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Roland Emmerich has admitted that he feared a fatwa would be placed on him if he filmed a scrapped scene for 2012.
The filmmaker is well known for decimating famed landmarks on movies including The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day. He stated that while he decided to destroy the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro because he is "against organised religion", he was fearful of the Islamic religious decree for a sequence that was planned but not shot.
The 53-year-old wanted to demolish the Kaaba, which is a cube-shaped building at the heart of Mecca and is the centre of prayers and the Islamic Hajj pilgrimage.
He told Sci-Fi Wire: "Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit. But my co-writer Harald said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie. And he was right. We have to all in the Western world think about this.
"You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is.
"So it's just something which I kind of didn't [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out."
2012 is scheduled to open in cinemas on November 13.
