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November 20 , 2006 • VOL. 44, NO. 20 • Oakland, CA
FILM REVIEW
'The Nativity Story'
When filming about Jesus’ birth,
animals don’t always follow the script
MATERA, Italy
(CNS) -- The hardest part about making a movie about Mary, Joseph and
the birth of Jesus is convincing the animals to follow the script.
Herds of sheep, goats, a soaring hawk, ornery oxen, a baby calf, caravaning
camels and pack donkeys all feature in a new film, “The Nativity
Story,” due out in theaters worldwide Dec. 1.
Digital technology has made putting a shooting star and hovering angels
on celluloid a cinch, but convincing an ox to kneel and low before the
baby Jesus in a manger proved to be an ordeal, crew members told journalists
May 23 during filming in this southern Italian city.
Because animals are more used to doing improv than following stage direction,
sheep wranglers and ox whisperers were hired to help with filming, and
local Italian shepherds were hired to play the shepherds in the movie.
But the shepherds’ real-life skills in steering sheep were sorely
challenged as director Catherine Hardwicke called for several retakes,
urging them to keep their furry flocks on a particular path and not to
run over Mary and Joseph as they crested a hill.
The film by New Line Cinema, which brought moviegoers “The Lord
of the Rings” trilogy, was shot this spring and summer in the ancient
city of Matera, the same rocky, mountaintop city where Mel Gibson filmed
“The Passion of the Christ.”
The city is famous for its ancient “sassi” or carved-out-of-the-rock
neighborhoods and its cream yellow, limestone-walled streets. Because
the city’s historical center poses a striking similarity to what
Jerusalem might have looked like 2,000 years ago, directors have chosen
Matera as a backdrop for filming the holy city and its environs in movies
set in biblical times.
Scriptwriter Mike Rich said he wanted the story to flesh out who Mary
and Joseph were and what emotions they must have felt as they faced the
immense responsibilities God entrusted to them. He said he was inspired
to write the screenplay after seeing Time and Newsweek put the Nativity
of Christ on the cover of their 2004 Christmas issues.
However, he said he felt the story of the Nativity had always been presented
as an “event-based” story: what happened and when, with little
about how the protagonists lived their faith. After months of research
and input from religious scholars, Rich started writing what he called
“a character-based story.”
“Talk about limited source material,” he said, noting that
the only description of Joseph he found in the Bible was that “he
was a righteous man.”
Rich, a nondenominational Christian from Beaverton, Ore., said that even
though his story was speculative he still sought to keep it faithful to
the spirit of the biblical account.
The result is that the young Mary, played by 16-year-old Oscar nominee
Keisha Castle-Hughes (“Whale Rider”), and Joseph, played by
a 26-year-old graduate of Julliard in New York, Oscar Isaac, leap to life
on the scripts’ pages and hopefully, Rich said, also on the screen.
Hardwicke said that when she first saw the script’s title she thought
it would not be interesting because she knew the story of Jesus’
birth “backward and forward.” But she said she was “intrigued
because the writer got inside the heart and soul” of the characters.
She said that in directing the movie she tried to build on making the
characters seem real on the screen so people could easily identify with
them and see how ordinary people, like Mary and Joseph, were able to take
such a huge leap of faith.
Co-producer Marty Bowen, a Catholic raised in Texas, said that, growing
up, he always put Mary “up on a pedestal.”
“The Nativity Story” is trying to make Mary real, Bowen said,
adding that he hoped that the movie would help people see “Mary
was a girl before she became a woman and a woman before she became the
mother of God.”
He said people should also feel empathy for Joseph, a man “who finds
the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with,” then discovers
she is
pregnant and he is not the father of the child.
“Talk about a crisis of faith of staggering proportions,”
Bowen said.
Bowen, who wears around his neck a rosary his grandmother brought him
from Rome and a medal of St. Christopher his mother gave him, said the
story of Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds they meet is “a journey
of faith that’s rewarded” by God. But people also “need
to understand how they earned that” divine reward, he said.
Bowen said because of the enormous success of Gibson’s movie about
Christ’s passion, Hollywood has awakened to the potential popularity
of religious-themed films.
“Gibson was a pioneer, a trailblazer, and we’re trailing the
blazes,” he said.
Rich, too, said Gibson helped break barriers.
“If I had made this script two years ago, who knows” if a
major studio would have given it the green light, he said.
After filming in Matera, cast and crew headed to Morocco for four weeks
to film scenes of King Herod and his palace and the journey of the Magi
over the sand dunes.
