Posted on 11/22/2006 10:30:20 AM PST by siunevada
A career change from Hollywood agent to producer was more than a leap of faith for Marty Bowen, who remembers well his days as an altar server growing up in Fort Worth. It’s been the fulfillment of a dream to work on a project he passionately believes in.
Co-producer of “The Nativity Story,” expected to be the big Christian movie this Christmas season, Bowen found himself, after 15 years in Los Angeles, searching for a new direction.
Two years ago, while still an agent at United Talent Agency, Bowen challenged his screenwriter client Mike Rich to pen a Biblical story. Rich began to write during the Christmas holidays two years ago and set out to discover just who Mary and Joseph really were and what they might have thought about their unique role in salvation history.
New Line Cinema’s “The Nativity Story” chronicles the pair’s arduous journey, Mary’s miraculous pregnancy and the history-defining birth of Jesus.
Directed by Catherine Hardwicke (“Thirteen,” “Lords of Dogtown”) and co-produced by Wyck Godfrey (“I, Robot,” “Daddy Day Care”) the film boasts an international cast, including Academy Award nominee Keisha Castle-Hughes, who played the main character in “Whale Rider.” In “The Nativity Story,” Castle-Hughes becomes a teenage Mary who is told by her parents that they have arranged for her to marry Joseph. Distraught by the news, Mary takes refuge in a quiet valley to collect her thoughts. There she is visited by the angel Gabriel who tells her she has been chosen by God to carry his son. While Mary accepts the news, she has no idea how to tell her parents.
The film is set for nationwide release Dec. 1 and will be premiered by the Vatican in late November.
“I wanted to tell the story from a story-telling point of view,” Bowen said in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “I was raised with an understanding of the Nativity and how it was dramatized in most schools and churches, like a Christmas pageant.
“There is a very real dramatic tension going through the film that you don’t see in a Christmas pageant,” he said, “because no one wants their child to play the bad guy.”
Most Christmas pageants dilute the dramatic impact of the journey of Mary and Joseph and the socio-political context by omitting King Herod.
“We wanted to retell that story with all that Hollywood storytelling has to offer in a way that makes you want to identify with the characters involved and how the story might have played out,” Bowen said.
“The Nativity Story” is faithful to gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus found in Matthew and Luke, he said.
The challenge was to be true to the gospel but also to tell the story “so a modern audience can relate to it.”
Historians, theologians, Catholic experts and ecumenical experts were all consulted, including Pauline Sister Rose Pachette, who was instrumental in helping the New Line Cinema team develop a unique and very poignant rendition of Mary’s “Magnificat,” which is used in the film. Although his research proved invaluable to Rich in writing the screenplay, it was personal loss that gave him his greatest inspiration.
“During the year I took on the project my father passed away, and I felt compelled, both spiritually and emotionally, to tackle something,” he said.
“It was a joy to write, not because it was a huge, epic, event-based story, but because it was just the opposite: a personal, intimate story of two ordinary people carrying out this absolutely extraordinary mission.” Bowen, who began re-reading Scripture as the project moved along, found himself compelled to make a very difficult decision. He decided he wanted to be part of the movie rather than simply acting as agent. So he prepared to leave his job at United Talent Agency, where he was a partner.
“When you are an agent and have done this as long as I have (since the fall of 1991), the first blush of making a deal is not what it once was,” Bowen said. “You have to find other things that are inspiring.
“If I was going to be in the movie business for the next 20 years, I knew I would have to do something different,” he said. “Otherwise, I could have moved back to Fort Worth and gotten into real estate. I wanted to get into the creative process, and this movie became that exciting opportunity.”
Bowen called New Line Cinema production executive Cale Boyter to set up a meeting. Over the course of lunch, they talked about the idea of “The Nativity Story.” Boyter, who liked the idea immediately, asked who might write the screenplay. Bowen told Boyter that Rich was already working on it. Boyter had long been an admirer of Rich’s other film work (“Finding Forrester,” “The Rookie”).
A deal was quickly reached for New Line Cinema to produce the film, with Bowen enlisting long-time friend Godfrey to leave his job at Davis Entertainment so they could start a company together. The first project for their newly formed Temple Hill Entertainment Company: “The Nativity Story.”
“I am very blessed,” Bowen said. “I literally had everything work out the way I wanted,” he said. “I can’t complain about a single aspect of the making of this film.”
Taking a little less than a year, Bowen admitted that “to do a movie like this with an overseas cast in 11 months is almost unheard of.”
Filmed in Matera, Italy, (scene of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”) and in Morocco, the pieces quickly fell into place for a “palette of actors that felt like they were from a different era,” said director Hardwicke, who read the script from her hospital room in Los Angeles as she was recovering from surgery. She immediately loved it.
Besides Castle-Hughes, who lives in New Zealand, the role of Elizabeth is played by Academy Award nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo, best known for her previous work in “The House of Sand and Fog.” Mary’s parents, Anna and Joachim, are played by Hiam Abbass (“Paradise Now” and “Munich”) and Shaun Tobb (“Crash”).
“We felt they made a really moving couple,” Hardwicke said. Irish actor Ciaran Hinds, who played one of five Israeli assassins in the film “Munich,” was chosen to play the part of King Herod.
Work soon began on constructing a version of the village of Nazareth in Matera, a small town in southern Italy that looks much like Judea 2,000 years ago, with caves dotting the hilly landscape. Carved out of the terrain, the cave dwellings have served as homes for thousands of years.
The movie, intended to reach a wide audience, cost “in the $30 million range” to make, Bowen said. The cast and crew did defy two rules of Hollywood in making the movie. “They always say never work with children or animals at the same time and beware of night shoots,” Bowen said. The “quintessential Nativity scene” is shot in a grotto and it is at night.
“One of the most challenging nights on the set was the night of Nativity,” Bowen said. “We had everything from donkeys with hemorrhoids to cows with irascible natures.”
“We had nasty, spitting, feisty, biting camels,” he said.
“The Nativity Story” seeks to reveal the real Mary, he said. “What’s interesting is that for the most part, growing up with Mary as a Catholic, you think of her on a pedestal,” he said. “She is someone to be admired. She is someone to take comfort in, but she is not readily accessible.
“It’s hard to identify with her when she is up on a pedestal because she is an iconic figure,” the Harvard graduate said. “We tried in the film to make her a real young girl with real feelings and real concerns. We tried to make her someone to relate to. If the angel Gabriel came and appeared to you, you would not immediately come to terms with it. She had real doubts and fears.
“Ultimately what you end up with is an understanding of why she got to be revered,” Bowen said.
He said the movie’s message is multi-level. Not only the journey of Mary, it is the journey of Joseph, the journey of the Wise Men, and the journey of the shepherds.
“We tried to make each character important and to show how they were affected by this experience. “It’s fundamentally a journey of faith and a journey of faith rewarded,” Bowen said.
He hopes the film will make his family and friends proud of him. “I think the movie is going to floor my mother with emotion,” he said. “I think my friends from Texas will be proud and moved.”
“The Nativity Story” has given Bowen “an opportunity and platform to have my cake and eat it, too.
It’s difficult to get movies made in Hollywood,” he said. “It’s even more difficult to have subject matter that you really believe in. Very rarely do you get to do this first time out. It is life-changing,” Bowen said.
Bump
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