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| Jesse Metcalfe and Melissa Joan Hart in God's Not Dead 2 |
screenwriters of
Nick Olszyk: God's Not Dead was an enormous success, bring in $64
million at the box office against a budget of only $2 million, earning a 32
fold return. By comparison, the highest grossing film of the year, Transformers
4, had only an 8 fold return. Why was this film so successful?
Chuck Konzelman/Cary Solomon: Well, we’re not knocking the success of theTransformers franchise. We’re sure Paramount is very happy with their eight-fold return…especially on a big tent-pole release. Part of what allowed for God’s Not Dead’s success was that it was filmed on almost a micro-budget, in film financing terms. So when it resonated with its target audience, that translated into an unusually high multiplier in terms of the return on investment. Dollar-for-dollar, the industry site The Numbers ranks it as the seventh-most profitable film of all time.
Nick Olszyk: In the first film, a
college student is challenged by an atheist professor. In God’s Not Dead 2, the tables are flipped, and a teacher is brought
to court for mentioning Jesus in a public school classroom. It’s an interesting
inversion, and I’m curious if you see this as a changing trend in academia?
Konzelman/Solomon: Ironically, teachers live in such fear of mentioning faith issues in a classroom that this sort of thing almost never originates with the teacher…unless, of course, they’re denigrating Christianity. But the situation in the film stems from a female student in an AP history class recognizing a parallel between the nonviolence teachings of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and those of Jesus. So she asks her teacher a direct question about it. Recognition of that parallel shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, since Dr. King was an ordained Baptist minister. But that tends to get glossed over in the public school environment these days.
Nick Olszyk: A significant portion
of defense’s case resides on proving the existence of Jesus as a historical
fact, even bringing in former skeptics like Lee Strobel and J. Warner Wallace.
Why was this important?
Konzelman/Solomon: For two reasons: the first being that this particular issue hasn’t been litigated yet. So we wanted to “lean into the future” a little bit, even if it’s only 15 or 20 minutes into the future. The second is that we’re looking to make believers aware of the fact that the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights aren’t drafted to suggest “you can talk about any person who ever existed with the exception of Jesus.” So we’re separating the Jesus of history—whose existence is universally accepted by all credible scholars and historians, including atheists—from the “Christ” of theology. The former is a history issue; the latter is a faith issue. Exclusion of the faith aspect shouldn’t preclude discussion of the historical side. After all, we’re talking about the most influential person in the history of the human race.
Nick Olszyk: The prosecuting
attorney frequently insists that this is not about “attacking beliefs” but
rather “preaching in the public square.” How has our society relegated
religious faith to only a personal spiritual experience? It seems unreasonable
to assume religion, the dominant force in the lives of the vast majority of
humanity cannot have a public expression.
Konzelman/Solomon: The secular-humanist progressives insist that people are free to worship as they choose, but they need to leave their personal beliefs at the door when they enter the public sphere. And unfortunately, too many Christians have bought into that. But it’s a trap: it means the other side gets to bring its belief system into the public square, but we don’t. We’ve got to stop making that concession, or we’re going to end up losing the right to exercise our religious faith as well.
Nick Olszyk: Both of you are
Catholics, but I notice neither film makes any mention of Catholic ideas like
the saints or the sacraments. Neither is any Protestant denomination explicitly
spoken. In the first film, you faced a little heat for labeling the great
physicist Georges Lemaître a “theist” instead of a “priest.” Were these films
deliberately made to appeal to a wide range of Christians across denominational
lines?
Konzelman/Solomon: You’re asking a delicate question. In the script for the first film, we actually referred to Lemaître as a Catholic priest, since that’s what he was. But that reference got buffed out during shooting. In order to make the film accessible to the widest possible Christian audience, the producers elected to keep the flavor very nondenominational. So the tone and vocabulary of the film are very much contemporary and Evangelical. We’ve had some Catholics challenge us about this, to which we politely respond that not a single dollar of the film’s budget—or even the advertising fund—came from Catholic sources. So we consider ourselves blessed to have been invited along for the journey. And if Catholics want to see some films with a distinctly more Catholic flavor, then they’re going to have to help fund them. That might sound blunt…or even rude. But that’s reality.
Nick Olszyk: One of the strengths
of both films is the willingness to face hard questions against Christianity.
As St. Paul states, “always be ready to give a reason for your belief.” What
challenges have you faced in your own faith journey, and how have these
experiences influenced your writing?
Konzelman/Solomon: When we left the mainstream film industry—feeling like we’d been called by the Lord to do so—we entered a pretty rough period. Without going into details, let’s just call it a “desert experience” that lasted about seven years. The advantage of that is, now we consider any successes—even small ones—as a blessing, and hopefully we’re better prepared to withstand whatever trials are still ahead.
Nick Olszyk: I loved the line “I
would rather be judged by the world and loved by God than be loved by the world
and judged by God.” I might be butchering this, but it’s still beautiful. How
does a “heavenly viewpoint” change our perception of Earthly struggles?
Konzelman/Solomon: St. Augustine wrote about the City of God…and the City of Man. And those two cities are forever in opposition to one another. It’s easy to see Hollywood as sort of the ultimate “City of Man.” Or perhaps, “Vanity Fair” [from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress], the pleasant town full of diversions on the road to destruction, where faith is an anathema. A “heavenly viewpoint” means we try to evaluate each project in terms of what it can accomplish for the glory of God. And while solid returns at the box office are nice—allowing faith-driven filmmakers to go back and produce more product—even a film which underperforms by industry standards can do a lot of good. Every film with a truly redemptive message is going to touch someone deeply. It’s going to strike a nerve at just the right moment, and move him or her to repentance. And helping to save even one lost soul is a pretty big deal, according to heaven’s way of accounting. Part of the beauty of film is that it can do that for someone in a movie theater, over a bucket of popcorn. And it can just as easily do it again for someone else, years later, because they happen to view the same picture on television or an old DVD. Film’s ability to move human emotions isn’t diminished either by time or consumption by others.
Nick Olszyk: There has been a great
deal of discussion recently about the lack of diversity – especially race and
gender – in Hollywood generally and the Academy Awards specifically. Yet there
is little mention of diversity of ideas. Does Hollywood have a “diversity
problem” when it comes to representing Christianity or Judeo-Christian
morality?
Konzelman/Solomon: Certainly. There’s no solid representation of Judeo-Christian morality anywhere in the industry. That’s because the executive ranks of the studios are nearly devoid of practicing believers. Nearly a third of America finds itself in church on any given Sunday, but we’re willing to wager there’s not a single studio head who attends religious services—of whatever denomination—on a regular basis. What’s worse is that studio culture doesn’t just ignore Christian thought, it’s downright hostile toward it. So the very few believers we know of who are working inside the system have to keep their personal beliefs very quiet. And that’s not going to change any time soon. The good news is that believers are quietly moving forward, outside of the traditional studio system, to get things done. To flip Karl Marx on his head—in a way that would’ve horrified Marx himself—we’re seizing the means of production. And that’s a very exciting idea for those of us with a faith-driven worldview.
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