'Real missiles and bombs were going off': How Saddam Hussein made an epic Hollywood-style film in Iraq

In July 1983, Clash of Loyalties was screened for the first – and almost last – time. In 2020, its producer told the BBC about conscriptions, interrogations, and a drunk Oliver Reed. The biggest threat to Saddam Hussein's epic Hollywood-style film Clash of Loyalties was not the outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq in 1980, a few weeks after filming began in the desert near Baghdad. It wasn't the steady stream of cast and crew being called up to fight, disappearing from the film set without notice. It wasn't the challenge of transporting World War One prop weapons across the border of Turkey, where customs guards stopped the film's lorries, believing they were importing a real arsenal to aid Iraqi troops. Instead, the film was closest to being derailed by a drunken incident in a hotel restaurant involving the film's star Oliver Reed urinating in an empty wine bottle. "He asked the waiter to take it over to the next table, and said, 'With my compliments,'" the film's Iraqi-born British producer, Lateif Jorephani, told the BBC's Witness History in 2020. "The authorities were absolutely flabbergasted… I had Telexes from ministers in Iraq telling me, 'Pull this guy out, we don't want h