Nights of Imagination

In ABC’s lavish retelling of “Arabian Nights,” the infamous magic carpet flies through the air with the greatest of ease. Ali Baba does battle with two snarling dragons as well as the evil 40 thieves. And Aladdin is granted his heart’s desire by the genie in the lamp.

Though the four-hour adventure features eye-popping special effects, dazzling sets and costumes, the core of “Arabian Nights” is really a simple love story.

“What people finally care about is people I think,” says director Steve Barron (“Merlin”). “If you get the people right, you can out do any visual effects I think.”

“Arabian Nights” stars Mili Avital as Scheherazade, the eldest daughter of the grand vizier of an Arabian kingdom. In the classic tale, she saves her life by telling mesmerizing stories to Schariar (Dougray Scott), her new husband she finds still paralyzed by anger at his first wife’s betrayal. Schariar plans to have Scheherazade killed the morning after their wedding night, but her stories buy her life a day at a time.

In the course of 1,001 nights, Scheherazade tells him the imaginative tales of Ali Baba (Rufus Sewell) who thwarts the evil Black Coda (Tcheky Karyo) and the wiley Aladdin (Jason Scott Lee), who has the genie of the lamp (John Leguizamo) grant him wealth so he can marry his dream woman.

Filmed on location in Turkey, the adventure features more than 500 special effects created by London’s FrameStore and Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. More than 48 sets were built on the sound stages in Antalaya, Turkey.

Avital (“Stargate”) says the spine of “Arabian Nights” is the constant death threat on Scheherazade. “She has to save her life no matter what,” she explains. By telling the stories to Schariar, “she’s saying there is a way to heal the pain--there is a way to heal your madness, and the way to do it is through your imagination. The message is so beautiful and spiritual.”

And it’s very sensual. “There’s fantasy, there’s sex,” says the Israeli actress. “It’s also very primal. Even with all those special effects, at the end of the day it is about a man and a woman trying to survive.”

Though these stories reportedly have existed since the 10th century, Avital found Scheherazade very contemporary.

“She is an absolute example of a modern woman who takes everything in her hands,” Avital says. “She’s such an independent spirit within a world where women had no rights. She’s very wise and at the same time she’s using all of her qualities of a woman from her sensuality to her brain to get to the heart of this man.”

The broodingly handsome Scott (“Ever After”) didn’t want to make Schariar sympathetic at the outset. “What I was trying to do was to make people understand why he was the way he was,” says the Scottish actor. “It wasn’t because he was just bad. He had lots of dark streaks in him and dark emotions. I wanted to go to that very dark and violent place where he was.”

Over the centuries, readers have misconstrued Schariar. “They think his madness is evil,” Scott says. “They don’t really look at the history of him--the way his father treated him and the way his brother and his first wife treated him. He sort of recoils into being a child again.”

Barron allowed Scott to make Schariar as dark as he wanted. “He had a big journey to make,” says Scott of his character. “We didn’t want to make him ‘Hollywood’ and make him likable from the beginning. We wanted him to be what he was--a very scared animal who was paranoid and whose reaction to fear was to lash out and say, ‘I’ll be the first one to harm someone before they kill me.’ ”

Barron found “Arabian Nights” to be a complex production because each story was set in a different culture and century. There was an Arabian advisor on the set, and Peter Barnes’ script was checked for accuracy by “Arabists”--scholars of the Arab world.

“The actual volume covers an enormous area--as far north as Turkey, as far south as south Arabia to the west as far as Morocco and the east way over to China,” Barron says. “It meant that we could really make all the stories very diverse in look and feel to each other. But that gave us more complications in that no two kind of sets could be reused.”

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“Arabian Nights” airs Sunday at 8 p.m. and Monday at 9 p.m. on ABC. The network has rated it TV-14-V (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14 with a special advisory for violence).