The recent announcement that Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky is moving forward with a $130 million adaptation of the story of Noah’s ark comes on the heels of last week’s news that Steven Spielberg is being sought to direct a new epic on the life of Moses for Warner Bros.
These are two of a remarkably high number of Hollywood biblical projects in the works at the moment.
- In addition to Warner Bros’ Moses project, there’s another Moses story in development at 20th Century Fox.
- There are also two projects underway to make a movie about Judah Maccabee and the Maccabean War. One is being developed by Mel Gibson and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas.
- The other Maccabees project, which might wind up as a TV production or a big-screen film, is being developed by Jewish producer Bruce Nash.
- A project a step removed from the Bible itself is worth noting: Alex Proyas’ Paradise Lost movie.
- Director Scott Derrickson, whose name was once attached to Paradise Lost, is working on a David and Goliath movie that focuses on the Philistine.
- Camilla Belle, who has been rumored for the role of Eve in Paradise Lost, has been cast as the Virgin Mary in Mary the Mother of Christ, written by Benedict Fitzgerald and Barbara Nicolosi and starring Al Pacino and Peter O’Toole.
That’s an impressive convergence of biblical films in development at the same time.
How any of them will turn out, of course, is anyone’s guess. Aronofsky’s Noah project has been called a “fantasy epic,” but Aronofsky has also been working on a related graphic novel project that apparently puts a science-fiction spin on the Noah story. It’s not clear that Aronofsky intends the film to be a sci-fi retelling of the Noah story, but the prospect is a disconcerting one.
Then there’s Variety’s reference to the Fox project retelling the Exodus story “in 300 style.” That might be no more than a reference to the use of green-screen technology, but still the precedent of recent pictures like 300, Clash of the Titans and the upcoming Immortals may be some indication of the creative environment in which these movies will be made. Is Hollywood up to the challenge of retelling these biblical stories?
How should Hollywood filmmakers approach these stories? Here are a few suggestions for open-minded filmmakers:
- Realism doesn’t mean everything should be gritty, dirty and joyless. Take Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, among many other offenders. Would anyone watching Scott’s misconceived anti-romance want to be one of Robin’s not-so-merry men in that film? Is there anything appealing about that world that draws the viewer in? Other than one boisterous folk song during a Channel crossing, I can’t remember much.
- Let the material challenge your preconceptions. Artists are always eager to put their own stamp on their material, and rightly so. There would be no point in doing an adaptation if one didn’t have something to contribute. But there’s also no point in doing an adaptation merely to remake the source material in one’s own image. (The moment in the muddled denouement of Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when Willy Wonka winds up on a psychiatrist’s couch trying to work out his daddy issues, like any number of daddy-haunted Burton characters, was surely one of the low points in Hollywood adaptations of the last decade or so.)
- Acknowledge a level of responsibility both to the material and to your audience. You are the filmmaker and you can do whatever you want with your story. But these are stories that belong to the world. The stories of Noah and Moses are not only beloved but sacred to Christians and Muslims as well as Jews. I’m not saying “Watch out and don’t offend anybody.” I’m not saying “Focus group your movie to death.” I’m saying: “Think of your project as a gift for the world, and embrace the world in your fashioning of the gift.”
- Question skepticism. We’ve become so skeptical of certitude that doubt—especially self-doubt—has become a cardinal virtue for today’s movie heroes. What I call the “Aragorn Complex”—the need for leaders to question their rightness to lead—can be seen in The Prince of Egypt’s Moses and The Chronicles of Narnia’s Peter Pevensie. Likewise, the heroes of movies like King Arthur and Kingdom of Heaven suffer from a sort of existential homelessness.
- Question reductionism. It’s fashionable in war movies nowadays to give up on questions of right and wrong and portray soldiers fighting for the sake of their brothers, but the Maccabean rebels really were fighting for something more than that. And they weren’t just fighting for “freedom” as a universal value, either, à la Braveheart and even to an extent The Ten Commandments, with its echoes of the Declaration of Independence.
- Take Simone Weil’s indictment of fiction as a challenge. “Imaginary evil,” Weil charged, “is romantic and varied: real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring: real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. ‘Imaginative literature,’ therefore, is either boring, or immoral, or a mixture of both.”
At the risk of overgeneralizing, a filmmaker should be in love with his or her subject matter—and that should come across to the viewer. Suppose you could travel through time to the Maccabean period and ask a local to show you around, introduce you to his friends, and so forth. What would he want you to see? How would that world look through his eyes? A film set in that period should make us feel like that. The viewer should leave the film feeling a connection to the world it depicts. The idea of spending more time there—say, watching a documentary about the same subject matter—should be an inviting thought, not a tiresome one.
Art thrives under constraint—and one constraint is the inherent nature of one’s material. A sculptor working in granite has to respect the fact that it’s granite and not marble. Adaptation is an exercise in collaboration, and while a live collaborator may push back in creative discussions, dead collaborators—the human authors of the biblical stories—can only push back if you let them. Let them.
