Behind the lens

MOST PEOPLE, on some level, love movies. Yet as both a Christian and a filmmaker, I'm persuaded that Christians have not excelled at filmmaking because they haven't really loved the cinema. They may love the power of cinema. They may appreciate the social impact of cinema. Yet many Christians remain suspicious of film, and that's a problem if one wants to succeed in the creative endeavor of making films. In order to do what I do, one must know and love the entire history of film, and believe that filmmaking is an expression of creativity that glorifies God.

Ernest Hemingway would not have been able to become the writer he was if he had not read Shakespeare, Dickens and other great writers. In the same way, Paul Thomas Anderson couldn't have made Boogie Nights and Magnolia if he hadn't studied Martin Scorsese. And Scorsese couldn't have made films like Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ if he had not studied Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs). And we wouldn't have Peckinpah without John Ford (The Grapes of Wrath, The Quiet Man). Prospective filmmakers have a responsibility to understand the history of cinema--both American and international. If we don't know the work of Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, our cinematic vocabulary is limited.

Only by knowing where cinema has come from--by knowing, for example, what constitutes the essential qualities of the French New Wave, of Italian neorealism or of American film noir--can we understand where film is now and perhaps participate in where it is going.

Now this is a risky business because it means being willing to fill our minds with all kinds of images and all kinds of thoughts from all kinds of people. Of course, implicit in all of this is the necessity of watching contemporary movies. We need to know the state of the art and to observe the work of the great living directors. It's also important to pay attention to what makes certain films financially successful. Steven Spielberg's success is only partly due to his directorial talent. There are other directors as good as, if not better, but no director in cinema history has ever combined such excellent craftsmanship with such an astonishing sensitivity to the state of popular culture. He has a sixth sense for what our dreams are, and he's constantly visualizing them for us. When he speaks about his work, he talks as much about the audience as he does about his films. He's making films because he wants people to see them. And as he's gotten older he seems to be making films that are not only entertaining but also rich in thematic and historical ideas. Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan will certainly go down in cinema history as two of the great artistic achievements of the '90s.

Excellence in filmmaking is always dependent upon great writing. Those who want to work in cinema must develop their writing skills. My University of Southern California thesis film Love in the Ruins played in many film festivals, won numerous awards and even got me a good agent--but it didn't get me a job. If the studios are looking for a young first-time feature film director for a project, they are far more inclined to pull somebody from the pool of top music video directors or commercial directors than to hire a film school graduate who has made a great short film. The best way into a first-time feature directing job is to write a script somebody wants so much that, in order to get it, that person is willing to risk letting the writer direct it.

The second requisite for success in the business of making movies is often hard for Christians to tackle. Anyone who wants to succeed in this business has to be willing to wrestle with difficult ideas and situations. It's a complicated business, and film is a complicated art form. To succeed at it, a person has to be willing to get into the messiness of dealing with the issues of sex and violence. The Christian tendency is to oversimplify these issues. I've read many Christian periodicals that evaluate the "acceptability" of a film solely by the amount of sex, violence and profanity it contains. Those publications count the cuss words and describe the frequency and intensity of the episodes of sex and violence. I always secretly wish they would make such an "evaluation" of the Bible. If they applied their standards of acceptability to Holy Scripture, it would surely be found "unacceptable." Much of the Bible is profane, violent and lurid, yet it's a profoundly moral book. The moral quality of a movie is not determined by its MPAA rating. Of course, there is such a thing as excessive violence or gratuitous sex, but we have to become much more thoughtful about how we determine what constitutes excessiveness or unacceptability.

Taxi Driver, one of my favorite films of all time, has taught me more about filmmaking than any other picture. It's a very violent movie that inspired a real-life act of violence--John Hinckley's shooting of President Ronald Reagan. It's also a great work of art, a film that captures a profound sense of human loneliness and examines how urban America breeds alienation--and the film does so with great compassion.