Former production designer Catherine Hardwicke made her reputation as a director by creating the hard hitting and authentic coming-of-age drama, Thirteen and garnered actress Holly Hunter another Oscar nomination as a result. Then she made another teen rebellion film, "The Lords of Dogtown"—about championship skateboarders.
Going against the grain of those very modern and edgy films, she has now made The Nativity Story. The film attempts to provide an insider's look at Mary, Joseph and the other characters surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ. One thing stressed through the film is that it is a story about people who were Jewish and one of the great challenges was to give a sense of what it was like to be Jewish in those times.
Q: These people were Jewish, so you had to learn a lot about them being Jewish.
CH: The incredible thing to me was that I grew up knowing the nativity story, but I didn't even know the first, most basic thing about it: Mary and Joseph were Jewish. Wow! That's like 101, and I didn't even think about that. They don't advertise that in your Church Sunday School classes and I realized that's what I was probably the least educated about. So we got a Jewish scholar to come down from Rome and we made a small synagogue there in the Nazareth village, and he taught us about how people prayed in the first century. And the thing that was really cool, I thought, was that you would pray with your eyes open, try to have a closer connection to God, you were encouraged to have your own gestures, not in a ritual way, but you would really try to bring God into your heart. You could move your hands, kiss it, touch it. So the thing that was fascinating was that you needed to be grounded or it doesn't make sense, and Mary wanted to have that closeness with God, but maybe got a little closer than she was expecting, a little more personal. But I still think it's very important to know, what were their feelings and what were the rules at the time and all that?
Q: So that's why you created the idea of a Nazareth boot camp where your actors got familiar with the characters and the conditions of the time?
CH: Yeah, because I wondered about how we would get people to go back in time. I did the boot camp in both of my previous movies, in a way. In "Thirteen," it was more like slumber parties. [My leads] Nikki [Reed] and Evan [Rachel-Wood] would stay over at my house, and Holly [Hunter] and everybody had slumber parties and we really tried to bond and live in that house. For "Dogtown," we had two months of surf and skate camp. The boys did not wash their hair because the ocean washes your hair if you're a surfer, I'm sure you probably know that. We really tried to live the life, in a way, and that's the only way that you can just go into a total immersion, the best you can do to make it real, and that's what we tried to do in all the movies.
Q: There have been so many biblical epics, like "The Ten Commandments." Did you watch any of them for inspiration?
CH: No, I don't go for those kind of movies. It's a different style, and I can't relate to them to be honest. They're very stiff and formal. I've tried to sit through them but no.
Q: Since you didn't use those films as a point of reference--how did you approach such scenes as the one with the angel Gabriel? Was that how it was scripted or did you add your own take on it?
CH: No, that was a real struggle. How much do you show and not show? How would an angel appear to somebody? That was a tricky thing. It's interesting to think of if you really go to the source material, the Bible. Every time an angel appears to somebody, he says, "Fear not." So there has to be something a little exciting and electrifying when this person appears. So I tried to get a little bit of that feeling, with the natural environment where you see the wind, and you felt this presence of an energy when he comes near you. In the temple, it's the smoke, or it's the olive branches. Try to think of the most beautiful, spiritual place and I found that olive grove and I thought, this might be the place that you could feel connected to that spirituality of another world. Then have it be a man that looks like the people, because at first people are scared, but then they do start listening and talking and interacting so he probably did look like the people that he came to talk to.
Q: You've certainly familiar with making films about teenage characters...
CH: Exactly, or those that have a teenage mentality [laughter]. She was the most famous teenager in the world--that's what was kind of cool [about her]. We don't usually think of Mary that way, but when you do the research you realize that she was 13 or 14 years old; life expectancy was so short at that time and people died during childbirth. That's what really drew me to the film, to think about all the teenagers that I know... What if they were faced with this kind of thing, and these kinds of challenges? It's an incredible idea, so it got me interested in getting inside of her [head] and to figure out what she would have thought and how she would have felt.
Q: You have been categorized as this indie director since you created such a low-budget, edgy hand-held camera styled film like "Thirteen" and even the similarly styled "The Lords of Dogtown." What led you to do this film with its far more mainstream concerns and relaxed camera style?
CH: Well, in each movie I tried to do what was right for that character in the story, so when I did "Thirteen," of course I wrote it with Nikki, the 13 year old girl. The whole time I was writing and working with her, if a song would come on the radio, even if we were having a really heavy conversation, she'd be distracted or go on to this or that, or her phone would ring. So I think our life today is very fractured and very frenetic, and I was trying to capture that with the camera movement. And then when I did the skateboard movie, "Dogtown," it's that, but now you add wheels to the kids, so I had to actually be on a motorcycle cam with them half the time just to chase them around. Now in this case, we go back in time, we've got the pace of a donkey, and life was at a little different pace so I thought it needed to be more like the pace of life at that time too.
Q: Did you approach them about this film or did they approach you?
CH: Well, I heard that the Pope really liked Thirteen. Yeah, he's been TiVo-ing it and he just watches it on a regular basis. [Laughter] No, I think it was random and actually, accidental, that my agent sent me a stack of scripts in January of this year that needed a director, and they often do this, they say, are you interested in any of these things? If you are, we'll ask if they're interested in you. And I think they were probably just as surprised that I was interested.
