How the directors of 'Bad Boys for Life' spent 8 years making 'Rebel,' an unflinching examination of the Syrian war and their most personal movie yet

• After finding acclaim in Hollywood with "Bad Boys for Life," directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah have now made their passion project.
• Taking eight years to make, "Rebel" delivers an authentic look at the Syrian War.

Growing up in Belgium, filmmakers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah spent much of their youth like most kids around the world: having fun with their friends.

But by the time they were in their 20s, many of those childhood friends suddenly weren't around anymore. The discovery of what happened has haunted the directors for most of their adult lives.

The Syrian civil war changed the lives of many Muslims in the region, beginning with the Arab Spring protests in 2011, three years later, the terrorist group Isis began radicalizing young Muslim men, even kids, and occupied large areas of Syria.

The complicated conflict reached all the way to the lives of El Arbi and Fallah in Belgium.

"I grew up in Vilvoorde, which is a place where the highest percentage of young Muslims went to Syria," Fallah explained to Insider over a Zoom chat while sitting beside El Arbi. "I saw them one by one leaving. I knew them. I went to school with them. I played soccer with them. So to see them leave, it was really shocking and painful to see because they are like us. They are the same backgrounds and that's why we felt we had to tell this story from our perspective, from a Muslim perspective with all the nuances and complexities."

Having built up a high profile with the direction of "Bad Boys for Life," two episodes of the Disney+ series "Ms. Marvel," and a "Batgirl" movie for Max that was canceled, El Arbi and Fallah thought they finally had enough leverage to make the movie they had been developing for eight years.

"Rebel," which hit select theaters Friday, follows two Muslin Belgian brothers, Kamal (Aboubakr Bensaihi) and Nassim (Amir El Arbi), whose lives are forever changed during the Syrian war. Kamal goes to Syria to help the victims but becomes a member of an armed group against his will. Meanwhile, Nassim, who idolizes his older brother, gets recruited into Isis, thinking he's following in Kamal's footsteps.

El Arbi and Fallah took the skills they gained in Hollywood, combined them with all the emotions they had been carrying for years, and produced an authentic, unflinching examination of the Syrian war and how it crippled Muslim lives.

"One of our favorite directors is Oliver Stone, and I think the way he portrayed the Vietnam War, we wanted to do the same thing through the Syrian war and the rise of Isis," El Arbi told Insider. "Besides making a movie that hits people really emotionally, we also wanted to try to educate."

But instead of taking the dramatic route that Stone leaned into for classic war movies like "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July," El Arbi and Fallah mixed in musical interludes and poetry to tell their story.

"Music seemed to be the most appropriate part because music is part of the Muslim and Arabic culture," El Arbi said. "People tend to forget that Isis was against music, instruments, against female voices singing. So we felt if we are going to make a movie that is really this attack against Isis it should have musical elements and poetry. Musical and poetry elements reach the audience in a different way than just normal scenes can do."

Throughout the movie, the set changes, and the actors break into song (or sometimes rap, depending on how the character is feeling) and dance. But audiences can still expect plenty of action.

Having worked with "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Top Gun" producer Jerry Bruckheimer on the "Bad Boys" franchise, El Arbi and Fallah consider themselves graduates of what they called the "Jerry Bruckheimer School of Action," making them well-equipped to pack plenty of action into "Rebel."

One stand-out scene occurs during a battle sequence within an apartment building. After an explosion, a floor of apartments opens up, now all connected by holes in their walls. The camera trails the characters as they race through all the rooms as more explosions go off around them.

The filmmakers believe that scene defines the way their collaboration works.

"Through the years, the idea evolved to something beautiful," Fallah said.

"I had seen pictures of these holes in a wall going through every room and I felt it would be really striking that we have a sequence like that," El Arbi said. "Bilall and the DP then designed it so there's a shot where you are going through different rooms and each has a different look. So it's something where our two ideas came together."

"Rebel" had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 and was released last summer in Belgium to high acclaim. Showing it now in the US is exciting for El Arbi and Fallah, as it's a culmination of the close-to-a-decade journey to finally putting the movie on-screen.

"This is the most personal experience we've ever had so it's higher than just making a movie," Fallah said. "The way we felt about the story, the way we wrote it, the way we thought about the scenes, it's an extreme responsibility because we are Muslims and we wanted to show the real thing; something we hadn't really seen in movies yet."