'Dude, That Was Graphic'
Mel Gibson talks about The Passion of The Christ.
by David Neff and Jane Johnson Struck | posted 2/23/2004
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CHRISTIANITY TODAY editor David Neff and TODAY'S CHRISTIAN WOMAN editor Jane Johnson Struck interviewed Mel Gibson about The Passion of The Christ, following an advance screening in January. Here is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Neff: You have been getting a tremendous reception at screenings for evangelical church leaders. As a traditional Catholic, how has being exposed to this different segment of Christianity affected you?
For years, my best friends were actually evangelicals, many in the business and many in professional ways. I love them. I think they really know the Book. They know the Book better than Catholics, actually.
I've been actually amazed at the way I would say the evangelical audience has—hands down—responded to this film more than any other Christian group.
For me the amazing thing is that the film is so Marian. But I think the way the film displays her has been kind of an eye opener for evangelicals who don't usually look at that aspect. They understand the reality of a mother and a son.
Jane Struck: You've been quoted as saying that you felt that the Holy Spirit was helping to direct this film. Do you feel like you had any specific answers to prayer throughout the process of filming and even as far as getting a distributor?
Well, this is very funny. There's a friend of mine. She's an evangelical pastor. She just said to me, "How many screens do you want?" And I won't tell you how many but I gave her a number and she said, "Okay." And I'm telling you, it's getting there.
Struck: Does she have people praying specifically?
I think she's doing it all by herself. She's just going for it. So that will be interesting to see if we hit the mark. We'll know she gets heard anyway. It's pushing this week to 3,500.
Struck: How did you find the balance between staying true to the Scripture and your creative interpretation?
Wow, the Scriptures are the Scriptures—I mean they're unchangeable, although many people try to change them. And I think that my first duty is to be as faithful as possible in telling the story so that it doesn't contradict the Scriptures.
Now, so long as it didn't do that, I felt that I had a pretty wide berth for artistic interpretation, and to fill in some of the spaces with logic, with imagination, with various other readings.
For example, Judas goes to kill himself and I had him being tormented by children. I made up the children idea and that they were somehow diabolical, so they weren't real children. And that he was on a hillside and he looked at a dead goat, and then he goes and kills himself, hangs himself with a halter. I thought, so where's he going to get the halter? Well wait a minute, it should be a dead donkey with a halter on. I mean there's nothing that said there was a dead donkey there, but why not? It just says he "hung himself with an halter" [Matt. 27:5, Douay].
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