Continued here …

The idea was to make sure the executives understood the central importance of the narrative of Christ's birth to the faithful, in preparation for this week's release of The Nativity Story. The potential of the faith-based market became undeniable after Gibson's blockbuster film about the crucifixion.

Walt Disney's The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, with its underlying Christian themes, was similarly promoted from church pulpits last year, and went on to earn almost $750-million. Recently, Twentieth Century Fox established a FoxFaith division, aimed at Christian films for home and theatrical distribution.

There have also been several low-budget faith-based movies such as One Night With the King (the story of the Old Testament figure of Esther); Fighting Giants, a Christian-themed football movie financed by a Georgian Baptist church; and Color of the Cross (the last 48 hours in the life of a black Christ).

The Nativity Story represents a significant leap forward. Budgeted at $65-million (including marketing), it is one of the biggest religious releases ever by a major studio, opening on 2,700 screens across North America for the Christmas season. Starring 16-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes, a 2004 best-actress Oscar nominee for the New Zealand film Whale Rider, it follows the journey of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem. Playing Mary's cousin, Elizabeth, is Shohreh Aghdashloo, the Iranian nominated for best-supporting actress that same year for House of Sand and Fog.

The movie's own birth took place on Dec. 14 two years ago, “the genesis of The Nativity Story, if you will,” says screenwriter Mike Rich, when he went to the door to get his mail in his hometown of Portland, Ore., and realized that both Time and Newsweek had cover stories about the Nativity.

Rich, a former radio host and a non-denominational Christian, didn't become a part of Hollywood until shortly before he turned 40 in 1998, when his script, Finding Forrester, the story of a gifted black student's relationship with a brilliant literary recluse, won a prestigious Hollywood screenwriting competition. (It was released at Christmas of 2000, directed by Gus Van Sant.) Rich's second screenplay, The Rookie, starring Dennis Quaid as a middle-aged man who becomes a pitcher in the major leagues, was a hit for Disney in 2002.

“I tend to write stories about ordinary people who do extraordinary things,” says Rich, “and this time, I guess I've taken that theme to another level.

“It suddenly occurred to me that the Nativity is never told as a character story but as a kind of event narrative. I started thinking about who Mary was, and what started out as casual research ended up as 11 months of work before I started writing the script.”

He estimates that his story is “75 per cent speculative,” adding that “if you just used the Gospel accounts of Matthew and Luke, you wouldn't have much to work with. There weren't many fictional accounts and, of course, there is a lot of visual material, but it was really the historical research that made it open up in ways I couldn't imagine. We show our Mary in a tough little poverty-stricken town.”

He was also conscious of striking a very different tone from The Passion of the Christ, which he says he admires. “But the two movies are the alpha and the omega. This is a gentle, though not reverential, film, with a very humble presentation.”

Rich had already lined up the studio and the producers before a director was brought on board, and because this was a young woman's story, they felt they needed a female director. The surprising choice was Catherine Hardwicke, director of the teen shocker Thirteen, about a girl involved with drugs, underage sex and shoplifting.

“They're not really that different. Thirteen was the story of a teenaged girl with problems and so is The Nativity Story,” notes Rich, who is himself the father of two teenaged girls. Where Christian movies go from here, says Rich, is still an open question. He plans to write scripts “about stories that attract me, wherever they come from.” And of course, the Bible is a great repository of narrative possibilities.

Recently, he was in a bookstore and noticed the new paperback edition of Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, about Jesus at age 7. “So the middle years of Christ's life are another obvious film possibility,” he says. “What's so strange to me about this is, it's been decades, all the way back to Ben-Hur, since anyone in Hollywood wanted to make a Bible movie.”

Because he knows the movie business as well as the Bible, Rich also knows that the current marketing trend should not yet be interpreted as a cultural movement. Before The Passion of The Christ, he says, “my film just wouldn't have been possible. That's what opened the door to films, like The Nativity Story, which are designed for a faith-based demographic.

