Interview: Rich Christiano of ‘The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry’

Posted on May 4, 2010 at 1:59 pm

I spoke to writer-director Rich Christiano about making — and marketing — faith-based films.
You were really a one-man show behind the scenes for this film.
We have a good production team and worked hard on the distribution. This the third film we’ve put out theatrically. We learned a lot doing it. It played over 300 screens. We lot local churches to sponsor the movie in their cities. The churches that put forth the effort did well. We also worked with Christian radio. In Dayton, Ohio we ran 22 weeks because the radio station got the word out. In another city there was a pastor who really got behind the film and we did really well there. Promotion is the hardest part of it. We made sure we had local groups pushing the movie.
Is there a big audience for faith-based films?
The inspirational films have a lot of upside. One-third of this country goes to church each week and that’s our marketplace. And they’re an under-served audience. If everyone who goes to church would see our movie, we’d have “Avatar” numbers. Our society has changed over the last 20 years. If I’d told you back then there would be a weather channel, you would not have believed it. The Christian consumer group is now becoming more and more a player. They audience wants to watch these films; they just need to know they are there.
What do you hear about the way audiences respond to this film?
We’ve had wonderful reactions. There’s an emphasis to read the Gospel of John in the film. I heard from a lady who said her eight-year-old came home from the movie and read the Gospel of John. Then he wanted to go to Bible study like the boys in the movie. Another woman said her husband had drifted from the Lord. But when he came home he said three words that really lifted her spirit: “Where’s my Bible?” A 60-year-old lady told me her sister was visiting from Scotland and that she’d never, ever seen her cry until she saw this film. One of our sponsors in Fort Worth, Texas took his daughter to the film. When she saw a character change in the film, she told her father she wanted to show that she had been changed. There’s a strong message of forgiveness in this film. We’ve shown it in prison. Several of the prisoners wrote me a letter.
What can a movie convey better than a book or a sermon?
The church needs to recognize how powerful the audio-visual really is. I spoke to a man who was a church-goer and asked him if he could remember what his pastor preached a month ago. He couldn’t. I asked him if he could tell me about “The Wizard of Oz.” Even though he had not seen it for 15 years, he could remember all of the details.
Movies manipulate us, affect us, influence us. Most movies influence people away from the Lord. I want to use them to influence people for the Lord. There’s a spiritual battle going on and the Message of Christ is always being snuffed out. Movies are an entertainment medium, but every movie is religious because every movie has standards, every movie has a message about those standards. We’re trying to put forth films that are entertaining but put forth a message for the Lord, to inspire, to challenge thinking, to provoke spiritually, to make people think about eternity.
It was nice to see the film set in 1970 because that lends it a simplicity that suits its themes.
There’s no cell phones, no text messaging, no X-Box. I showed opening credits over pictures like old-school film-making. It’s like Mayberry with Bible study. It’s a throwback. It’s not edgy. It’s simply shot, no visual effects. It’s story-driven. It’s not an action film. It’s got laughs. And it’s got heart.

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Interview: Derrick Borte of ‘The Joneses’