But I read it and I started getting excited about the idea of going deeper than I'd ever gone into these characters. Usually you just think of them with their halos, not as humans, so I thought, this is fascinating and I want to explore that world and I went in with a big pitch, with ideas and photographs, and talked about how I really wanted Mary to be somebody from the region. I wanted her to look not like the Swedish, a blonde, or a blue-eyed Mary, but somebody that looked like she could live in that Mediterranean region; someone with that skin--beautiful olive skin tones--and I wanted her to be thirteen or fourteen years old.
I suppose they decided to go with me because no one else would take the job, but they went with me regardless, and then they said, yes, we'll go with your take, your idea for Mary, and of course, I walked out of there going, well who in the world am I going to cast now? There are no A-list actors, there's nobody from the Middle East, a young fourteen year old girl. I was just like, why did I say this? And suddenly one day, Keisha just popped into my head because I loved her in Whale Rider and she was so moving and just really soulful.
Q: You had to learn a lot about the Middle East, the Bible, and these actors. It must have been an amazing experience; so what was that process like and what was the biggest challenge you faced?
CH: The biggest challenge was that all that stuff had to be done in nine months, and I had to edit it and the score. Every single element had to be completed nine months and 10 days after I got the script, and that was on two continents. So it was just about being ultra-efficient, using the laptop and the "crackberry," just working on everything you could work on at every moment. I would literally be riding in a four-wheel drive through the desert in Morocco, taking digital photos, and the computer would be plugged into the car battery-lighter thingy, and you're trying to organize everything. Maybe we could shoot that scene there, and this one here, and try to add layers, talk to experts, scholars, do crash courses. We had a lot of scholars come down. An ancient astronomy professor came in and talked to us and told us about what kind of instruments they used. How sophisticated was Persian astonomy at that time? Then we made instruments that seemed to be right.
That was like a full-on total immersion system in milking goats and weaving cloth and making the bread, because women would wake up every single morning and grind the grain and make bread. You didn't have a refrigerator or preservatives and all that stuff.
Q: There have been other nativity stories over the years. Why revive it now as such a high-profile movie?
CH: There's been one TV movie in the '80s or something. Very few people have tackled the subject. People think that most people know the story, and I don't know how many of us grew up Christian but, you don't really think about it this way. You don't really think about them as real people with problems we would all have, you don't think about them on the first level as being Jewish. We barely know anything about the story and we don't think very deeply about it, usually, even though it's a beautiful, magical story that has endured forever.
I was captivated by the story itself, just the beautiful relationship between these characters and how their love grew and each one had to have more strength and more courage to stand up for each other. I love that part of it, but now, going to Jerusalem, right off the bat, that's a part of the world that's in so much strife, and the first passage opens with the prophecy in the bible that Israel will dwell securely. We haven't ever ac! hieved that yet, and that's an important sacred place for so many religions, yet how come we can't get along and love the beauty of other religions and appreciate other people? I think it's an important time now for people to think about religion.
Q: You addressed what it would be like to be an unmarried, pregnant woman in that environment
CH: Yeah, and how they were viewed in the eyes of the synagogues and villages of that time.
Q: When people think about the birth of Jesus they think a lot more about Mary, but people really got to know Joseph through this film. Was it you intention to present his story so strongly?
CH: I think that since it is this relationship, you realize that she didn't do it alone. She didn't make that trip to Bethlehem alone, and if you want to look at it this way, God's plan was for her to have a partner to help her get through this. And if you want to look at it in a secular way, it's a beautiful relationship story, it's just the strength of the marriage and the love that these two people have for each other, or developed, in her case--she didn't have it at first. But he showed, by his actions, much more than his words, what kind of a man he was, what kind of heart he had. And that won her over.
Q: Is this movie going to be screened in Israel?
CH: I think so. I think it's going all around the world. Oh yes, because our friends in Israel from the Nazareth village just sent me an e-mail saying they're looking forward to it.
Q: What impact do you hope the film will have on the audience?
CH: Well, I hope that people could think more deeply about faith, even about their faith, and what courage it takes sometimes to be different from others, and you have to have that faith to believe and get you through. I hope that there is a message of tolerance because as we worked on the movie, we had people from all religions. We filmed in a Muslim country, and had every kind of person working on the movie, including people that had no religious affiliation but had a spirituality or a connection to this material, and to the idea that there is something deeper and more important--there is some heart and soul. Also, [we showed] the virtues of these people and the fact that they had courage to do things, like how Joseph had courage. I hope people can feel that on many different levels.
And the cool thing about the Vatican screening we are having, it's a benefit for a town in Israel that was bombed, [so the money can be used] to build a school there; in that town there are Muslims, Christians, and Jewish people all living together. So there is a message of peace here which we need at this time.
Q: And what are you doing next?
CH: I'm trying to do "The Monkeywrench Gang," which is about people passionately caring about the environment. While working on "Nativity Story", trying to find a location that looked the same as it did 2000 years ago was hard, because we have messed this land up pretty bad. So I think it's time, now more than ever, to care more about the planet and what we've got left.
Q: Are you going to write the script yourself?
CH: Actually, William Goldman did a draft. It's very "Butch Cassidy..." So he did a draft and now we're trying to make it a little less expensive so we can afford it. It's based on a novel that Edward Abbey wrote in 1975; Robert Redford, Sean Penn, Dennis, Hopper, a lot of people, have tried to make this movie over the years. It's a cult classic, an environmental movement classic.
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