2 of 3
What do success stories like Passion, the first Narnia film, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy tell evangelicals about making successful films?
I've learned the hard way that movies are not a great teaching medium. If you want to engage people emotionally, great—but you can't ever turn to the camera and say, "Now I have three points I want to make about parenting." You can do that on TV. Sesame Street does that. Dora the Explorer does that every day and nobody says, "That's not filmmaking! That's didactic!" The difference is that people do not go to the movies to be preached at. That's the bottom line. The more you preach, the fewer you reach. What frustrates me with the film business is how much time, energy, and money you have to spend to have the opportunity for two sentences of real transparent meaning.
The Passion was such an anomaly; you really can't use it to learn much of anything about the nature of film. You had the most popular film actor in the world making a deeply personal work of art about a religious story. What are the odds of that happening again?
The movies inspired by the Narnia stories and the Lord of the Rings are also tough test cases. How many Narnias are there? How easy is it to come up with another Lord of the Rings? It's not.There's Tolkien and Lewis and then everybody else. Besides, Narnia had a 50-year history of engagement with fans—and a grandfather-clause evangelical exception for the use of fantasy and magic. You can't get away with that today. Now, if we go to another fantasy world, we need to find Jesus there—literally.
That is why for some evangelicals, the Harry Potter books are seen as being straight from the pit. Even if Rowling says she's employing Christian themes, forget it. How do you write a Christian fantasy today? I have no idea. I don't know that you can. I think we've killed it. I think we are so concerned with how oppressed our worldview is and so defensive that we've painted ourselves into a corner. And thus, we can't tell the kind of stories that Lewis or Chesterton would have told to share the gospel. It's kind of depressing, frankly.
After Big Idea was sold, you started Jellyfish Labs, an idea incubator. What was the goal?
We wanted to go back to being like Big Idea Productions in 1993—when we were just looking at trends. Back then, that led directly to VeggieTales. Now, it has led us to launch JellyTelly (JellyTelly.com), which is a seed planted online for a Christian Nickelodeon.
We need some way to interact with kids on a daily basis. With VeggieTales, even at our peak, we were telling two stories a year. The average American kid is consuming about 5 hours of media a day—including more than 3 hours of TV. So, telling two stories a year is not helping parents as much as they need to be helped.
Instead, we want to be there every day—like Mr. Rodgers was—and say: "Good morning, kids, here's what we're gonna learn today." Even if it's just for a half hour a day, we could have a huge impact by taking them out of the Hollywood media stream.
Kids consume media in so many ways. Some have assumed that tv is dying because of all the other growing media. But tv consumption has held steady for five years. Instead of being replaced, it's merely being augmented by all these other options, and media consumption is rising. So, we need to be on tv. What's the best way to get there? Sony rolled out their new line of tvs, and they all have internet ports on the back. All entertainment is becoming data. In ten years, the internet will be how all data is transmitted—whether you access it on your tv, laptop, or iPod is irrelevant.
share this page
RSS Feed