Posted on April 17, 2010 at 2:55 pm

Derrick Borte, an artist-turned journalist turned producer/director of commercials, was watching a television news magazine one night when a segment about “stealth marketing” came on the air. We channel-surf during ads on television and use pop-up blockers to avoid ads online. So now some companies are going back to in-person selling, but with a twist — the customer does not know that the tourist showing off a new camera or the pretty girl asking for a particular brand of vodka in the bar are being paid to do so. And this gave him an idea for a script, and that became The Joneses, a provocative debut film about a marketing division disguised as a family — mother, father, and two teens — who move into a wealthy community to make everyone envy their consumer goods enough to buy them.
I spoke to Mr. Borte at the AFI Silver Theater just before a screening of the film and Q&A session with the audience.
Did you ever buy something because someone cool had one?
Absolutely! It started when I was about seven years old, my first pair of Puma Clyde tennis shoes. Somebody wore them to school and I wanted them. So I am definitely not immune to this phenomenon.
Your story is not far from what is really happening. I wrote an article about companies that use middle schooler slumber parties to sell products to girls.
It’s also companies that give purses to an actress so she can be photographed with it. Or developers that have furnished model homes. They hire out-of-work actors to pretend that they were living on the houses and they sell better. It’s definitely an ever-evolving thing. As long as there are products, there will be money spent on trying to sell them.
The products in this movie are real, right?
For the most part. There is not yet a phone with the video feature we show in the film but we figured as we were shooting that by the time it came out, there might be. I wanted real products because fake products would take it into a cartoon world. I wanted a disarming naturalism. I wanted to feel like it could be happening in your neighborhood. But in certain places we couldn’t use real products because of what happens to them. Some companies saw this as celebrating consumerism and were glad to be included. Some saw it as an indictment. But many companies with high-end products were very happy to participate. It gives it great production value.
What surprised you about making your first feature film?
It wasn’t as intimidating as I thought it would be. I thought I would throw up in my trailer the first morning! But I had already spent so much time with the actors and prepping the crew that it was just another day at work. It was fun and exciting, but there weren’t any training wheels.
What did your preparation include?
It started with the producers. Kristi Zea is a legendary production designer, and Doug Mankoff. I was not very precious with the material. I wanted it to evolve and grow so I was open to listening to them. And the actors — we didn’t pay them a lot because it was not a big-budget film. They all wanted to be a part of this film and they were all generous in terms of coming to work with ideas. Before production people kept telling me, “You have to hold on tight to your vision because people will try to knock you off your game as a first-time director.” But I thought that was ridiculous. If you hold on to that vision you could hit that mark or fall short. But if you foster an environment of collaboration you can listen to other people’s ideas. You may not use all of them but be open to them and to allowing the process to help discover the characters and story. That’s the only way to get something that goes beyond your vision.
The top-liners are responsible but what a deep cast — I was so fortunate with Gary Cole and Glenn Headley, and Amber Heard. Sometimes they would have an idea that would spark another idea for us. Because I wrote it if I found something I liked better I could go with it, rewriting on the set or in a lot of late nights.
Why do people want to be cool and especially be cool by owning stuff or looking a particular way?
It can be a disease — affluenza — wanting to have what other people have because of the perceived effect it has on them. I don’t think anyone is immune to that. There’s no way to predict it; it just happens. I read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, great book. I wish I knew the secret of what makes things cool!
What movies inspired you?
Everything from the spaghetti westerns to the John Hughes films, the Plant of the Apes films, the David Fincher, Tarantino, the Coen Brothers. I’ve always loved film but everything I’ve done has led to this point.
What does that include?
I started off in college at Old Dominion studying fine arts but paying my way doing graphic design, t-shits and things like that. I was probably the first person to learn to use PhotoShop. I graduated with a degree in fine arts and went to LA where I was represented by a gallery. But when the bottom dropped out of the art market, I went back to get a Masters in Media Studies at the New School. It seemed like a logical progression. I was a production assistant and then after I graduated got an offer to be an on-camera reporter for an NBC affiliate. It was great training in guerrilla film-making. I had no budget but I had six or seven hours to come up with a story for that night. When I started my production company I knew I wanted to do features, but I knew I would not get a chance unless I wrote my own script. I turned down much more money for the script for the chance to direct it myself.
Were there other influences on your concept for the movie?
I was fascinated with reality TV. A lot of it is stranger than any fiction. I can’t imagine a prime-time sitcom that would be as captivating and bizarre as “Jersey Shore.” And they become celebrities and have endorsement deals.
I thought this forced intimacy that happens when you throw strangers into a house would be great to combine with the stealth marketing. When you’re going to do something with stealth marketing you have to decide — are you going to go broad comedy, are you going to do a thriller? I thought that would be an interesting angle. It it was just the stealth marketing, where would you go after the first 15 minutes? So I wanted to explore the fake family dynamic. Hopefully, the personal stories are enough to carry people through.
What’s next?
A movie based on a novel called “The Zero.” We’re waiting for the first draft of the book adaptation and we hope to be going to work in the fall. I love doing features. In my everyday life I am so attention-deficit but on the set time slows down and I’m very calm. I love being on the set working.

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Storytime Live! — Interview with Director Sam Scalimoni