Think of your work as an exercise in creativity and retelling, but also as an exercise in curating, preserving, illuminating. Be humble enough to serve the story. Don’t just make a movie for the audience of today. Make a movie that people will want to watch 50 years from now. This may be a privileged moment for biblical films that might not come again for some time. It’s ridiculous that no one has touched the story of the Exodus in a live-action big-screen version since DeMille, but there it is. What if your film were the last time this story were touched for decades? Do you want to make a classic, or do you want to make King Arthur?
Of course drama needs conflict, and a conflicted character is more interesting than an unconflicted one. But not all conflict has to take the form of doubt. A character who knows what he believes can be compelling and attractive. Look at Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons or Father Gabriel in The Mission.
The convention in The Ten Commandments and The Prince of Egypt of having God speak to Moses in Moses’ own voice works reasonably well—if your Moses is Charlton Heston or Val Kilmer—but God should not be reduced to a subjective “religious experience.” It’s one thing to make a movie like Troy in which the gods are irrelevant, but these stories are different. This God is different. And for God’s sake, please let’s not have any “religion vs. spirituality” postmodern piety. The Maccabees were all about the Temple. The Passover, the sacrifices at Horeb, the Torah are the foundation of Jewish religion, not generic spirituality.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way, but too often it is. Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, the Wicked Witch of the West and so on tend to be more captivating than their opposite numbers. Even pious Milton, whose stated motive was to “justify the ways of God to men,” has been felt by some to have inadvertently made Lucifer the de facto hero of his book—and that’s a very real possibility in any adaptation of his work.
That’s not brave or transgressive. It’s easy. It’s easy to question God (or the gods). Legion did it. Clash of the Titans did it.
You want a challenge? Make Moses more interesting and compelling than Pharaoh. Make Noah’s family life more appealing than the debauchery of his times. Make God’s way more compelling than the Devil’s. How many movies do that nowadays?
Those are my suggestions. What are your thoughts?
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All the things you say about the “what not to do” fill me with dread for what will probably come. Part of me WANTS these films to be made and part of me is just really scared about how bad they will distort the stories.
Good suggestions and insights, Mr. Greydanus. I am both encouraged and nervous at the prospect of some of these filmmakers trying their hand at biblical material. It gives me hope that they find these stories compelling enough to put their creative efforts into them. At the same time, I’m sure I will always have that nagging feeling of, “Oh boy, I wonder what they’re going to screw up.”
I love your suggestion to “Think of your project as a gift for the world, and embrace the world in your fashioning of the gift.” As a screenwriter, I try to keep this idea top of mind - I should be writing this movie out of love for my audience. If I’m not writing something worthy of being offered as a gift, I’m not doing my job.
A Man for All Seasons and The Mission are a couple of my favorites. I’m both excited and scared about all these new movies in the works. It would be great to see more Bible stories, but sometimes it’s dangerous. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, hopefully the people involved in putting these films together will catch wind of them. God bless you for your work.
Tell me if I’m off base here: it seems to me that if the art of film was in a remotely healthy state, no one would be even considering adapting Paradise Lost. I can accept the idea of a movie version of the fall of Lucifer, etc. - although war in heaven kind of sounds inherently unfilmable, and I don’t see how depicting Michael the Archangel in terms of Hollywood-level badassery could avoid diminishing him and trivializing the spiritual dimension of the story - but not an explicit adaption of Milton. An epic poem is never really cinematic material. I’m really getting tired of watching filmmakers dishonor their own craft by indiscriminately ransacking the shelves of literature, everything from epic poems to picture books, for ever more awkward and nonsensical ideas for adaptation into overproduced big-budget spectacles instead of coming up with their own ideas.
Aside from this rant, I’m in complete agreement with your post. Your comment about a sculptor working in granite puts me in mind of The Makers” by Dorothy Sayers:
I thought Lucifer appeared as ‘heroic’ in Paradise Lost because he was supposed to be a deconstruction of pagan heroes (like how Rorschach is a deconstruction of anti-heroes, yet they both appear heroic to some readers). Proyas did a great job with Dark City, so I’m hopeful he can pull this off.
Hollywood on Paradise Lost? Oy. In the text, there are so many passages that show Satan as self-centered, petty, loathsome: if he can’t be happy than no one else can. William Blake didn’t pay full attention when he said that Milton was, deep down, “of the devil’s party.” Satan was not heroic - but this will all be swept under the rug as some hipper version of Philip Pullman screenwriter explores the “angel who rebelled against the tyrant.”
Not looking forward to it.
Brilliant. I especially agree with #6. After years of tiresome, post-modern, vaguely-agnostic films where the only thing that’s certain is that Christians are hypocrites, the idea of morally sound characters being portrayed as more attractive than villains would seem jaw-droppingly original. And the devil being shown as completely foul in contrast to the awesome butt-kicking God—why, the Great Hollywood Hive Mind would explode from the sheer ingenuity of it all!
