One interesting twist to this... If you were going to make a movie, with professional actors playing the roles, and your final goal was to create something tha

One interesting twist to this... If you were going to make a movie, with professional actors playing the roles, and your final goal was to create something that would be considered slanderous of Islam, there's are arguments in favor of keeping the actors in the dark about your actual intent. Assuming that this fact would be easily discovered (and the actors could plausibly deny all accountability publicly), that does protect them quite a bit from most backlash; so you'd mostly be risking your own neck, not theirs. In theory, anyway... in reality, the people who suffer the backlash will be, for example, IT workers at a US embassy with no connection to the film whatsoever. And the actors, yes, will be protected somewhat, but not completely; and they'd probably prefer to be able to make the decision on whether they'd like that (reduced) backlash or not. I suspect the theoretical protection is what the film creator had in mind, though.