Interview: “Shaun the Sheep” Co-Writer/Director Richard Starzak

Posted on November 23, 2015 at 3:51 pm

Richard Starzak and Mark Burton wrote and directed the adorable “Shaun the Sheep,” and it was a lot of fun to talk to him about making a stop-motion animation movie with no words. The DVD/Blu-Ray, which will be available November 24, 2015, has a behind-the-scenes featurette showing Starzak and Burton acting out some of the movements for the animators “to get the timing right for comedy” and working with actor Justin Fletcher on recording some of the non-verbal sounds. The idea of having the mouths of the sheep go off to the side of their snouts came from one of the storyboard artists “just to indicate that the character was smiling and we thought it was funny so we kept it there. Some people think it looks very strange and some people kind of don’t worry about it.”

The vehicles in the film are as individual as the human and animal characters. “We tried to give everything a bit of personality.”

It is a painstaking, very slow process to move each of the characters very slightly, take a picture, and then move it again. “We aim for about two seconds per animator a day so in a week we’re expected to do about ten seconds on average. That’s times sixteen animators so it would be two or three minutes of animation during the week…We use mainly the live action video to time how long we need for any particular shot. It’s a bit of jigsaw puzzle. You have to fit the film into a certain amount of time but it’s kind of trial and error. We shoot and then we might adjust them after we have shot them, we might take the odd frame out here and there, we’ll double up the odd frame so it is constantly being reassessed. I suppose the film ended up a few minutes longer than we intended but that’s fine; the timing was worthwhile so we were happy with that.”

Working without dialogue was liberating. “Strangely, yes, it makes life in some ways more difficult but also really focuses you on the story. We kind of have a lot of evidence particularly when children watch the film, they really concentrate on the film as they do on the television episodes because it requires all the attention but they get more immersed in it as a result. So I found it very liberating because it’s a very pure way of making a film. It’s very cinematic. I can’t wait to make another one really, I love the idea of not using dialogue.”

One of the challenges is directing the voice talent on recording the various sounds that the characters make. “They are noises but they are still very crucial to get the right tone so it’s a question of the voice talent that we use actually understanding and getting the tone right so they can watch and understand how to enhance and how to make any shot or movement more understandable. It’s a lot of trial and error. And it’s very strange standing there saying, ‘Can you put a little more despair into that squeak?’ or ‘Can you make that squeak slightly lighter?'” It’s a process but we get there in the end. We put up the storyboards against a temporary track of grunts and squeaks and then we invite the voice artist to lay down some sounds for us and after the process is finished we refine them and we get them in again to see if they can improve on what we’ve already got.”

Starzak was influenced by silent film masters like Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. “When I first started the series I always had Buster Keaton in mind because there is not a lot that you can do with Shaun’s face. He has just got eyes and occasionally a mouth but there’s not a lot to express with so I’ve got a picture of Buster Keaton on the door on the way into the studio to remind people what we’re trying to do. We watched a lot of funny comedies. Jacques Tati films are very clever in including a lot of ideas in the same shot and playing out the shots obviously with sounds but no dialogue which is kind of what we were aiming for.”

The most complicated scene in the film takes place in a restaurant, where the sheep are disguised as humans. “It’s almost a comedy of manners. We had to stage four characters sitting around the table then there was another table with two characters plus there was the waitress and the maître d’ and everything was quite complicated. The most fun thing to do was the hospital scene.”

Interview: Jay Roach, Director of “Trumbo”

Posted on November 20, 2015 at 3:46 pm

Jay Roach is best known for wild comedies like the Austin Powers and “Meet the Parents” films, but he also directed the sharp, fact-based political films “Recount” (about the Bush-Gore election) and “Game Change” (about Sarah Palin) for HBO. He turned to serious drama in “Trumbo,” the story of a blacklisted screenwriter who won two Oscars under other names when he was prohibited from working in Hollywood during the McCarthy era. Bryan Cranston plays Dalton Trumbo and Helen Mirren plays gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in the film. In an interview, Roach talked about what makes a great screenplay and the challenges of casting actors to play iconic real-life characters like Kirk Douglas and Edward G. Robinson. “I always look for a main character whose soul is at stake, a character whose mind and psychological and spiritual situation and intellectual situation is someone I want to track. Particularly though their conscience, that’s what I mean by their soul at stake. What type of moral choices do they make? And I think a really good screenplay takes the character through the triumphs and the valley of the shadow of death where you should feel like you’ve been through everything through the course of the story. In drama and even in comedy too I always try to have the main characters go through pure hell. There’s also an anxiety dream element. I also like it when a story works on multiple levels, not just a personal level. If there is a civilization at stake which has gone a certain way in all the dramas I have been working on then that’s very interesting too, if the soul of the country is to some extent at stake, that really improves the sense of suspense and puts more forces into play.”

