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The comedian told the Late Show With David Letterman that he wanted to make the movie better than his previous big-screen outing with Borat.
Cohen said: "We thought, 'What could people see that they've never seen before on film?' We thought one thing would be a comedian interviewing a terrorist, which I think has never been done before, for good reason!
"So we showed the outline of the script to the studio and they said, 'This is great, who's going to play the terrorist?' and we said, 'No, we're going to find a real terrorist'."
He added: "It's not that easy to find an actual terrorist. In fact your government has been looking for one for about nine years!
"There's no Craigslist in Beirut, for example. So we called up a contact we had in the CIA and said, 'Can you help us, we're looking to find a terrorist?'"
Cohen revealed that he managed to secure an interview with a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade in the West Bank and that he hired an English security guard who had worked on the 'Hero' tour for singer Enrique Iglesias.
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