Christians in Cinema

Critically acclaimed director Scott Derrickson is one of the most vocal Christians working in Hollywood today. After his film The Exorcism of Emily Rose caught the eye of producer and manager Erwin Stoff, Derrickson was invited to direct the remake of the science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still.

During a worldwide press tour, I had the chance to talk with Scott in Hollywood and by phone to discuss the film, his faith, and the filmmakers who influenced him.

I want to live a meaningful life.

The original film was very politically-minded, but yours is directed more toward ecological concerns.

Scott   The original film has a grand reputation for the very strong political ideas that are in there. I think both the original film and this one are much more about human nature than even the social issues. They’re about how our human nature has this propensity toward self-destruction, and whether or not we have the capacity to avoid that.

As far as the political or social issues are concerned, in the original it was the Cold War. It was a perilous situation where we were possibly going to destroy ourselves through nuclear weapons. Now the peril that we’re bringing on ourselves is the destruction of our environment. It’s serious and it’s real, and it’s something that I thought made sense in terms of updating the story. At the same time, I didn’t want to make too much of it, and there’s not a lot said in the movie about it.

It’s certainly not trying to tell anybody what to do, because I don’t like films particularly that do that. What I was intending was making a movie that’s more of a picture about what’s happening in the world right now, and we’re good at making messes of things.

You reworked the script with the original writer David Scarpa. How much time did you spend working on it?

Scott   Quite a lot of time. The script was written and then sent to me as a screenplay that 20th Century Fox wanted to make. I didn’t write it and I didn’t start on it. When I read it, I thought there was a lot in it that made me want to do the movie, but it still needed a ways to go.

I worked with the writer for a few months right away, and then when Keanu [Reeves, playing the alien Klaatu] got involved, that was a more intensive time working together. It was myself and Keanu and the screenwriter locked in a room for quite a few weeks, all day every day, just going through the script scene by scene and trying to work out how the movie would function.

The alien Klaatu actually learns as much from us as we learn from him. He learns about compassion.

Scott  There’s no question that’s the story. It’s one of the most interesting things about the movie to me. I love the idea that he comes to assess human nature. He takes human form, and it’s through his experience of being human that he sees that there’s more than just the obvious fact that we’re destructive. He sees this other side that is profound and startling, and his own human of what he feels at seeing this mother and son is indescribable. It goes beyond his categories. So, essentially, he does become humanized.

I heard Keanu say that Klaatu starts off more alien than human and ends more human than alien. I really like that part of the story; I think it’s one of the very interesting aspects of the story.

There’s a wonderful scene with a character named Mr. Wu, and it’s all about human nature.

Scott   That’s my favorite scene in the movie. It was my favorite scene in the script, and it’s the scene that made me do the movie. When I read the script, I thought there was something so beautiful and just fantastic about two aliens speaking Mandarin in a New Jersey McDonald’s about human nature and what it is, and how there are these two sides to it. I love it when Mr. Wu says, “Here’s what I can explain to you. They’re destructive. They’re bent toward the destruction of each other and themselves. That’s a fact. But there’s this other side,” and he can’t really describe it. He struggles.

He says, “What I can tell you is I’ll die with them. They’re that meaningful to me.” He sort of puts the burden back on Keanu’s character Klaatu and leaves it up to him to figure out what that means. It is my favorite scene in the film.

I secretly believe that Mr. Wu is putting him on a course, and he’s saying, “if you’re going to make a decision, you have to figure this out.” He plants something in Klaatu, and the look on Keanu’s face when Mr. Woo says there’s another side to them that I can’t explain to you, and human life is hard having lived it, I’m so grateful I have that I’m going to die here. Klaatu looks at him like he can’t quite grasp what he told him.

To me, that was the first crack in Klaatu’s ice. And Barnhardt opens even more, then Helen and Jacob open it all the way, and he gets it. He realizes that they’re just as important as the planet itself, and he can’t choose one over the other.

There’s one scene where you have the cross on the tombstone almost half the size of the screen, then the kid’s posture is almost like kneeling at the foot of the cross.

Scott   That was very conscientious for me. I thought the Christ analogy of Klaatu is very strong, and I get asked that at every press conference I do. The DNA sample, the wound in the hand, which is a stigmata, where he walks on water, etc.