Trumbo is under intense pressure through the film. He has to continue to support his family even though he has been blocked from writing films for the Hollywood studios and even went to prison for nearly a year for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. There are several scenes of him writing in the bathtub, smoking, taking pills, and frantically trying to churn out scripts. “In this case Dalton Trumbo has overextended himself as a writer during this period. Not only was he writing black-market screenplays to survive during the blacklist era for 13 years, but he had also gone to the King Brothers and other producers in our story and said, ‘Look, help all of us get work. He had other friends who he was just trying to help too and bring them in, so he told the shlock independent producers, ‘These are some of the better writers in the business. You can get them at a ridiculously discounted price right now. They will be writing under assumed names and if you don’t like their work I’ll make them go back and rewrite it and if you don’t like it even still I’ll rewrite it myself.’ So he put himself in this kind of hell of perpetual deadlines by having to write way too fast just to be able to make a living because his pay was so low. His back went out, he was smoking too much, taking so many uppers and downers to wake up and then go back to sleep, drinking too much and I wanted to try to capture a little bit of that hellishness. It is kind of an odd place to write in the bathtub but he had to be there to deal with the pain of his screwed up back. He couldn’t sit there just soaking so of course he would sit down and write. And I also like that there is a very constructive aspect to that kind of writing because he is cutting and pasting and stapling and ripping the pages apart and he is muttering the lines of the characters out loud which are funny and some of which are heartbreaking and that kind of mania, that kind of manic-depressive aspect that every writer is familiar with, I thought could add some cinematic drama to the situation and I think Bryan embraced that and went for it.”

Cranston worked hard to get the physicality of the character, very different from what we’ve seen him do in “Breaking Bad” or his other roles. “That was partly to distinguish this character from his other roles but the most important reason he went that way was that was how the guy was and he wanted to get the authentic guy. The Trumbo daughters were around and when the saw him transform into that character both of them said, ‘Oh my God that’s our father.’ They had a lot of thoughts about details, that’s a thing that they had agreed on and agreed with this us on that Bryan captured the essence of this guy. He was theatrical and larger-than-life, a very brilliant writer too, and was just a very deep, deep thinker who would spend hours and hours alone. But when he got up to talk and he spoke a lot at public, he was old school, oratorical. He wasn’t just saying things; he was performing the ideas, and Bryan really went for that too. So as I said the daughters described it as a surreal experience seeing Bryan channel their father.”

Elle Fanning plays a character based on both of the Trumbo daughters. “I just knew she would capture the essence of the cost to the family, the price on the family’s happiness that Trumbo was forced to be pay and so and I think she was in some way robbed of a normal childhood. They both described it that way but in another way they were bonded by being ostracized and locked into this sort of secrecy together and collaborating in this conspiracy to sell Trumbo’s black-market scripts. By the way they never called him anything other than Trumbo, his kids called him Trumbo, his wife called him Trumbo. Nobody called him ‘dad’ or ‘honey’ or whatever, just Trumbo. They describe their lives as being like living on island, like the Swiss family Robinson, like being castaways. It was very painful sometimes because their lives were so turned upside down and Trumbo became somewhat dysfunctional under all the stress but it was also very loving and family driven in an unusual way that they became so close.”

Mirren plays a character known for the iconic hats and glamorous gowns. “Daniel Orlandi is the costume designer I work with all the time. He just has a fantastic eye for authenticity but also for which of the realistic costumes are going to be the most spectacular especially with a character like Hedda Hopper. Her hats alone were part of her persona, part of her iconography and you throw in those beautiful gowns. She used glamour and fashion to disguise this killer instinct that she had in politics. I just thought we had to give her lot of layers. She’s not at all a cartoon villain; she is a very interesting pop culture, gossip, columnist kind of person but she also had this whole other sort of dimension which was pure politics and her form of patriotism. And you mix all of that together and it just visually became really a interesting complex character.”

