INCOGNITO: Cops escort thoroughly disguised filmmaker Nakoula Bassely Nakoula from his Cerritos, Calif., home yesterday so he could be interviewed by federal investigators. (Reuters)
Federal authorities yesterday grilled the filmmaker behind the controversial movie that sparked hellfire across the Muslim world for depicting prophet Mohammed as a womanizer and a pedophile, authorities said.
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, in hiding since the bloodshed erupted on Tuesday, was escorted shortly after midnight from his home in Cerritos, Calif., to a local sheriff’s station swaddled like the Invisible Man in a coat, hat, scarf and glasses.
The disguise was Nakoula’s idea, cops said.
Authorities “don’t have an active investigation” on Nakoula, 55, and he “participated in a voluntary interview with federal probation officers,” a law-enforcement source said.
He spent 30 minutes with authorities before being released. A spokesman for the LA County Sheriff’s Department said Nakoula did not return to his home, but instead was at an undisclosed location.
“We don’t know where he went,” said the spokesman, Steve Whitmore.
Nakoula was questioned about his activities while filming “Innocence of Muslims” — a low-budget film whose 14-minute trailer was posted in July on YouTube — and whether it was a violation of his probation on a financial-crimes conviction that prohibited him from using computers or the Internet.
But the feds’ sudden interest in Nakoula’s activities, coupled with the White House on Friday asking YouTube to review whether the film “violates their terms of use,” is making First Amendment experts wonder if the government is squeezing him to take the film off the Web.
“If it’s a pretext for getting him not to say what he said because of the content of the movie or its impact, that would raise a First Amendment concern,” said Donald Downs, a political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“They need to be duly careful about undermining our free-speech rights.”
Despite its “mocking” and “highly critical” message, Downs added, the movie should be wholly protected under the First Amendment — and cautioned against calling it hate speech.
“This wasn’t like the KKK or the Nazi Party,” he added. “This was mockery.”
Clips from “Innocence of Muslims” sparked a wave of protests that swept across 20 countries, beginning in Libya when a wild mob attacked the US Embassy in Benghazi on Tuesday and killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American officials.
The man behind it all, Nakoula, first identified himself as Sam Bacile — an Israeli real-estate mogul who boasted that he raised $5 million from Jewish investors for his pet project.
In reality, he is an Egyptian immigrant and Coptic Christian who has served time in federal prison on felony bank-fraud charges.
He “truly believed” the film was “all real and verifiable through some sort of historical books and could be looked up by anybody,” an industry insider told The Post.
Nakoula fed a screenwriter notes and instructed him on exactly how he wanted the low-budget script to read, the source said.
“The writer had very little to do with the content of the screenplay, other than formatting Sam’s notes in something that could be shot as a movie, with the possible exception of some tidbits of dialogue, which is always the case with writers,” the source said.
He was aided by self-described “script consultant” Steve Klein, a Christian fundamentalist in California notorious for his anti-Islam remarks.
Once the script was ready, Nakoula called in director Alan Roberts — whose work includes a series of cheap softcore porn flicks like “The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood” — but had “virtually no money” to shoot the flick despite his deep-pocket claims.
“That is why it was all done with green-screen backgrounds, because they could not afford to pay for more than one location,” the source said. “I remember the director saying that he was going to rent an old warehouse to film that in,” he added.
Municipal Permits required for filming were issued to a charity called Media for Christ, run by another Coptic Christian of Egyptian origin, Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih.
The film was eventually shot in front of a warehouse in central LA with a few scenes shot at Nakoula’s home — and screened in June at the small Vine Cinema in Los Angeles, a place often used by student filmmakers to show their projects to tiny audiences.
Several actors who participated in the low-budget “Innocence of Muslims” this week condemned Nakoula’s work, saying they had been duped into creating anti-Muslim propaganda.
One of them, Tim Dax, said he was paid $75 a day to play a character he thought would be the Bible’s Samson — but eventually found himself with a spear in hand, shooting a movie with a nonsensical plot.
Another, Cindy Lee Garcia, told “Inside Edition” that the original script didn’t even include the Muslim prophet and the flick underwent “drastic” rewrites.
“The entire cast and crew are extremely upset and feel taken advantage of by the producer,” 80 crew members said in a joint statement. “We are 100 percent not behind this film, and were grossly misled about its intent and purpose.”
But the industry source, who was in close contact with the film’s director prior to filming, said he didn’t buy it.
“I do not see how anybody could have been fooled unless they did not read what they were hired to do,” the source said. “I saw this script years ago, and it was pretty obvious that Muslims would not like it — just like it was obvious with Mel Gibson’s ‘Passion of the Christ.’ ”