I wanted to take on that aspect of the original because I love the fact that he makes a sacrificial death, and the final affirmation that he’s leaving is the ascension. He’s not dead, he’s not gone. For me that Christ-story of Klaatu is so embedded in the story, it’s inescapable. I tried to put things in there that I thought would be elegant enough for a modern audience to appreciate and enjoy. For the record, every press conference I’ve gone to around the world makes a big deal about it. Particularly because it’s Keanu, and he’s played the Christ figure in The Matrix. That and the remake seem to be the two most common questions I receive.

This film shows your hope for human nature. What is it you see around you that gives you that hope?

Scott   What I see that makes me hopeful about the future is certainly not the circumstances we’re in, nor the gigantic messes that we’ve made. What makes me hopeful is human nature, and I feel that way about myself as an individual as much as I feel it that way about America as a country or the human race as a species. I feel that, very often, we have to make mistakes and sometimes get ourselves into bad situations before we have the strength to recognize that we have to change on deep levels and make really significant alterations to who we are and the way we’re living. Sometimes that’s the very thing that forces us to grow beyond where we were before we made the mess in the first place.

I see a lot of that every way I turn. I feel that way from my church community, from watching the national news and watching the way the country, from all sides and all political parties, how everyone has recognized the significant things that needed to be changed. I feel that way as I’ve recently traveled around the world and listened to people in various countries talking about these issues.

What makes me hopeful is human nature

People talk about issues like environmentalism, which in my opinion is something that should not have become so politicized. But I think that everybody is realizing that we should be good stewards of our planet. We can all at least agree on that, so let’s do what we can to sustain this life-giving world that we live in.

I don’t feel any sense of blind optimism, but I love it when I see people change. I love it when I see people grow. I love it when I see it in myself, in my children, in my wife. As much as there’s a lot of adversity and a lot of hurting people right now…there are a lot of hurting people right now, especially because of the economic crunch. It’s a basic belief of mine that that’s the very thing that forges us into better human beings, if we respond properly. And I see a lot of good responses going on right now.

The Day the Earth Stood Still speaks to many big “life questions” that a lot of other films address, but from a faith perspective. How difficult is it to make that part of the film without making it the message of the film?

Scott   It’s not something I ever had to fight for. It’s been very encouraging in the course of my career that I’ve never felt on any level pressure to divorce my perspective as a Christian from the work that I do. I don’t think I’d be able to.

I’ve got a lot of problems and shortcomings, but one of the things I think I do well is that I’m a pretty integrated person. My faith isn’t a compartment in my life; it just is who I am. It’s fundamental and foundational to who I am, and I can’t do anything that’s separated from it.

I happen to believe that Christianity is true, and not just true in terms of the revelation of the Bible and Christ and all that, but it’s also true about life and wisdom. It speaks to all issues well. I find that also Christianity is so rooted in Western storytelling, a tradition we’ve all inherited for 2000 years.

Keanu and I have had good conversations about this, how you can’t escape it. You literally can’t get away from it, and I think the filmmakers that go out of their way to get away from it end up telling stories that don’t resonate as well with the popular public because they’re breaking the storytelling tradition that people are sort of built to understand.

With this movie, the Christ allegory of the alien character Klaatu is very overt in the original, and it works beautifully. It doesn’t matter what your religious perspective is coming into the movie, it just works on a storytelling level. So I made the decision not to discard that, but to shape it for a modern audience in some ways. I think it’s in people’s DNA to respond to those things.

But it can’t be an attempt to get people to believe the way you believe. It’s never that for me, because once you do that, people resist it. If the movie feels like it has a message, like it’s trying to tell people how to think or how to act, even if they agree with that message, they know it’s not good storytelling.

But if you’ve got truth in there, and they get to discover it, the packaging of it is something that doesn’t bother them. If it doesn’t feel specifically “Christian,” but feels truthful, they love it. I certainly don’t expect to have any criticism at all to have done that with this film.

I think to try to extract it from the original Robert Wise movie would force you to break the back of the story. If you tried to take it out, you’d be left with a house with no rafters and the roof would fall in. There weren’t any conversations about taking it out, because everyone knew it would have to be there, because that’s what the story is.

You’ve been quoted as saying that your role as an artist is to “shine light into the dark corners of human life.” Where did that philosophy play out the strongest in this film?

Scott   It has to do with the manner in which the film is an attempt to portray this moment in time, this era, this year of 2008. The original film was such a product of its time – it was about the whole war, the fear of the atomic bomb, the establishment of the UN.