As he did with “Recount” and “Game Change,” he had to find actors who could play people whose faces are already indelible in the minds of the audience. “Well, you first have to just tamp down your terror that you are going to get it wrong because you know what it’s like when you see a favorite icon miscast or underserved. I think that the fear of failure helped me because I just kept looking and kept looking kept looking until in each case I found the person that that I absolutely was convinced could pull it off. And Kirk Douglas was possibly the most terrifying one for me because he was such a hero in the story along with Otto Preminger who I also had to make sure I got right although he is nowadays a little less iconic. And David Rubin, my incredible casting director, kept sending me people and everyone sort of got part way there. Some people did more of an impression, and that was not right. And then we came across this guy named Dean O’Gorman in New Zealand and I had to rely on Skype calls and video rehearsal and workshopping the character until he and I were both confident because he couldn’t come out until quite close to shooting. So that was risky. It took some faith and I’m really happy with what he did. Kirk Douglas saw him. He joked that he wished that we had cast him but if he couldn’t do it he was really happy with that guy and that meant all the world to us because we recognize that Kirk Douglas took such a risk to put Trumbo’s name on ‘Spartacus,’ so what a great part of the story that would be if we get that character right.”

He’s changed his mind recently on which is his favorite of Trumbo’s films. “Up until I started making this film, ‘Spartacus’ was it because I remember distinctly seeing it when I was at a drive-in with my whole family when I was a little kid, four of us as kids and my parents in 1967 when it was reissued. As a 10-year-old kid I was just like ‘I am Spartacus!’ I’m sure we shouted it around the house and every one of us got in trouble for months and months. But then I re-watched ‘Roman Holiday,’ with that sublime performance and characterization of Audrey Hepburn’s character in her first film and Gregory Peck. It’s not typically my kind of film. I don’t love somewhat straight up romantic comedies but there’s something so beautiful and fairytale about this princess who is not allowed to be a human being in the position she’s kind of thrust into, born into and so she goes out and hangs out with this sort of slightly working-class journalist out in Rome. It’s just a fascinating, I think it might be my favorite.”

Roach says the story has special meaning in today’s political climate, but some themes are eternal. “It’s just the power of storytelling. I think that’s the reason he’s such a hero to so many writers is that he turned storytelling and writing to a super power and he used it to take on one of the most oppressive political witch hunts in the history of our country and he in a way emerged certainly scathed but he reclaimed his name, he helped other writers reclaim their names, he wrote great material and it ultimately exposed in a way the lunacy of the system by doing so. He started out in his life working in a bakery and for many years of hard working he became the highest paid writer in town and then got completely shut down enough to have to go back to square one and write his way out of not only literal jail but movie jail. This is just one of those stories of hope people point to. And then the other thing is just how so easy it is to exploit fear to get people to conform to a particular political ideology. Fear is a powerful political weapon and that applies the 2015 as much as it did in 1947.”

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Interview: Billy Ray on “Secret in Their Eyes”

Posted on November 18, 2015 at 3:58 pm

It was a thrill to get a chance to interview one of my favorite screenwriters, Billy Ray (“Shattered Glass,” “Breach”) about the new film he both wrote and directed, “Secret in Their Eyes,” a thriller starring three Oscar winners, Julia Roberts, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Nicole Kidman. It is the story of a horrific murder and its impact on the lives of three people, a prosecutor named Claire (Kidman), and two FBI investigators, Jess (Roberts) and Ray (Ejiofor). The movie goes back and forth in time, and I asked Ray about the skillful way that he as both writer and director allowed the story to unfold. “The story to me is about the character played by Chiwetel, Ray, he and Jess and Claire played by Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman, they walked through a minefield 13 years ago and suffered horrible effects as a results. Now its 13 years later and Ray has come back to them and said, “Let’s walk through that again,” and they both know it’s a disaster although they know kind of on different level why it’s a disaster. But they both know as well that it is inevitable that they’re going to walk into that minefield again. And I felt it was really important to paint a picture of how the steps that they are taking now in 2015 completely mirrored the steps that they were taking in 2002. And that there was a certain inevitability to the tragedy in both time periods so you need to show the plot progression in 2002 with exactly the same plot progression now.”

What signals do you use to let the audience know what year we are in?

