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How did you two meet?

Godfrey: Marty and I were roommates when I first moved to Los Angeles. We were both young and up and coming in the business, and we got to be really good friends. We always talked about maybe going into business together some day, and finally, the timing just felt right. We both said, "If we're going to do this, let's not just make movies that are commercial, let's make movies that our moms would be proud of."

Wyck Godfrey (right) with screenwriter Mike Rich on the set in Italy

When you first read Mike's script of The Nativity Story, how did you react?

Godfrey: I remember thinking, He did it. He pulled it off. He found a way to put you in the shoes of a 14-year-old girl for whom any of these things are big deals—having to tell your parents you're pregnant, going on a dangerous 100-mile journey. Those are much more dramatic scenes than you think about when you're reading Scripture or hearing it in Sunday school. You just think, Oh, an angel came to her and told her she was going to have a baby, and she said, "Great." And then they had to go to Bethlehem and they had it in a manger. You never think about how tough it really was. This script and film make you realize that the level of faith Mary and Joseph had in God was extraordinary.

I hope the movie will make people reflect on their lives. Like, "If God came and asked me to do something half as difficult, would I have the faith to do it?" I'm not sure a lot of us would be able to say yes.

Once New Line signed off on it, what happened next?

Godfrey: When they said, "Oh, by the way, we want it for this Christmas," there was a little bit of panic. It usually takes months to find the right director, but literally within a week, Catherine Hardwicke called up and said, "I want to do it." She had already read the script, and was immediately interested.

That sounds like one of a number of "God things" you could point to along the way.

Godfrey: Yes. The probability of being able to pull this off in such a short amount of time is so small that you just start to say, "It's ordained. There's a power behind getting this thing done. And it's not ours."

Any other anecdotes that seemed clearly "ordained"?

Godfrey: The chances that a studio immediately loves an idea—especially on the first draft of a script—and wants to do it is very rare. Finding a director in less than two weeks is extremely rare, especially one who's willing to attack the movie in such a short time frame. When we said we want it for December 1, Catherine said, "Well then we should probably get on a plane tomorrow for Morocco and Italy to check out the locations." She was game to attack it as voraciously as needed.

Keisha Castle-Hughes as Mary

And then your cast came together pretty quickly.

Godfrey: Yes. I tried to tell the studio that it took us six months to find the boy to play Eragon [in another upcoming Godfrey production, releasing Dec. 15], and he's certainly less iconic than The Virgin Mary! I said, "People go on worldwide, year-long searches to find these actors, and you're expecting us to find a girl that can speak with an Aramaic accent, have the perfect look, and is a good enough actress to pull it off?" Then Catherine just showed up for our meeting with the studio and said, "Here's the girl." It was Keisha Castle-Hughes, who had been in Whale Rider. We flew Keisha in from New Zealand, and everyone went, "Wow, that's her."

Why is Catherine the right choice for directing this?

Godfrey: I really believed she could bring the texture and reality to the characters of Mary and Joseph—that she would have the ability to really treat them as real people, not iconic figures. I felt like that was the key to the movie working. We didn't want to objectify the story; we didn't want to treat it just like an "event." We really wanted to get underneath the skin of Mary and Joseph, to really put ourselves in their shoes and understand what it was like to go through what they went through. Catherine had done that in Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown both with girls and boys. I felt like this story needs that edge, that intensity. Otherwise you end up with something that might feel like a Hallmark movie.

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