Through reading David Pritchard's press bio in preparation for the interview, I came to realize how important a figure he is in film and television. A self-described "crazy person" who I had the "auspicious opportunity" to interview on March 6, Pritchard is a humble, compassionate and humorous person who, despite his astounding success (numerous award nominations and five Emmy awards) in the worlds of business, film and television, possesses a genuine interest and concern for his fellow human beings. These attributes are highly apparent in his most recent endeavour, the acclaimed Jordanian film, Captain Abu Raed (directed by Amin Matalqa), which was screened at Sundance Film Festival and opens in Boston in June. I encourage everyone to attend Brandeis' screening of the film on Saturday, March 21, at 4 p.m. I know I will, and not simply because Pritchard threatened to send me "a dirty note and . dirty pictures" if I did not. JustArts: I know that a major purpose of the film is to promote cross-cultural communication between the Middle East and the West. What progress has been made on that front in regard to the film, and do you find differing degrees of willingess to engage in dialogue from one side versus the other?

David Pritchard: There are very few ways to communicate to a wide range of people that is not electronic, that is not video and audio. The fastest and most penetrating manner of communicating who we are, socially, culturally and privately is through film. And, I believe that so many of Western films about the Arabic world ... contain Arab actors and Arab people and are pretty skewed toward violence and anger and political and religious people. I can give you a very specific example of this: I screened [Captain Abu Raeb] at Sundance in January of 2008 for 1,200 junior and high school students in Ogden, Utah at 9 a.m.-I was frightened. Ogden, Utah, is a very conservative religious community-Mormon, ... and you're getting a bunch of junior high and high school students to come at 9 in the morning to see a foreign language film in Arabic. So, I was expecting the worst, but these kids were engaged . they were laughing at all of the jokes; they were moved by all of the conflict. They were especially moved by the conflict between the old man and the father and the son who Abu Raed helped. And, at the end of the film these kids were joking around with each other and saying Arabic words that were presented on the screen in English subtitles in Arabic. So they were saying to each other salam, mahaba, shufi, ... [and] using that language breaks down cultural barriers instantaneously because now you have 1,200 kids there who know three or four words of Arabic, and when they meet an Arab they're going to use those words even if they do it in kind of a goofy way.

The girls in that theater ... deeply related to the plight of the the female airwoman in her film, and after the film they all wanted her autograph. They were getting their picture taken with her, and she had stood up on the stage after the film-the actress who played Nour in the film, she got up on stage-and she said to them, "I'm a very strict Muslim." ... And these young girls wanted to talk to her to find out what it was like because they had never met a Muslim woman and when, by the way, when [the actress] said it, all the guys in the theatre-you could hear them [gasp] because they were like "Whoa," because this is some hot woman and she's a Muslim? So just that experience tells me that the more people that see the Arab world in its honest presentation as the film has done, the higher the probability that the cultural barriers and the cultural differences are going to get reduced. In the Arab world they embrace this film wholeheartedly because it was the first time somebody showed a cross-section of society without having it all be about politics or religion-there's no mention of politics or religion in the film.

JA: As a follow-up to the last question, how did the goal of the promotion of cross-cultural communication influence your decision to hire a production crew composed of people from at least four continents?

DP: Well it was really important for us to make the majority of the crew coming from Jordan and the rest of the Arab world, so we specifically tried to fill every key crew member that we could with Arab-language crew members. Now there weren't skilled people in Jordan, so we had to go into Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon and Syria and Algeria, and then there were people from Sweden and Germany and Canada, and the United States and England. So, it was a pretty wide range of crew, and we wanted ... to get as many Arab crew members as possible, and of course the cast was completely Jordanian.

And by the way, the boys and girls in the film are all refugees, and 11 of them are orphans, so they all live in very, very austere-pretty poor-conditions in refugee camps in Jordan. . Most of them don't have fathers. So you know it was important for us to have mostly Arab members on the crew, and it was also important that we have crew members who you know were going to be flexible and understanding. You're in a foreign country; you've got to adhere to different morals, different cultural taboos and different ways of talking to each other. . On the set there were nine different languages spoken at different times.

