Hollywood filmmakers know all about dealing with recalcitrant stars. But making a movie about a figure who can’t be depicted for fear of enraging his 1.5 billion followers is a whole other challenge.

Earlier this month, Barrie Osborne, the American producer of such blockbusters as The Matrix and The< Lord of the Rings, announced plans for an “epic” retelling of the life of the Prophet Muhammad. The US$150-million biopic, scheduled to begin production in early 2011, is being financed by the Al Hashemi Group, a Qatari construction and petrochemical conglomerate. Their aims sound laudable: “Hopefully this film can bridge some cultural misunderstandings,” Osborne, reached in San Francisco, told Maclean’s. “Muhammed was a great man, he made incredible changes to society.” However, even aside from Islamic traditions that forbid visual or aural representations of the Prophet or members of his immediate family (a prohibition driven home by the worldwide rioting that greeted a Danish newspaper’s publication of a series of Muhammad cartoons in 2005), the project seems a fair bit more fraught than the usual studio fare. Continue…