How did Sept. 11 and its aftermath affect the filming of “Sahara”?
We were actually filming out in the desert on 9/11. We were in one of the most inaccessible places, a town called Agadez in the heart of Niger. We’d hear from BBC News and I talked on a satellite phone to my family at home. But it’s very, very poor and they don’t have newspapers and magazines, and there were no televisions where we were. All you could do was just imagine from these images what you’d heard had happened. I had a couple nights of very bad dreams. After that, I thought, “That’s the end of this series.” But it was quite the opposite. The people in Algeria actually asked if we would come to their country. They said, “Now you’ll know what we’ve been going through for 10 years with our own extreme radical Islamic movements here.” And to a certain extent, for a while, it did make things better. We had no problems after 9/11, no problems after the Afghanistan bombing, anywhere that we went. It’s a good time for this series now — a chance to humanize the people of Islamic countr