“But it's a discerning demographic and I don't think Christian audiences are going to be led to a film just because it's got a spiritual theme. If we don't make good films with good stories, that door won't stay open very long.”

It’s true that a lot of good has been done by accident but it’s also true that movies can influence, in the way Oliver Stone’s JFK, for many, became the definitive story. That was unfair on Stone, who readily admits he introduced characters who were an amalgam of two or three others – Clay and the low-lifes were examples. It was a film, for goodness sake. A movie. It was others who placed it on a pedestal.

What concerns me is that the people who produce films on Christian themes, the Christianity 101 crash course students, are doing it because of the potential market and the only reason to stay true to the book, so to speak, is that the target audience is critically aware.

You might say that any publicity is good publicity. Not a bit of it. There are a number of sayings to effect here: Where G-d builds a Church, there the Devil builds a chapel. The Devil is G-d’s ape and so on. It’s so easy to stray, even slightly, from what is, in effect, a very narrow path. That’s why the term fundamentalist, so vilified in its political sense and rightly so, is not, in itself, a dirty word.

Fundamental – concerned with the roots, concerned with the unadorned word, the only source which can be trusted. How is this a dirty word? All right but how can the literature be trusted? An unproven set of writings, derivative in the extreme and contradictory in fact – how can they form the basis of the supposed truth?

The answer lies in their substance. Once you get past the pedants who like to argue if Josephus actually intended this or that, once you get past the contradictions in the Gospels, once you get past all of that, the message still shines through, the nature of the language and the fruits borne of following the recommendations. The thing glows. Plus it requires a commitment. Like a comment left on a blog, it means nothing until you press the button below and put it into action.

This tree does bear fruit, it gives sustenance and protection, provide you feed and nurture it and those who stand sneering from a distance can’t hope to see the mechanics of what’s going on inside the person. It’s a deep thing within. It’s like physical training. You put in the hard hours pushing that metal and it’s painful. You go away wondering. Next time you go there, surprisingly you can lift five kilos more.

After three months, strange bulges start to appear and your whole appearance is reordered. But more than that, you’re locked into healthy eating, routines and regimens, which sound awful except for one thing – there’s a vibrant aspect to you now, a sense of well being which can’t be got from fat reducing pills. And it spills over into relationships. Females start to notice you and so on.

What I’m saying is that someone with inner spirituality does have this ‘vibrance’ – it comes through and others can feel it. You might say the Buddhists equally exude this, that active money worshippers have it and I’m not getting into theological argument with you over that. What I shall argue vehemently is that there are four pillars to well-being:

# Physical
# Mental
# Social
# Financial

But fuelling them, as a tree is fuelled through its roots, is the spiritual aspect. A man without personal spirituality is an empty shell. Looks good on the outside but no infrastructure to sustain the organism when the vicissitudes come. Has no inner resources to fall back on under pressure and in the end will be just that – a shell.

The Australian aborigines understand this well. Man is the totality of his environment, his ancestors, the spiritual, his family, his tribe. If he has the bone pointed at him, he goes away and dies. The westerner can never see why. And it requires getting off his backside and living hard, close to the earth, understanding the fragility of life and the deadly need for personal resourcefulness.

I never understood this until I came to a FSU republic and was shocked to the core. Now, after eleven years, I wouldn’t have it any other way. We’re forever close to the edge. We can lose all instantly, without any warning. Rather than horrify us, it hardens us and that might come through a little too much in my writing for the sensibilities of some. And yet there’s a healthiness about being back to the roots.

Lunch today is not foie gras and a nice ’75 rouge, although they certainly have their place. It’s smoked red fish, salted cabbage and capsicum salad and a glass of water. Followed by a long walk. With the girl. And on that walk, I don’t expect ever to return and if I do, it’s a bonus. Such a life is not for all, it’s too austere but it still has much to recommend it, as Theodore Roosevelt might have said.