than something more ambitious and felt from the inside.

With shooting in Iraq impossible, the filmmakers found an unexpectedly effective substitute in Malta. Having just worked on Green Zone, production designer Paul Kirby has done a terrific job creating both the grand exteriors and ornately vulgar interiors of the Hussein regime, an effect elaborated by Anna Sheppard's costume designs and Sam McCurdy's cinematography. Christian Henson's score and various source music choices are effective at generating a dark, turbulent mood.

In utter command of both roles, Cooper differentiates between the two beautifully, suggesting Latif's necessarily restrained natural cockiness and seething resentment at his lot in life while letting out all the stops as the mercurial Uday. He's really the whole show, although it's too bad the script restrained him from further illuminating Latif's inner self.

The film doesn't mention that, in real life, Uday and Latif had been schoolmates and that their close resemblance had been noted since youth. Furthermore, the third act particulars of Latif's escape and subsequent events seem to have been fabricated out of whole cloth. Latif's autobiography was published in 1997 but only became an international best seller after 9/11.

VENUE: Sundance Film Festival, Premieres
PRODUCTION: Corsan, Corrino, Statccato production
CAST: Dominic Cooper, Ludivine Sagnier, Mimoun Oaissa, Raad Rawi, Philip Quast, Khalid Laith
DIRECTOR: Lee Tamahori
SCREENWRITER: Michael Thomas, based on the life story of Latif Yahia
PRODUCERS: Paul Breuls, Michael John Fedun, Emjay Rechsteiner, Catherine Vandeleene
EXECUTIVE PRFODUCERS, Harris Tulchin, Arjen Terpstra
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Sam McCurdy
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Paul Kirby
COSTUME DESIGNER: Anna Sheppard
MUSIC: Christian Henson
EDITOR: Luis Carballar
SALES: Corsan World Sales
No rating, 108 minutes

Sundance ’11: Saddam’s Crazy Kid, and Crazy Love

01/23/2011 1:02pm
By: Roger Friedman

If you want to win an Oscar, play a crazy ol’ depot. Forest Whitaker did it with “The Last King of Scotland.” Christoph Waltz did it with “Inglourious Basterds.”

Now Dominic Cooper, the up and coming young British actor, knocked the Sundance crowd out last night playing Uday Hussein, the now dead (thank god) son of Saddam in “The Devil’s Double.”

The Lee Tamahori film is like “Scarface” in the desert. Cooper plays not only Uday, but Latif Yahia, the man who was forced to be Uday’s double during the wild days of the Saddam reign of terror leading up to the Gulf War.

This is no “Patty Duke” show. Cooper is mesmerizing in both roles, often on screen together. Latif–at least in this film–is thoughtful, has a conscious, even realizes early on that Uday is, as he says, “a psychotic.”

Uday is a delicious character. He rapes, pillages, and tortures. He is amoral sort of beyond the pale. Cooper never turns him into a cartoon, although by the time we see Uday and his mother watching TV in bed together, we’ve almost jumped the shark. Luckily, the Americans arrive in 1991. Uday is maimed–great scene –and eventually dies in 2003 when Saddam is finally deposed.

Whoever gets “Devil’s Double” will have an Oscar nominee in Cooper. And a wild ride. Let the bidding begin!

While distributors fight over “Devil’s Double,” one of them has nabbed Drake Doremus’s “Like Crazy.” A few wanted this sort of British “Blue Valentine”–what seems to be an auobiographical account of the American director’s ill fated romance and marriage to a beautiful youg Brit. Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones are the stars; I found the film ultimately a little tedious. It’s all improvised, too. So surprise! Paramount paid $4 million for worldwide rights. That’s like, crazy. You do learn a lot about immigration laws, however, concerning well-heeled Brits and Americans. Not the usual INS story.

The Devil's Double

By: Peter Debruge

Posted: Sun., Jan. 23, 2011, 3:55am PT

A Corsan presentation of a Corsan, Corrino, Staccato production in association with FIP Malta, Tulchin Entertainment, Foreign Media, Film Finance VI. (International sales: Corsan World Sales, Antwerp.) Produced by Paul Breuls, Michael John Fedun, Emjay Rechsteiner, Catherine Vandeleene. Executive producers, Harris Tulchin, Arjen Terpstra. Co-executive producers, Harm Mulder, Sjef Scholte. Directed by Lee Tamahori. Screenplay, Michael Thomas, based on the life story of Latif Yahia.