JA: Captain Abu Raed is the first Jordanian film to be exported worldwide. What was the Jordanian filmmaking industry like before the production of Abu Raed, and what effects has international reception of the film had on potential growth and development of Jordanian film?

DP: Well, it's the first film in 50 years. There have been a couple of other films, but they have not had this kind of theatrical structure and budget. And the budget on this was about $2 million. There have been a lot of other films-there's a very active film community in Jordan that was started by King Abdullah and Queen Ranyah, and . there've been a lot of films made there in Jordan-including the new Transformers movie [which] was shot in Jordan-the one that's coming out this summer, so there's a lot of films that are produced in Jordan. Most of them are war films where they're trying to have Jordan double for Iraq or Iran or Lebanon or some other war zone. This is the first one that's come out of there that's actually a dramatic narrative film that's actually not about war or religion. And, one of the things that was really important to all of us who were associated with this film is that . we actually demonstrate to the world that the Arab world is not just about death-that it's about the people.

The effect on the Jordanian film industry, I mean there's a film school that has inducted the first class, [which] is graduating next year, and the film school's in Aqaba, Jordan, in the south of Jordan and, . that school is in association with the University of Southern California film school, so that the professors from USC are over there teaching young Jordanian [and] other Arab kids from around the Arab world how to make films and television shows. So, I think this film is going to have a dramatic impact, and . what I'm hoping is that it encourages other filmmakers in the Arab world to make films like this that actually inspire young people to tell their personal stories and their personal journeys.

And I think that it's important that the film is being exported around the world. The film is being distributed in practically every country in the world-all over Europe and all over South America and all over Asia and in the United States, and it starts in theaters in the United States in June. . What that does for Jordan is that it's a copyright that's controlled by the investors in Jordan, and that copyrighted film is being exported commercially all over the world, so it's a way for Jordan to build a net export business ... [and] create a product that's selling all over the world, and that product has residual value to Jordan-it's expressing their culture and their society and their people in a way that is really, really constructive and positive. So, it has a double impact: You've created a product that you actually make money on, and at the same time you're telling a story that represents the truth about your country as opposed to some skewed media presentation. So, I think in terms of it being positive all around-I don't think anything is more positive than that.

JA: Brandeis University recently announced its new Film [Studies] major and is seriously discussing adding a Business major as well. For students interested in one or both fields as a long-term career goal, would you emphasize undergraduate and graduate work, practical experience or both as the most valuable means to achieve it?

DP: Well, having a formal education in any subject is a necessity, and it's because of the process you have to [go] through to get that information. It's not about filling the mind with information as much as it is the sparking the inquisitive nature of the mind, and what I believe is that when you're getting a degree-especially in a college as prestigious as Brandeis-you have to work, you have to apply yourself, you have to get up early, you have to read, you've got to be prepared, you have to manage your time, you have to have a capacity to present, to defend your position. All of those things happen at a university campus. In four years you grow so much that you don't really remember all the skills that you've adapted or that you've learned from your experiences at a university, but they stay with you forever.

And so the formal education is absolutely a requirement, and the practical experience teaches you how to get along with people-how to not make the same mistake twice-because that's the difference between people who are successful and people who aren't: They learn from their mistakes. And the other thing is if you want to be good at anything, you've got to just keep doing it. There's a great book-you know Malcolm Gladwell has written this book called The Outliers (he's written a bunch of great books-you know, many of them are pop culture-oriented). But in The Outliers, Mr. Gladwell says that if you put 10,000 hours into a particular subject or into a particular process that you're going to become pretty much an expert at it. But 10,000 hours is a lot of time, and the practical experience on top of the formal education, I think, prepares you to do anything, and I would encourage anybody who wants to major in the film business to understand the financial and business side of it because it is a commercial enterprise and it requires financial discipline to be successful . and vice-versa. you can't do it as just a business. You've got to understand dramatic structure, and you've got to understand literature and human motivation because that's what makes a story compelling. Same as in The Simpsons; The Simpsons is funny, and you keep watching it. And, you know those characters, but you keep watching it because there's a lot that goes into what those characters say and do. It's entertaining, but it's really good dramatic structure and really good literature.