I wonder how many people in the movie studios ever read the Register? And, how can we get their attentions?
Excellent comments - any chance they may hire you as script consultant?
Some of the non-biblical but “religious in a sense” films did not do such a bad job of protraying good v evil, if you put aside the theological ridiculousness. Prophecy, for example, does do a decent job of portraying, to some extent, what the struggle between Angels and Demons for the souls of men might look like, if you can get past St. Gabriel actually falling.
Vitto (Vido?) Mortgensen actually did a decent job portraying lucifer as a cunning political power player, and Warren as a fallen Gabriel was impressive. Why Gabriel falling? Why not Beelzebub turning on Lucifer in an underworld power grab, with men’s souls as the prize, and Michael intervening to protect humanity?
Make God’s way more compelling than the Devil’s. How many movies do that nowadays?
A rare few, but they are out there - End of Days (made Satan look like the double dealing sleeze he is), and Prophecy to some extent.
But not all conflict has to take the form of doubt.
True - and particularly in these types of stories, conflict can take the form of, well, conflict. Knowing what the right thing to do is, but wanting to do something else - the struggle for heroic virtue.
Umm…to be fair to the awesomeness that was the Prince of Egypt, the Moses of the Bible really did question his own worthiness as a messenger of God to the people. He tried to get out of the assignment any way he could until God pulled the Book of Job response on him. But other than that, great points—would that they were heeded.
Thanks all for the great comments so far.
@ Pachyderminator: I admit that Paradise Lost strikes me as about the most unfilmable work imaginable. In a way I’m glad Scott Derrickson is off that project and on his David & Goliath (or Goliath & David) movie (sorry I forgot that earlier; I’ve revised the post!). That said, I always want to give the artist the benefit of the doubt. Anything is possible in art. Anything. Not everything is likely, and some things are unimaginable until a visionary makes them happen, but I never want to say impossible.
@ Umberto: FWIW, one of the writers on Paradise Lost, Stuart Hazeldine, is a Christian. (So is Derrickson, though the project is now in Alex Proyas’s hands. I have no idea what Proyas’s religious background may be.)
@ c matt: Me, a script consultant? Heh. Let’s just say like I did above that anything is possible but not everything is likely. :)
@ Caspar: Don’t know if you’ve read my old review of The Prince of Egypt, the awesomeness of which I certainly on board with. That said, Moses’ running self-doubt is a device I’m very conscious of, one that goes way beyond the burning bush episode, where the Bible describes Moses raising objections when God first calls him. The Prince of Egypt goes way, way beyond that. Moses’s self-deprecating, self-doubting manner runs through the film. When Jethro throws a feast in his honor Moses mumbles, “Please, sir, I’ve done nothing in my life worthy of honor.” He requires so much encouragement from Miriam that in the end, after crossing the Red Sea, he turns to her and says, “Thank you,” as if to say, “I couldn’t have done it without you.” There’s no basis in the text for this.
I’ll put the money on Mel Gibson and maybe Speilberg on the better movies.
For good or bad, the best part of any Noah’s Ark movie will be the animals themselves (as always).
I’m interesting in seeing how the two Maccabee movies compare with each other, and with the Bible.
Already Jewish critics ae attacking Mel Gibson for attemptmg to make a movie that gives the idea that Jews can’t get along with anyone.
This isn’t entirely on-topic, I suppose, but whenever the question of goodness looking more or less attractive than badness comes up, the first thing that comes to my mind is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Khan is a dynamic villain, no question about it—and yet I always find the heroes, especially Kirk and Spock, far more “appealing” than Khan. There is something genuinely *good* about them and their relationships with one another that is ultimately more attractive to me than the raging ego of Khan; where Kirk and Spock both make deep professions of friendship and offer their lives for the ship, Khan ends up sacrificing his own friends to suit his own vain thirst for revenge.
Heh. And I just realized, Khan quoted (or at least alluded to) Paradise Lost at the end of the TV episode that introduced his character! Khan essentially identified himself with the Satan character, and no doubt thought there was something heroic about the Satan character too—but we in the audience can see that Khan was wrong, that Khan was a monster who ended up destroying all who were dear to him. (And this wouldn’t be the only way in which Khan Missed The Point Of A Story: just look at how he identifies with Captain Ahab in Star Trek II. In Star Trek: First Contact, Captain Picard was consumed with a lust for revenge against the Borg, and it was a quote from Moby Dick that made him turn around and put things in perspective. But in Star Trek II, Khan doesn’t learn any lessons from Moby Dick; he just uses it as material for verbalizing his own self-destructive hatred of Kirk & co.)
Re: Moses’ “self-deprecating, self-doubting manner”, I don’t know that I’d say there’s “no basis in the text for this.” Numbers 12:3 tells us that “Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth”, so, depending on how you understand “humility”, it wouldn’t necessarily be out of character for Moses to do the things that you describe him doing in the DreamWorks cartoon.
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