"Zero Dark Thirty," Kathryn Bigelow's movie on Navy's SEAL Team 6's hunt for, and killing of, Osama Bin Laden has run into more drama -- and major production hasn't even started.
After congressional republicans voiced concerns that the White House was leaking classified information to Bigelow and her team (a suggestion the administration summarily dismissed) and Sony postponed the film's release until after the 2012 election, the "Hurt Locker" director may have thought she was in the clear.
But new turmoil in India has further complicated filming as right-wing Hindu activists protested the production on Friday. AFP reports that members of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or VHP, disrupted shooting in the north India city of Chandigarh and demanded that any representations of Pakistan on Indian soil be taken down.
A production company claimed it was merely making "establishing" shots and that the Abbottabad home in which bin Laden was killed would be recreated in Jordan.
The movie will star Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, Edgar Ramirez and Mark Strong. Chris Pratt and Jason Clarke were also original members of the cast.
In development for years and written by Mark Boal (who also won an Oscar for "The Hurt Locker") film had to retool after Bin Laden was killed by the Navy's SEAL Team 6 early in 2011.
"The attempt to kill Bin laden in the Tora Bora mountains in 2001 was no longer as relevant a story as what had just happened," Edgerton told Indiewire last year, "But then what had just happened was so fresh and as we all know, history often needs time and perspective to kind of settle in everybody's minds, you can't just go and start shooting the movie in the next month and assume that you're going to get everything right and have all of the information. So the project was put on hold for a while while Mark and Kathryn kind of gathered information."
The movie's working title, "Zero Dark Thirty," is military slang for an early starting time, as Deadline reported.
That title, however, may cause another headache for Bigelow and Boal, as Slashfilm reports it is already being used by director Paul Solet, who is developing a sort of military zombie movie.