“You have a couple of cues. You have some hair and the whiteness in Ray’s beard. You have cultural references. If people are talking about 9/11 you know you’re in 2002. You have the character played by by Dean Norris, Bumpy. If he’s limping, it must be 2015. So we tried to drop as many of those in as we could without hammering it. It has always been a movie that requires some attention; I think that’s a good thing. I want the viewers of this movie to be actively in engaged in trying to piece together the puzzle of it. And part of that has to do with trusting your audience enough to know that it might take them 10 seconds into a scene to know exactly where they are but that they would be engaged by that. They will be with us.

This film is based on an Argentinian movie that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2009. In the original film the stadium scene was a big showpiece and Ray does the same here with a chase scene in Dodgers Stadium. Tell me about the challenge of filming that scene.

First let me tell you that I grew up in Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley and Dodgers Stadium was and is a cathedral to me. It’s one of the most important, iconic places of my entire life. So once I knew that we were going to be shooting the movie here in Los Angeles there was nowhere else I was going to put that scene except Dodgers stadium. It required a lot of begging, it was me personally hammering the LA Dodger organization, begging pleading, cajoling, doing everything I could to get them to say yes and eventually they did. And then of course we had to fight to make sure that we had the money in our budget to shoot it the right way which was its own challenge because we didn’t have an unlimited amount of money to spend on the movie. But it was extremely important to me because there are certain moments in the original that I just felt had to be honored and that soccer stadium sequence was certainly one of them, you know you can’t do that in Los Angeles and put it in a soccer stadium it is not the same thing here in an American context.

So for me to pick baseball which is a uniquely Americans sport and then to put it in a place that’s so well-known like Dodgers stadium with that great LA skyline certainly behind it, I just felt that that was going to be a great image and whatever we were going to do to get it we just had to do it.

So what was it like to film there?

We originally thought that we were going to have three full nights to shoot there. The schedule got compressed so we had to do it in two. So we had to be extremely prepared and very precise. We scouted dodger stadium eight times as a crew to make sure that that we know exactly what you are doing and that the camera was going to be in the right place. The trickiest thing in the world of course was that opening shot, the one that comes from behind hill and then over the parking lot over the stadium and then lands on Chiwetel and Dean and there was a lot of debate about how to do with that. At one point we thought it was going to be a drone but it turned out way too complicated because drones can’t fly at night, they can’t fly in a certain level of wind and they can’t fly in any rain at all. So if any of those eventualities took place were going to be scrubbed and that was going to be a disaster.

But someone invented this thing called the clouds cam which is a camera head that exists on a 30 foot long umbilical cord that hangs out of a helicopter so the helicopter could fly the camera head over the stadium and over the crowd but the helicopter would be high up above the cloud that they wouldn’t get the prop wash to blow their hair. So that’s what we did. It took 14 takes but we got what we wanted and moved on. It was designed actually to fly in between the crevices of ice glaciers so that they can get documentary footage inside glaciers. It doesn’t bounce and it doesn’t bobble at all. It stays very smooth and very steady.

There’s a struggle in the film between those who want to pursue the person responsible for a horrible murder and those who are more concerned with preventing future catastrophes.

Well to me, the movie is about the cost of obsession. And every beat in the movie turns on the idea of obsession all the way down to how they find the bad guys through their own obsession. Ray and Jess and to a slightly different degree Claire have an obsession about this case but they are running into people who have an equally valid obsession about public safety and that is why we set it against the backdrop of the repercussions of 9/11. I felt it was really important that the DA played by Fred Molina and the character played by Michael Kelly, have a valid point of view. And they do have a valid point of view which is that in those months right after 9/11, with the level of terror that was so great that if someone had come to me and said we can guarantee you that there will never be another 9/11 but we’ve got to take your civil liberties and we’ve got to take everybody’s liberties away, I would say, “Great, where do I sign?” You’re still in shock.

When you juxtapose that against the necessity for justice for this one case you then have the makings of good drama because everybody in the room has a completely valid and urgent point of view and they can defend it with great authenticity. That’s where we’re going for. I would love for this movie to be part of a larger conversation about the merits of this one case versus the needs of the public at large to be safe. It’s tricky and it’s nuanced and it’s not easy which is why I like it as a subject matter for this movie.

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Interview: Sarah Gavron on “Suffragette”

Posted on November 7, 2015 at 4:26 pm

Sarah Gavron directed “Suffragette,” starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham-Carter, and Meryl Streep in the story of some of the women who fought in the decades-long struggle to give women voting rights in the UK. I spoke to her in an especially appropriate location, Washington DC’s Sewall-Belmont House, a museum and archive of the National Woman’s Party and the fight for women’s voting rights in the US.