Posted on April 12, 2010 at 3:44 pm

Sam Scalimoni is the director of Nickeoldeon’s new traveling “Storytime Live” show, starring its most popular characters, including Dora and Diego, the Backyardigans, the Wonder Pets, Kai-Lan, and more.
What is it like to create a show for the most enthusiastic audience in the world, pre-schoolers and their families?
We thought we knew what we were in store for, but we really didn’t know until we saw it in front of an audience. Last week we were at Radio City Music Hall and to see 6000 families come in and just cheer for all the characters — the young performers that we have definitely felt like rock stars.
How do you hold their attention? They’re a very squirmy bunch and very excited!
The great thing about our show as opposed to those in the past is that we have four different stories. So it’s like four mini-musicals of about 15 minutes long. And between them we have Moose and Zee from Nick, Jr. coming out and play puzzles with the audience and help them guess what’s coming up next. So they’re constantly being engaged and entertained with something new happening all the time, and being led through it, entertained and educated at the same time.
They’ve taken four of the most popular character groups from the Nickelodeon stories. And they’re very fun and clever and fast-moving and they never talk down to them. We like to think of our show as the first theatrical experience for young people. We have some very clever writing and parents have as good a time as the young people.
I approach this like any other project. It is about story-telling and it’s about clarity. We kept the focus on making it clear to anyone, not just young people. We use our paint-brushes, the costumes, the scenery, even the lighting to show you what’s happening next and where your focus should be. And I find young people have a better sense of reality than adults. They know the theater is a pretend kind of place. We have some fantasy — a dragon, a witch who flies, a monkey king who flies, a dragon that turns into a prince — we have those kind of thing but they are done in a theatrical way and the young people are right there with you.
You mentioned the costume design — what were some of the challenges?
The costume design is challenging because the characters are so well known and the kids want them to look familiar. But the actors are human and we did not want them to have big cartoon-y heads. And we wanted them to be comfortable and be able to do all of the movement they needed to do. So we were working with five different creative teams from Nickelodeon to get the essence of the character — real people and monkeys and puppetry — and make sure it was practical for what we wanted to do on stage.
We had very specific requirements. It very much reflects our audience, a lot of ethnic diversity, people who were tumblers, who could do the flying and all of that. But most important was we needed people who could be themselves, very honest performers, none of that phony kind of acting as opposed to really being a person so the young kids could connect to them.
Is there a moment that really gets a big reaction from the crowd at every performance?
When the monkey king flies from nowhere, he just appears, and it is very exciting. And Dora makes a magical transition into a princess and it always gets a big “Oooo.” And our finale is so exciting because it’s the first time Nickelodoen has let us mix the characters from all the shows, to see them all together in a really exciting dance number, the kids are all dancing in the aisles.
The Touring Schedule — Dates and Locations:

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Interview: David Nixon of ‘Letters to God’

Posted on April 8, 2010 at 8:00 am

If you were desperately ill, what would you say to God? What would you ask for?
A boy named Tyler had some things he wanted to ask God when he became ill with cancer, and now his story has become a movie, Letters to God. I spoke to the film’s director, David Nixon, who has made a career out of faith-based films that, to the astonishment of Hollywood cynics, have been very successful with audiences. “Letters to God” opens tomorrow.
Tell me about the movie.
It’s the true story of a little boy in Nashville, Tennessee who went through brain cancer. While he was going through the chemo and all the horrible parts of that disease he was writing letters to his best friend, God. And he would put a stamp on it and put it in the mail. And the mailman, knowing that the little boy was a cancer boy, couldn’t bring himself to put those letters in the undeliverable bin — you know, that’s what happens in the post office, and it sits there for about six months and if nobody claims them, they shred them. But the mailman knew the little boy, so he kept the letters and he began to open them. And he discovered that the little boy wasn’t asking for anything for himself. He was asking for help for everyone else in his family, for the people in his neighborhood, for the people that the cancer was affecting, his mother and his grandmother, his brother, the little boy in school who was bullying him, saying things about his shaved head, about his best friend.
So the mailman started giving all those letters to the people the little boy was writing about. And you can imagine how they felt, how they responded. It did not only change the lives of the people in the community but it changed the mailman’s life. He was an alcoholic. His life was turned around because of the faith of the little cancer boy.
An extraordinary story. How did you find out about it?
We were putting together a film deal and looking for scripts and a friend who is a writer, Art D’Alessandro, had just polished the script for a guy up in Nashville, the father of the real boy. He’d never written a screenplay before so he asked Art for help. As soon as I read it, it just connected with me and I got on a plane to Nashville and met with Patrick and his wife and said, “We’ve got to make this movie.” Not just because it was a cancer story — though cancer is a universal theme that touches everyone because we are only about one degree of separation from somebody we know who is going through or has had cancer. But I thought, what a wonderful way to tell the story with the little sweet letters, a great way to get across the message.
I’d like to hear about your commitment to making faith-based films in an industry that does not seem to have as much interest in them as audiences do.
I’ve had this dream for about 30 years. I’ve had a secular production business but always wanted to make these kinds of films. You could never get distribution until something radical happened: “The Passion of the Christ” made $600 million. That opened the eyes of Hollywood. They saw that there was an under-served audience. Christians are going to movies! We’d better make a God film. And we were there with “Facing the Giants.” And that made $35 million. And then the church asked us to do “Fireproof.” And now every studio in LA has a faith-based arm. They are not quite sure what it is, but they know they can make money on it! We’re making as many of these as we can. We’re shooting two more this summer and we’ve got plans for number ten and number 100. We have to make money. But we can certainly use that pipeline to get our message out.
I think films are the greatest evangelical tool of our time. How else do you get to people who would never darken the door of a church. Or to your neighbor over the back yard that would never talk about faith. But they go to movies all the time, so why not use that to deliver your message.
What makes a movie a Christian movie?
You’ve got to have a message. We don’t want to be preachy or overbearing but you’ve got to get the gospel out. You’ve got to come up with a way to tell a true life story or a story that could be true of an average Joe, going through life like anyone else, maybe going through adversity, and how they react to that. Maybe they turn to the Bible instead of the bottle. Or they turn to God instead of the darkness.
That’s all our movies do. They’re telling true stories that people can connect with. It has to be real, or people aren’t going to get it. When people go and sit in that dark room for 90 minutes, and they drop their guard and empathize with those characters they see up on screen, it sears through your heart like nothing else can. People come out of these movies physically and emotionally changed.
And what’s next for you?
We’re making a Christian comedy called “Saving Livingston” and a true story about a girl here in Orlando called “To Write Love on Her Arms.”
What are some of your favorite movies?
“Chariots of Fire” and “The Mission.” Billy Graham’s Worldwide Pictures, the Cecil B. DeMille movies like “The Robe” and “The Ten Commandments. Then Hollywood went away from that and now here we are with a chance to tell these stories again. It’s heartening to me that we’re seeing more of these movies coming out.

