Showbiz / Interview With JINN Director Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad

Interview With JINN Director Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad

Showbiz Apr 04, 2014

by Anokhi Admin

Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad’s supernatural adventure JINN released Friday, April 4th in 200 theaters across North America. As the writer, director and co-founder of Exxodus Pictures, Ahmad is said to be committed to harnessing the power of imagination. After graduating from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, he began his career as a concept designer and storyboard artist, working in commercials and directing music videos for Brandy, Chaka Khan, Dr. Dre and Fatboy Slim. He followed his dream of becoming a director and to date has a slew of feature film and television credits such as: The Pretender series for NBC, Dungeons and Dragons from New Line Cinema, the award-winning science fiction short Alliance and the Bollywood-Hollywood feature Perfect Mismatch.

Ahmad sat to talk about his latest project based on Eastern mythology, the new supernatural adventure which he directed and edited, you definitely get the sense that this is a passion project as he also designed the 600 horsepower Firebreather car seen in the movie.

Director Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad

Tell us about your background and how you came to know about the jinn?

My parents were born in India. They moved to Pakistan during the Partition, then to England, and eventually to Michigan, where I was born. One of my mom’s nutritional tactics was to say, “If you don’t finish your veggies, the jinn will come out of the woods and get you.” In our house, jinn were somehow related to dietary threats, but that didn’t make them any less fearsome. Consider this: In just about every crevice of the world, there’s a grandmother scaring the crap out of her grandkids with jinn stories!

What made you want to make a movie about this concept?

As for jinn, I’ve known about them all my life. The concept was always very scary but cool at the same time, and I used to wonder why some of my friends knew about the jinn and others didn’t. We’d never seen a movie, comic book, television show or video game about them. Imagine growing up on ghost stories but having no cinematic portrayal of ghosts: no Ghostbusters, no Beetlejuice, no Poltergeist. Jinn are part of a mythology known to a massive populace – it seemed obvious that someone’s got to make a film about them.

Faran Tahir As "Ali"

What are your goals as a filmmaker?

As a filmmaker, I want to create new heroes. I want young people to be able to walk away from my films and say, “I want to be like that man” or “I want to be like that woman.” The movies I gravitate toward have all the classic elements of heroism and enchantment, which is what I’m trying to do today. I truly believe in the idea that we can shape the world, little by little, by putting positive images into the collective consciousness.

Dominic Rains As "Shawn"

What do you want audiences to take away from your new film JINN?

With JINN, we’ve taken an old story and delivered it to a new audience, thereby making it a new story if you consider that even people familiar with the concept predominately know it in the tradition of oral storytelling. I wanted to spark the imaginations of people around the world using a folklore which for the most part has not been explored by Hollywood. Everyone in the industry is looking for the next great idea, the next great franchise, the next great phenomenon, the next great work of imagination. This is a concept with the potential to be a lucrative franchise, ripe enough to lure moviegoers hungry for new content and appeal to an enormous audience whose cultural mythology has yet to be explored onscreen. We want people to come on the journey with us. If someone watches our film and goes on to tell their own story about jinn, I believe we’ve done our job.

Director Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad On Set

Updated theater list for US/Canada:
http://www.jinnthemovie.com/listings/

_{Photo Credit: Exxodus Pictures

Interview courtesy of Boxofficeguru}

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Interview With JINN Director Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad

by Anokhi Admin

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