The movie’s main character, played by Mulligan, works in a laundry, as her mother did before her, and the movie’s focus on the participation of ordinary working-class women, and not just the leaders, is based on years of research. “We dove into these archives in the Museums of London and the Women’s Library and discovered these accounts of these working women. And so often women have been marginalized in history books, but working-class women even more so. And it was really striking that this movement brought together women from all categories, despite the kind of class apartheid of Edwardian Britain. They worked alongside each other. The working women had so much to lose and they sacrificed so much. They went to prison, they lost their jobs, they lost their relationships and their families and homes as it was very shaming in that community to go to prison and so they were risking a lot. And they are also very instrumental. There were working-class women in the leadership of the movement like Anne Kenney who was a millworker. And there were women on the ground. We wanted to depict their stories because it felt like to tell a story of the women with no platform and no entitlement would be a way of connecting with audiences all over the world today.

The women fighting for the vote were following in the paths of activists who created the first grassroots political movements, to end slavery and to get universal suffrage for men, which was not granted until . “Emmeline Pankhurst kept saying that previous political movements and charters to fight for male suffrage also resorted to civil disobedience and I think that that was kind of instructive in terms of the tactics that they employed and as we said on the civil disobedience front that the women only turned to it after 40 to 50 years of peaceful efforts. And even then, they would never harm human life; it was always attacking property.” And some of the women in the movement came from families that had fought to end slavery, so they were familiar with political activism, the opportunities and the options for making their case. “I think it was just that campaigning genius which run through these families. Emmeline Pankhurst’s own family had been involved in so there was a connection there. But they were also coming up with original tactics for this movement and pioneering a lot. It’s kind of impressive the way they brand themselves, the way they got their message out, the way they used the media. And it was new media at the time, it was that emerging cinema and photographs just beginning to appear in these newspapers. They knew how to use it and they were employing new tactics a lot of the time.”

It is difficult for us to imagine today, with two women currently running for the Presidency with considerable support, that anyone could argue against the rights of women to vote and serve in government. But the way the issues are argued still has some resonance today. “It’s interesting when you read the debates in parliaments between MPs about whether they should give women a vote. It’s a lot of fear, it is fear of change, it’s fear if women get to vote family structures will breakdown, women will stop having children, women won’t vote for war. And women didn’t have the intellectual capacity, they were two emotional. The counter was what these women were. I mean someone like Christabel Pankhurst who was a Lawyer although she couldn’t practice as a lawyer — she was extremely eloquent and I think her intellectual prowess was proof alone that she was more than capable. So I think that they were just countering it with their speeches and the way they were behaving. They just realized that they had to use whatever they could to make their point.”

At the time depicted in the film, the UK was led a a woman, Queen Victoria. But she opposed women’s suffrage. “I think it’s very different if you were born into power and it’s hereditary and not out of a democratic system and so I don’t think that you can compare that in a way.”

The movie ends with a sobering list showing the years when different countries granted women the right to vote, ending with Saudi Arabia, which just this year began to extend a partial voting right to women, though they still need to be driven to the polls by men. “When we were researching we started to just look up when other countries got their vote and it was kind of extraordinary to realize how recently many of these countries had won their vote for women and it’s a reminder I think of how precarious those rights are and how important it is use our voting rights and how fought for they were and how recently they were won. We brought it up to present day because one of the aims in the film is to say that this is just not piece of history, this is a film that resonates with also issues we’re still attacking in the 21st century. Having the vote is just symbolic. There still many issues on which women don’t have any right and in many countries where women are given very very few rights. Like education. There are 63 million girls worldwide denied education and the correlation between lack of education and babies dying in early infancy. You know education is so key and then sexual violence. There are so many issues we’re still dealing with apart from representation.”

While the movie is grounded in history, the central character is fictional. “We read a lot of accounts of working women and we really she is based very closely on a number of the working women that we read about. So the reason we create a fictional character is to kind of give us leeway in terms of the timing and where we put her with her and how we began into the story but in terms of what happens to her you will find out in the research there are women who went through everything she went through. Some women were writing about their experiences at the time, like The Hard way up – The Autobiography of Hannah Mitchell – Suffragette and Rebel Anne Kenny was also a working woman who wrote a memoir and Anne Barnes another working woman. And female academics particularly have gone and dug into the working class woman’s life now and gone through records and accounts and factory accounts.”

