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After I walked them though the whole story, the head of marketing says, "That's really great. But, do you think it's Christian enough? Because if it needs to be more Christian, we're fine with that." I thought, What alternate universe did I just wake up in?

Elliott, George and Sedgewick are pirates who don't do all that much

How else have you seen Hollywood change between Jonah and Pirates?

Vischer: It's a different world in that so many doors are open. It's very easy to pitch your idea thanks to Passion. It's a very strange world in the sense that everyone in Hollywood is looking for Christian movies.

However, no one knows what a "Christian movie" is. This has created a cottage industry of Christian experts working on behalf of studios to help them find Christian movies or help them figure out how to make Christians come to their movies. It's a bizarre time. The movies that are most obviously "Christian" tend not to be very good. The really good storytellers don't enjoy didacticism—movies that preach or have an obvious and overwhelming moral agenda. But if you want a pastor to promote your movie from the pulpit, which is what the studios are all banking on, you can't leave the message open.

So the movies that appeal most to this new Christian machinery are ones that most filmmakers don't want to make. [Christian moviegoers often] don't like to think hard. We think, Would someone just come out at the end of the film and tell me about Jesus so I will know it's a Christian movie?

That's kinda where we were with Jonah. It taught explicitly. Movies are a good medium to engage people emotionally, but people do not go to movies to be preached at. You can teach explicitly on television, but it's almost inversely proportional in a film: The more you preach, the fewer you reach.

The Pirates movie, to a certain extent, was an attempt to tell a great story with a Christian theme and see, "Will this be more broadly received because it feels more like a movie and less like a very preachy kids' video blown up to film resolution?" There's teaching, but it is subtler than Jonah. I put less pressure on myself to teach explicitly. I'm gonna make audiences think a little harder.

Passion, Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings succeeded in this new environment. But other Christian films—including big budget releases like The Nativity Story and Evan Almighty—have not. What's the secret?

Vischer: Some Christian films have failed flat-out because their plot was their message when it should've been a subtext or a comment that a side character makes in passing. However, if your main character turns to the camera and delivers the truth of Jesus, you've probably lost nine-tenths of your audience in five words. It's hard to accept that when you are a filmmaker who has decided God wants you to use filmmaking to share the gospel.

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 Chronicles of Narnia and 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, you couldn't write Narnia today and have it accepted by the evangelical world because [of the magic] and because in its metaphor, it effectively has a non-Christian worldview.

Now, if we go to another fantasy world, we need to find Jesus there—literally. That is why the Harry Potter books are viewed to be straight from the pit. Even if Rowling says she's enjoying 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.

You said you wanted Pirates to tell a good story with a Christian theme. What's it about?

Vischer: I was trying to build a parable for the Christian life in a little movie about three lazy pirates. The story starts with these poor losers who long to be heroes, but someone else has to intervene on their behalf. This entity is with them all along and called them into the journey.

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