Interview: Cyrus Nowrasteh, Director of “The Young Messiah”

Cyrus Nowrasteh is the director of the new film about the early life of Jesus, The Young Messiah. In an interview, he talked about the challenge of casting a child to play the lead role and creating “the first Jesus moment” in the film.

How did you find a child to play the role of Jesus?

Well, first you call the agents and say, “Send us all the resumes of your seven-year-old actors,” and you don’t hear from anyone. You have to put out a casting call and go searching and use multiple casting directors in different locales which is what we did. I had casting directors in Israel, in Jordan, in Australia, in London, in Rome, in Los Angeles and in New York. Basically these were all people who we were just kind of spreading the word that we were looking for X. We were looking for a seven-year-old to play young Jesus. I get a call one day from a casting director in London. He said, “We just had an extraordinary child come in. He made the hair stand up on the back of our necks.” We looked at the tape, went to the London, put him through a fairly exhaustive audition process for which he was very game and I recognized immediately that he’s a very special child and he has wonderful parents. His name is Adam Greaves-Neil and he got the part.

The camera loves this kid, and that’s a quality you can’t really predict when you see someone in a room, even when you see them on videotape you don’t really know until you start shooting scenes.

My favorite part of the film is His endless curiosity about the world, and, like all parents, the way Mary and Joseph have to try to figure out how to explain things to Him.

It’s a part of the story but it’s also part of the character. I mean I have to believe that young Jesus was a very bright, capable child and very curious and very interested in the world. So in a sense that was sort of a part of why the human side of Jesus was amongst us and dwelt among us because He is here to learn and experience what it is like to be human. And that takes with it a lot of curiosity and intelligence and thought.

Tell me how this project came together. Who began it and how did you get involved?

It started when Anne Rice wrote a rave review of my previous film, “The Stoning of Soraya M.” Through some happy coincidences involving people that we knew, her book got in our hands, I looked at it and fell in love with it. My wife and I adapted it for Chris Columbus’ company 1492 Pictures and we took it to producers that we knew and trusted and then we brought in a financing entity led by Tracy Price and Bill Andrew, Ocean Blue Entertainment and they got it. Everybody just sort of kind of clicked to the idea that this was a really fresh and original take on the Jesus story. Now we knew there were inherent risks attached but we were willing to tackle those.

What did you see as the most significant risks?

That Christians might not like it. That they might think that the fact that we are taking on the unknown years, that we’re telling a story that’s not directly from the Bible, that might be objectionable to them. I felt all along and I said this 1 million times, it’s how you do it and I felt confident that we could do it properly.

It’s inspired by Scripture and rooted in history. The story imagines one year in the boyhood of Jesus. So we’re saying that it is fiction but it’s scripturally inspired, meaning our guidepost for this young boy, for this character of young Jesus, is Jesus as he is revealed in the Bible and how he acts in the Bible. So whenever we wanted some kind of idea of what he would do in the particular situation we looked at the Bible and try to say, “Okay, where is there a similar type situation so that we can interpret how He is going to act?”

I thought it was fascinating and very smart that His first miracle involved a bully because it showed so much about his character right from the beginning, and how he responded when the bully was killed by someone else.

I called that the first Jesus moment in the movie. The bully comes up and shoves Jesus first and makes mockery of him and he calls him a little baby for playing with girls. What does Jesus do? He kind of does a half turn away from him, He turns the other cheek, He’s not going to fight him. Then the kid jumps Him and is beating on Him and He really doesn’t fight back. He just covers up to protect Himself. It is then when the bully turns on the girl who tries to get him off of Jesus by hitting him with a stick when the bully goes after the girl and Jesus gets up and says don’t touch her, stop, don’t touch her. So He’s protecting the girl. This is a whole bundle of what you call revelatory simple Jesus moments even in just that scene but I actually think that’s throughout the movie. People have even pointed out some to us that we weren’t even aware of.

Tell me a little bit about the characters of Mary and Joseph and how you thought about them and the struggles that they were facing.

We have an opportunity in this movie to give the audience a window into the holy family in a fashion that they really never seen it before. I think it’s an amazing opportunity, because they have always been sort of shown to us as these icons and now they have to be real. They have to be a mom and a dad. I love that we were able to do that. I think for example Joseph, who is always just wallpaper in these movies, he actually has some presence, he has strength and he has sensitivity. You could see how he could be a loving father to his child and an example to his child. I think one of the reasons why Joseph gets so lost is because Mary and Jesus are such icons and here we get to see parents working together, supporting one another, loving one another, loving their child, going through all of life’s trials and challenges together. I think it’s a real opportunity in this movie to sort of portray that for parents watching the movie to connect with it. This is not only their child, the child they love and they want to protect but this is also the son of God. So it’s an interesting dilemma.

So why is this important to you personally to tell this story? What is it that you want people to take from it?

First and foremost I want people to have a very satisfying motion picture experience. I want them to go to the movies to be entertained and to be moved. I was approaching it from story level. This is this a story that attracts my interest. When I sit in the movie theater the only reason I’m sitting there is because I want to see what happens next and it is on that level I want it to work the most but of course you can’t get around what is about. This is a movie about faith, about God and about family.