Gavron wanted to make this film for ten years, and there was six years of research to get the script. One of the people they worked with was Anne Pankhurst, a descendent of Emmeline. She was struck by the challenges the women faced. “It was really the length to which they went and the violence they faced and the personal cost, the fact that they were prepared to go to prison, hunger strikes, be forced-fed 49 times Emily ward begged and she was even most forced-fed it was sort of extraordinary we know that’s a form of torture and it was even more so a form of torture with the equipment they used and so it was that that I found most shocking.”

They had to use the “pockets of London” that could still pass for a hundred years ago. “We wanted to film in the house of Parliament. No one ever had filmed in the house of Parliament in the whole history of cinema but we decided that we had to be suffragette about it and we did not give up, we filed a petition and finally got access. So then we had stunt people and vehicles and we were staging this government protest in this very place that barred women for centuries so that was very exciting. The testimony was shot in the very room where women appeared before Members of Parliament to make their case. One of the supporting actors stood up, an old man, and said, ‘My grandmother was a working woman who gave her testimony to Lloyd George.'”

Gavron hopes the film will inspire people to learn about the women who fought for the vote and to join them in pursuing justice and equality. “I hope that people come away remembering or realizing how hard fought for the vote was if they didn’t know and also feeling empowered to speak out against current day inequalities.” What makes her happy is when people come out of the movie saying, “I will never miss a chance to vote again.”

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Interview: “Armor of Light,” the Documentary about Faith and Guns

Posted on November 4, 2015 at 3:58 pm

Armor of Light is a thought-provoking new documentary with important insights for everyone on all sides of the debate on guns. Documentarian Abigail Disney made a film about two people who are making a faith-based case for addressing gun violence to conservatives.

Reverend Robert Schenck is an evangelical clergyman who has been very active in opposing abortion and Lucy McBath is the mother of a teenager who was shot and killed by a man who tried to claim the “stand your ground” law as a defense.

I spoke with all three of them in Washington, D.C. as the movie was opening around the country.

Schenck explained that being raised Jewish and converting to Christianity gave him an appreciation for different perspectives. “My mother was actually a convert to Judaism in order to marry my father and all the children were raised Jewish but that was our story. So already there were boundaries that had been crossed and that brought different cultures into the family. So that’s very important but I think probably more than anything the way my Jewish experience informed this was in the kind of traditional way of approaching a puzzling question. There is a long history in Judaism of asking questions and listening to lots of voices and perspectives. I mean it’s Talmudic, it’s Midrashic but that’s the way it’s done. And it takes sometimes a long time, it can take centuries to come to a conclusion. And I do think even though there is an urgency about this question of gun violence, of course lives are on the line, it’s matters of life and death that brings an urgency to the question. At the same time it’s profound enough to demand at least a period of contemplation. Growing up with the rabbis arguing and not necessarily in hostile, confrontational ways but arguing a question to its conclusion and sometimes hearing scores of opinions on that. You read the Talmud, you read the Torah portion and then the commentary and the commentary on the commentary and the commentary on that. This question is worthy of that kind of investigation so in that way it’s been very, very helpful to me.”

McBath spoke of reaching out to people through their shared faith. “How deeply and morally are they really willing to be the face of God, to walk out their faith? I challenge them all the time in saying ‘What does the Bible say? What does Jesus specifically say we are to do and be and do you really believe that your line of thinking is in line with the moral precepts of Jesus?’ I try to push them and challenge them to think morally about gun violence and not so much through fear.”

Fear is something both McBath and Schenck try to address. Schenck said, “Faith it is a certain antidote to fear and I do think in many cases this is a failure of faith. And of course I include myself in that. I mean I’m not finger-wagging because there are many, many occasions when I fail in faith and when I experience fear, not so much over this kind of question of physical safety. I don’t experience much of that fear but other kinds of fear. So this is really a challenge to faith and I think it is one of the reasons why pastors are key players in this. The pulpit is a place where faith is fostered and gun shops are places where fear is fostered. So I think pastors or spiritual communities in general need to play a key role but it may be the most important for our evangelical community because research shows over and over again that the pulpit, the pastor and the preaching that occurs within the evangelical community is really the most persuasive and important source for that. And one of the problems is of course pastors have been largely silent on this question of gun ownership use, self-defense, all of the questions that surround this gun violence. And that creates the vacuum that I addressed in the film. I’ve always spent a lot of time on is the crisis of fear within the Christian community.”

