Hooray For Holy-wood

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"The Passion made what was theoretically an audience very real," says Jonathan Bock, whose Grace Hill Media has helped market films like The Chronicles of Narnia and Walk the Line to religious audiences. What became clear was that the 43% of Americans who attend church on any given weekend like films as much as the other 57% but are seeking a certain kind. "Not everything needs to be a bathrobe-and-sandals kind of movie, but there have to be some family-friendly parameters," Bock says. "Something in the film should challenge or elevate the human spirit, some kind of through-line that would work for the faith community."

To get a sense of the diversity of filmgoers of faith, take a look at the minds behind Nativity. Screenwriter Rich, who attends a nondenominational church in Oregon, says, "I'm a man of faith, but I've seen [Martin Scorsese's violent, R-rated Mob drama] The Departed twice. Would I like to see more biblically based, spiritually based stories? I sure would. As long as they're of quality." The two producers who spearheaded the film are a Catholic altar boy from Texas turned Hollywood agent and a Tennessean who grew up attending a charismatic Christian church and recently produced Alien vs. Predator. And then there's Hardwicke, raised by Texas Presbyterians and best known for her gritty portraits of young people in Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown. For her, the most religious experience in making Nativity was sitting under an ancient olive tree in the town of Matera, Italy, where most of the film was shot. "If I were an angel, I thought, I'd go visit Mary there," says Hardwicke. That's where she set the Annunciation.

What this group of filmmakers shared was a desire to take Nativity beyond the Godsploitation genre, the extended Sunday-school lessons into which many independent Christian films devolve and in which the laughable acting and dialogue and the anticipation of a big payoff at the end feel closer to shtick than art. FoxFaith's first theatrical release, Love's Abiding Joy, a western based on a novel by the Christian writer Janette Oke, made only about $250,000 on 200 screens this fall, perhaps because it was a little like a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie--without the edge. "I'm not sure people want to pay $10 on a Friday night to be preached to," says Reuben Cannon, who produced Woman, Thou Art Loosed and Perry's films.

For Hardwicke, this meant making the icons of the story as real as possible. "People don't think of the character of Mary or the character of Joseph," she says. Since no one knows how Mary explained her pregnancy to her parents or what she and Joseph said to each other on that 110-mile journey to Bethlehem, it was up to Rich and Hardwicke to speculate, with the help of historians and theologians. "We'd ask, 'What was the mind-set of a religious Jewish person at that time?'" says Hardwicke. Despite the accelerated production schedule, she spent a month setting up a kind of Nativity sleepaway camp, where the actors improvised scenes, got religious training and learned to milk goats.