To me, what justified doing the remake in my own mind, was to tell the same story, but update it to modern day and deal with the social realities that we’re all surrounded by, these kind of messes that we’ve made.

We’ve made a mess of things on so many things, and we have yet so many problems, that it’s becoming really serious. The war that we’re in, the destruction of our planet, the cynicism of some people in powerful positions over the years, and certainly the economy being the one that we feel the most. I’m not saying that because of the presidential election this year, but I see it in my friends and families in our church. It’s HARD out there!

I don’t think of this as being a movie with a message, but it is an attempt to portray the world we live in. Human beings seem to be intent on self-destruction and the destruction of others. But there is this other side to us, and I’m seeing that other side shine.

I’m trying to shine a light on the fact that there’s hope for us, because people are responding to the messes that we’re in and are rolling up their sleeves saying, “OK, let’s see what we can do about it. Let’s figure out how we’re going to ‘change.’”

I almost hate to use the word “change,” because it’s become such a catch-phrase from everybody. Again, that’s not a partisan statement, that’s everyone. But what you have to do is step back even farther and think, it is kind of amazing that our whole country in America, and even the whole of the world, listening to specific individuals, are gathered around this idea that “yes, we’ve made some really bad mistakes, and we’ve gotten ourselves into them. But we’re going to do what we’ve got to do here.”

I believe in that, and I believe in that on every level. Probably one of the best examples I can use for it is that it matters not whether you were an Obama or a McCain supporter, but I think it’s extraordinarily significant that we elected a black President. What that does say is that America has overcome something huge.

Even if you believe he was the wrong guy for the job, I think everyone can at least agree that we surprised the world by doing that one thing, because people thought that we would never get over that.

I think the light that shines in the movie is that sometimes when things are very bad, when we make messes of things, those are the very things that propel us toward growth. It leaves us better than we were in the first place.

I’m very moved by that. As a Biblical reference, I was in Madrid doing press [for the film] and visited the Prado Museum. I saw this incredible painting I’d never seen of the Apostle Peter being crucified upside down. I was looking at the painting, and I thought, “I think he only gathered the strength to die that kind of martyr’s death.”

I think that the role cinema has in our lives is so deep and so profound for those of us who love it.

This was the guy who denied Christ. The guy who arguably had the worst moral failure of all the people in the New Testament, even possibly worse than Judas’ failure. The difference was that he recognized it, and it transformed him into something really extraordinary where he could go and become the foundation of the modern church, write a good portion of the Bible, and die this martyr’s death.

I’m very moved by that, and I’m a deep believer in that idea, that sometimes we have to make those mistakes, or be allowed to make those mistakes, and get ourselves in those desperate situations before we can grow to the level we need to grow to.

That, to me, is the light in the movie, that “at the precipice, we change.” That’s something that can be applied to someone who’s struggling with a marriage, or with an illness, or a country struggling with a war, even a human race struggling with its own issues. I love that idea and I thoroughly believe it.

Are there images or movies that have been significant to you in a spiritual way?

Scott   I just thought of 500 films, but I’ll name one. My favorite director is Akira Kurosawa. I have taught college courses on his films and seen all 30 of his films multiple times. My favorite of his is Ikiru. It had been my favorite film for many years. I think everyone’s life as a Christian takes different forms. There are different things that become important to individuals, and it’s the life of God in them, their calling as individuals. For me, it’s meaning.

I care so much about meaning. What is meaningful? I want to live a meaningful life. I don’t care about happiness. There are probably good things I should care more about, but I’m really obsessed with the idea of meaning. I feel like Ikiru is a film that captures meaning as well as any film I’ve ever seen. It’s about a man who’s dying of cancer. It’s about death, and halfway through the film he actually dies, and it’s very shocking.

But it’s really about when he finds he has cancer, he goes to look for the meaning of life. What do I do with this time that I have left? He tries to connect with his son, and he ultimately finds meaning in unselfishness. He realizes he has to do something outside of himself because that’s where meaning resides. To me, that is at the heart of Christian life.

From the time I first saw it, it was always my favorite film. I was teaching this class at Azusa Pacific University, and I was in the parking lot when I got the phone call that my dad had died. I had that film in my hand. It’s funny, because when I look at that and think about it, I think that the role cinema has in our lives is so deep and so profound for those of us who love it. It connects to real things, and that day it connected to an intensely personal event in my life.

All images courtesy WETA, ™ & ©Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation