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Few people knew the names of Jimmy Morris, Robert "Radio" Kennedy, or Herb Brooks before they hit the big screen in The Rookie, Radio, and Miracle, respectively. So if Mike Rich, who wrote the screenplays for those films, messed up any details of those real-life characters, few would have noticed.

But that's not the case with Jesus. Or Joseph and Mary. Mess them up, and you'll hear about it. Nobody knows that better than Rich, who decided to tackle those characters anyway for The Nativity Story, coming to theaters in December.

Rich was well aware of the gravity of the subject matter when he decided to write the script. But after reading Time and Newsweek cover stories on the Nativity in December 2004, he knew what he wanted to write next: A screenplay about Mary and Joseph, leading up to the birth of Christ, and telling the story in such a way that made the characters more human than they'd ever been portrayed before.

Mike Rich has written a number of screenplays, but nothing like this

He spent 11 months researching the topic and about a month writing the script. New Line Cinema bought it almost immediately, Catherine Hardwicke was tapped to direct, and the film was put on the fast track. It opens on December 1, about one year to the day after Rich started writing.

We first met Rich, who is also the film's executive director, in May on the set in southern Italy, and we recently followed up with a more in-depth interview. He spoke with us from his home in Beaverton, Oregon, where he lives with wife Grace and their three children, and where he attends Southwest Bible Church—a congregation Rich says has been upholding this project in prayer all along.

I hear you've just seen a rough cut of the film. How did you like it?

Mike Rich: For a writer, that's always an anxious moment, the first time you see a cut of the film. What you want to see is the diamond that you can polish—and we saw it. The quality of the film so close to the end of production was really remarkable. I'm really grateful to Catherine for that. As a writer, you visualize what the scenes might look like. So it's tremendously exciting to see that what I saw in my mind was actually put down on film—always the equal of what I had visualized, and sometimes even exceeding it.

I understand you did almost a year of research before you started writing the script?

Rich: Yes. Usually, I'll just spend a month or two with a person—like Jimmy Morris in The Rookie or Herb Brooks in Miracle—doing research and interviews, then start sinking my teeth into the story. With this one, I did about eleven months of research. And obviously I couldn't interview the principle characters!

What did your research look like?

Rich: Primarily it was conversations with theologians and historians, and spending a lot of time with a lot of books. One of my sources was Father Richard Rutherford here at the University of Portland, a pretty noted academic theologian. I read books by John Meier and Raymond Brown; Brown wrote basically what's viewed by many as the seminal text on the subject, The Birth of the Messiah.

Any particular "wow" moments in your research?

Rich: A couple. Number one, the economic and cultural oppression of the times. To get an in-depth look at the brutal oppression, economic conditions and tyranny they were living under was really eye opening for me.

One of the fun moments was my research on the star of Bethlehem. If you ask half a dozen experts, you'll get a half a dozen answers—ranging from a comet to a supernova to a major celestial event. But the one explanation that was so intriguing to me—and it's the one we incorporated into the film—was the alignment of this star the Babylonians called Sharu [better known today as Regulus] with Jupiter and Venus. The only time that's happened in 3000 years was in that particular time period. To me, the "wow" moment is the mythological references to all three: Sharu is the Babylonian word for king, while Venus is the mother planet and Jupiter the father planet. Father, Mother and King—that's really an intriguing combination.

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O Little Town	Printer view
We went to Italy to visit the set of The Nativity Story, a New Line Cinema film coming to theaters this Christmas. Here's a behind-the-scenes peek at the making of the movie.