Interview: Bill Riead of the Mother Teresa Film, “The Letters”

William Riead is the writer/director of the lovely film about Mother Teresa called The Letters. It was a great pleasure to talk to him about his dedication to sharing her story. “I wanted the story to be accurate when I started researching Mother Teresa’s life. What I wanted to do was let the chips fall where they may, if she’s a good person let’s find it out, if she is not who we thought she was let’s find it out, and so I just sort of let the story tell itself and let the script sort of take its own direction as I was doing my research. And when I came upon the letters that she had written, I couldn’t think of a better actor to cast than Max Von Sydow and let him tell her story through reflecting back on the letters that he received over a 40 year period. There were three of four trunk loads of these letters which told her story and I took it as a responsibility to let it be told truthfully by her own words.”

He begins the film with an investigation to consider Mother Teresa for sainthood. “In real life the Vatican does assign a postulator for someone that they designate a candidate for sainthood. And in this particular case I created this character to go out and investigate whether she was worthy of canonization or not. And so little by little he concluded that she was beyond saint-worthy for sure. That was my conclusion when I finished writing the script and ultimately made the movie, I knew that there wouldn’t be one man, woman or child who left the theater who wouldn’t draw the same conclusion that I drew: that she is a saint.”

Mother Teresa’s letters created some controversy because she was candid about her doubts and frustrations. “People who know that I made this film would approach me and say, ‘You know Mother Theresa lost faith in God right? You know that?’ And I have to straighten them out and say, ‘No, Mother Teresa never ever lost faith in God. She felt like God had abandoned her, and lots of saints do, it’s called the dark night of the soul. And she experienced that like all the saints.’ She was very human. We can all aspire to be as selfless as she was but she was very much a human being. All sainthood really means is someone who the Vatican has declared for sure has made it to heaven and is experiencing God and so that could be any of us. And my feeling is if Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu who would become Mother Theresa of Calcutta didn’t make it to heaven, none of the rest of us have a shot at it.”

The movie shows her experiencing what she called “the calling within a calling,” when she was already a cloistered nun but felt that God told her to work with “the poorest of the poor.” Riead said, “Her first calling was she wanted to be a missionary when she was a little girl and that didn’t become practical. Where she got the thing with the poor is she would be sitting at the family dinner table in Albania and her mom would go to answer the door and there would be a poor family who would be at the door because mom was out somewhere that day, found the poor family and invited them to her home to have dinner with them at the dinner table. She didn’t just give them money and give them food out on the street. She would say, ‘Come eat with us.'”

“So Anjezë experienced this sharing and decency from incredibly wonderful parents and then when she went off to become a nun and then ultimately settled into the life of a teacher at the Loreto Convent School. Her mother sent her a letter saying, ‘Anjezë do not forget why you became a nun.’ That was to help the poor. But she was a cloistered nun, she had taken the vows of a cloistered nun, which mean you cannot go outside of the convent walls. She realized that her mother was right and that her true calling was to help the poor and to be a selfless person and so she gave her life to God and said, ‘I’m going to do everything I can to honor what I think you put me on this earth for.’ And so she then absolutely dedicated her life to helping the poorest of the poor and that ultimately led to her having to start her own order because Mother General didn’t want her to leave. She was simply protecting her turf and when students started abandoning the Loreto Convent School and going off to join Mother Teresa, she had not started her own order yet but they just wanted to help, Mother General became extremely upset and said she was pilfering their students and so forth. I did not put that in the film because I felt that that would upset the Catholic community even though it’s the truth. There’s nothing about my film that is not the truth. I spent twelve years as a journalist so I wanted to get this right but Mother General eventually came around. Mother Teresa’s kindness, goodness and selflessness eventually so impressed Mother General that she became a fan as well.”

Riead was impressed to learn in his research that Mother Teresa was both driven and egoless, a very rare combination. “How can you be that driven without an ego? Because she felt she was a pen from God’s hand. When I was putting this project together I experienced the same thing. When I set out to make this film I became obsessed and the more obsessed I became the less ego I had. The more exposure I had to Mother Teresa the more I became like Mother Teresa. When we were filming in India there wasn’t one of us on the cast or crew who didn’t feel Mother Teresa’s presence. All of us left India and went to our respective homes Juliet Stevenson to England, and me to Los Angeles and so forth and all of us left not the same people we were when we arrived there, none of us. We all felt Mother Teresa’s presence.”