Though her views on politics and faith have little overlap with McBath and Schenck, Disney said working with them was “Such a pleasure. When I first met Rob of course I was expecting cloven hoofs but I obviously encountered a lovely human being who’s eloquent and intelligent and well read. Shame on me for assuming otherwise. So it was pretty quickly that we were able to put aside differences. It was a conscious decision from the onset. I said, “We could fight or we could just take that and put it aside and choose to inhabit everything else,” and it turns out there’s a lot else. And generally when you choose to inhabit everything but your political differences you find your way up above politics. And because I came from a different kind of childhood than adulthood I live in I’m used that. I think of it as being politically bilingual. I always refer to Thanksgiving dinner because everybody knows about the Thanksgiving dinner. So you still love people, even with the most violent deep disagreements about politics but your values are never all that far apart. So I definitely tapped into my experience growing up at odds almost all the time with my family to sort of discipline myself to remember that I love people and we are different. So it’s been good for me because I have been living in Manhattan for a long time with all the fellow travelers stuck on one island together reinforcing each other’s point of view. It took some discipline for me to kind of not engage sometimes and I wanted to fight about an issue. There were a couple times that I didn’t hit someone over the head but it has been such a pleasure.”

She went on: “First and foremost I wanted to reach people who weren’t already on the same page with me about everything violence related. I mean this is not about guns; it’s about violence and the particular American relationship with violence which is unlike I think another country and any other time. It’s a particular problem and I don’t think we look at it or frankly address it very often and so I wanted all stripes politically and socially to sit down and have a frank conversation about it. So we’re looking to engage with Christians in part because evangelicals are the group of people most likely to want guns and most likely to say that they are pro life but the depth of the inconsistency between those positions is profound and troubling to me. But I also want to engage liberals too because I think my liberal friends have a smugness that needs to be challenged and they’re quite certain about how bad other people are on the other side of the fence or so forth or so stupid or the rest of it and I really want to challenge us on that too because I’m uncomfortable with people being too comfortable. So I just wanted to stir it up.” They are making some screenings of the film free to NRA members.

McBath, whose father was an example of activism through his work with Martin Luther King in the Civil Rights movement, reaches out to the faith community on gun violence. “I just knew as a woman of deep faith that that had to be part of the culture of gun violence prevention specifically from the lobbyist of view, from an activist point of view, that if this was not incorporated in a spiritual way in faith that they were never going to be successful. That’s a huge element that has to be addressed because it is the evangelical and the white conservative Christian community that so entrenched in this gun culture and so specifically in faith. So that’s how I kind of evolved into the faith and community outreach leader in every town. I kind of created my own position.” While she did not always understand as a child what her father was working on, “I knew what that he was doing was important. I did understand from my father the urgency to always make sure that people were protected civilly and humanely protected. I understood from my father very early on that prejudice was wrong and that a segregated country was wrong and that it always had to be addressed, always had to be watched. We always had to continue to fight because my father did teach us that to remain free you always have to be very diligent and protecting that freedom. I know that it’s my role to specifically make sure that the work of God is deeply incorporated in this work. It has to be, there is no other way to do it.” She is working with Everytown and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

Reverend Schenck is working with the pastor community to bring the message to their congregations through an online forum called Narrow the Road. “Evangelicals brag about the fact that we don’t have a structured hierarchy to the church, we don’t have bishops and archbishops but then again we have very influential personalities who others will almost obediently follow. Yesterday we met with one of the leading evangelicals in America. He is at the top tier of influence. We received a relatively warm welcome and he indicated the willingness to talk about, to really seriously examine the issue but at this point privately, quietly not publicly, behind closed doors. Well, that’s progress because we hope that we can get to a place where he feels strong enough about it to actually venture his convictions as they emerge in the public setting so that’s one way.” But he has lost friends and supporters over this issue. “Right now is a pretty lonely road for me. So that’s costly and there will be other pastors who will face the same consequences. I hope maybe I can be literally an encouragement to them, I hope I can give them courage, and we can give each other courage and then a create a critical mass where there is strength in numbers and eventually I hope a small group of us can come out and thereby encourage as many many other pastors who in turn have influence on their congregations.”

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