Uday Hussein/Latif Yahia - Dominic Cooper Sarrab - Ludivine Sagnier Ali - Mimoun Oaissa Munem - Raad Rawi Saddam Hussein/Faoaz - Philip Quast Yassem - Khalid Laith

The life story of Latif Yahia, body double to Saddam Hussein's diabolically unhinged son Uday, makes for slick action-movie fodder in "The Devil's Double," a rocket-powered thriller rife with scenery chewing and fast-and-loose revisionism that could, by dint of sheer sensationalism, break the Iraq movie curse and rack up some serious B.O. around the world. More "Scarface" than "House of Saddam," director Lee Tamahori's gangster-style treatment veritably blisters with tension as reluctant decoy Latif comes to fill the void of Uday's nonexistent conscience, playing front-row witness to the tyrant's insatiable cruelty. Biggest setback Stateside could be the ratings board.

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for character actor Dominic Cooper (usually relegated to dreamy supporting parts), "Double" allows the Brit thesp to tackle two juicy, red-meat roles, playing opposite ends of the moral spectrum as both Latif and Uday -- often in the same shot. In fact, "Double's" seamless split-screen work makes "The Social Network's" high-tech twinning effects look as old-fashioned as Friendster.

Within its opening minutes, Michael Thomas' script lays everything out, cutting from a montage of real-world atrocity (front-line footage depicting corpses and other casualties of war) to an attack in which Iraq Army Lt. Latif narrowly escapes with his life. Called to Baghdad by former classmate Uday, the decorated officer comes face-to-face with Uday's favorite mistresses, Sarrab (alluring French actress Ludivine Sagnier), and judging by the look she throws Latif, we know exactly where "Double" is headed before Uday even enters the room.

Uday's proposal is simple: He needs a "fiday" (a lookalike who can stand in for him in public), and Latif can either accept the job or see his family executed for his insubordination. Even when faced with this impossible choice, Latif resists. Did he really have such reservations? Though the film was inspired by Yahia's true experiences, Thomas and Tamahori treat "Double" as a dramatic retelling untethered to reality. For the sake of a good yarn, they prefer to think of Latif as a righteous soul, forced to "extinguish" himself (as he puts it) and mirror this monster feared by the Iraqi people.

"Double" panders to the basest tendencies in the makeover sequence that follows, depicting Latif's transformation with the same sordid approach seen in many an episode of "Nip/Tuck." Uday watches with mad-scientist zeal as Latif is stripped down, sized up and reshaped through plastic surgery to reflect his new boss.

The film shows a crass, party-boy interest in Uday's attitude and lifestyle, ranging from an unnecessarily explicit series of torture videos (including a power drill to the ear sure to inflame the MPAA) to uncomfortable scenes of kidnap, rape and murder. "It's all worse than we could possibly portray," Tamahori said by way of defense at pic's Sundance premiere, though one wonders whether auds really needed to have their faces rubbed in such vile behavior. "Double" further emasculates Uday by injecting suggestions of homosexuality and incest.

Looking on with disapproval, Latif remains upstanding through it all, and though it's easy to feel manipulated by the polar differences between Cooper's two characters, that dichotomy makes for great drama. Watching the swift, svelte energy with which Tamahori hurls us forward, it's easy to see the qualities that earned him the gig directing "Die Another Day," especially in the music choices, which favor electronic and rock over the typical regional sounds used to situate Middle Eastern fare.

Tamahori clearly wants the experience to feel extreme, intercutting blocks of vintage news footage from Saddam's invasion of Kuwait and the eventual American reaction to situate the Malta-based shoot and ground Uday's increasingly demented behavior. Whether brandishing a gold-plated assault rifle or snorting cocaine off the end of his knife, Uday easily could have lapsed into caricature, and one suspects that an entirely different, more satirical film might have resulted from the same script -- one closer in tone to "Dr. Strangelove" than "Dr. No."

That potential tongue-in-cheek quality might explain pic's preposterous ending, which indulges in a radical historical rewrite, or the implication that Uday's staff (including Raad Rawi as his security chief) might not have his best interests in mind. At any rate, someone else can come back and do a proper documentary later. Tamahori aims to entertain auds, and he does so with expert attention to all the crafts, especially the hair and makeup team that helps us distinguish between these evil twins.

Camera (widescreen, 35mm/video), Sam McCurdy; editor, Luis Carballar; music, Christian Henson; music supervisor, Mark Lo; production designer, Paul Kirby; art director, Charlo Dalli; set decorator, Caroline Smith; costume designer, Anna Sheppard; sound (Dolby Digital), Tim Fraser; sound designer, Stefan Henrix; supervising sound editor, Henrix; re-recording mixer, Martin Jensen; special effects supervisor, Michael Dawson; visual effects supervisor, Paul Round; visual effects, Peerless Camera Co.; stunt coordinator, Lubomir Misak; hair/makeup/prosthetics designer, Jan Sewell; line producer, Guy Tannahill; assistant director, Matthew Penry-Davey; casting, Amy Hubbard, John Hubbard. Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival (Premieres), Jan. 22, 2011. (Also in Berlin Film Festival -- Panorama.) Running time: 109 MIN.

(English dialogue)