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Interview: Conor McPherson and Ciarán Hinds of ‘The Eclipse’

Posted on March 25, 2010 at 7:00 am

“The Eclipse” is a ghost story for grown-ups, which means that it is story first, ghost second. It is an Irish film about Michael (Ciarán Hinds) a recent widower with two children, who is volunteering at a local literary festival. Two of the festival guests are the arrogant, self-centered Nicholas (Aidan Quinn), a novelist, and the sensitive Lena (Iben Hjejle), author of a popular non-fiction book about ghosts.
I spoke to Hinds and writer/director Conor McPherson about the film.
What do people ask you most about the film?
CM: They want to know exactly what was going on, to answer the questions the movie leaves unanswered.
Yes, Americans are very concrete, very literal. We want everything explained.
CM: When people are out of their comfort zone, it’s more dramatic, more prone to have more entertaining experiences, get into fights. That’s the dramatic instinct, to move people out of what they know and make them deal with it. In theater it’s all through dialogue in traditional plays. In movies, it’s so lovely, you can show him putting dishes in the dishwasher and everybody just knows what’s going on, that his wife is gone and he has to do everything. You still tell some things with dialogue in scenes but we’ve taken some away…
CH: Pared it away, really.
CM: And that’s enough. Film has that magic.
You play a quiet person in this film. How do you as an actor convey all you have to about what he is thinking and experiencing?
CH: He’s just a guy like anybody. We’re all ordinary in a way. We can all be hurt. We can all be unbalanced. We all have feelings. Life can treat us harshly, even shockingly sometimes. He has minor pretensions but he is a woodwork teacher. He works with his hands. He is a practical man. But though he is doing his best with his wife gone he is out of his depth a bit apart from the grief. He’s a real person but you bring elements of emotion to a heightened situation. He just wants to survive and take care.
I loved his interaction with his kids. It felt very real. The frustration and the need to convey a sense that he is in control.
CH: When Lena says she is sorry to hear about his wife he responds, “It was terrible for the kids.” He knows he hasn’t grieved enough but he has to keep a lid on it for the kids. In the end, in the story, he is allowed to let it all out and properly to grieve.
Do you find that now, like Lena in the film, people want to come and tell you their own ghost stories?
CM: At the first screening last April in New York, it turned into a sort of heavy session with people talking about how they lost people and the film made that feeling come back. It’s probably the last thing you think about when you’re making a film is other people’s problems. You’re thinking about your problem, which is making the movie. But you do have a responsibility. You can’t mess around with people’s emotions.
CH: You find people genuinely relating to something or a truth they felt, and that is what you aspire to.
Do you believe in ghosts?
CM: Yes I do, but I don’t know what they are. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. But if someone said to me, “Last night I saw the ghost of my sibling” or whatever, I wouldn’t say, “That’s impossible,” I’d say, “What was that like?”
CH: I don’t disbelieve.
CM: There’s a very old tradition in Ireland, and as an island at the edge of Europe, for thousands of years with no one knowing what was beyond there, I wonder if a sense of the beyond was internalized into the Irish psyche. We’re very quick to accept the supernatural. And I think Catholicism took root very quickly in Ireland because it’s a very superstitious religion, the holy ghost, the holy spirit, it has a goddess, very visual, the music. For me, philosophically, we don’t know anything anyway. We have this short little life we have to somehow try to get a grip on without understanding anything about the nature of time or existence or the universe or God or infinity. We’re just here for a brief moment and we open up these little eyes and go “What is this?” and then we’re gone! I love stories that frame that: This is what life is about — you don’t have a clue.

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