Peddy and I land safely in Colombo. Peddy is my partner in film. My editor, my good rock.

Checked into the Taj Samudra. While we get our bearings and figure out the best strategy, here's a recap for those of you who don't know the story-of-everything that happened so far and how we ended up on a small island 20 hours away from NY.

It all started with a simple enough question, "Will man's invention of god supersede man's invention of the wheel?" Put another way, will religious fervor conquer the science of reason? Can you separate faith from organized religion and have it co-exist with rational thinking or must one destroy the other? And how, by the way, is our future looking like 10 to 50 years from now? On thinking of ways to settle this debate one name came immediately to mind. Unfortunately, when we tried to reach Sir Arthur C. Clarke by email we received a curious auto reply saying that due to an influx of information Mr. Clarke is regretting to announce that he has disconnected himself from the Internet and had stopped answering emails. The message said that all inquiries should be sent to his agent. Agent? The man is turning 88! by the time his agent will answer my email he could already be on his way to the stars... This will not do. Being the conquistador Israelis that we are, we immediately set out in (a vain) search of alternative ways to reach him online. The search mainly revealed a lot of interesting stories and the fact that very few filmed projects exist about the man. In the process we took the time to read all of the existing biographies and watch all existing documentaries. We decided that the story of Clarke deserves a better representation on film. It all started with a simple enough question.

I wrote to the ACC Foundation. Wrote to the Clarkives. Wrote to my lawyer. Wrote to the agent.

Gave 3 reasons to make the film: nobody knows him; his final prophecy may become a priceless legacy for mankind; nobody from Hollywood is knocking on your door.

No game. Made a proposal: we'll go to Sri Lanka. Spend three days with the man and get an interview. We'll try to sell the film this way. If we fail you keep the tapes. If you succeed just reimburse us for the travel expenses. The bottom line was no.

But Karma was already working with or without us.

We met with documentarist Ilan Ziv. My wife works with him. He liked the idea: "art meets science meets religion go diving and find the answer to all of human kind's questions." We have a backer. Distribution on BBC and ARTE. Tsunami hits Sri Lanka, Clarke announces he is all right. Scary moment there. Later we feel that this particular backer might actually settle for something more "Fog of War" and less "Life and Death of Peter Sellers". It had to be accessible to most not to some. It means we have to get the interview to get a shot at the big picture. Talked to Bobby J., a long time New York Comedian friend. Turns out he knows of Clarke and that they spoke over the phone in 1989 while a civil war was raging in Sri Lanka. Clarke had to cut it short because they were shooting all around him.

Met Sunil R. in focus groups in Pheonix. He was born across the road form Clarke. Got Clarke's home phone number. Apparently many of Sunil's classmates used to hang out in Clarke's pool and play table tennis. Will try to arrange an unofficial get together through Sunil's brother who still lives on the island. Most likely we will need to get a diving lesson from Clarke's life long partner Hector Ekanayake.

Went to a party at Montezinos, Fashion Photographer. Friend. Turns out he also spoke to Clarke after a lecture he delivered in Princeton. Weird. If you think it's not, try this: my good friend Pavel offered to introduce me to his British neighbor upstate since he was born in Sri Lanka. Imagine our surprise when it turned out that said neighbor actually interviewed Clarke in 1978 for the first edition of Omni Magazine. What you may call a small world.

Going to go there on his birthday and pose him a series of fundamental questions. About religion and science, about transportation and water, about education and money, about medicine and politics, about earth and space, about communications and astral projections, about drugs and consciousness, about fatherhood and our place in the universe, about why he's so damn hard to reach.

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