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Today's Christian spoke with Taylor, Smith, and carr about the making of The Second Chance and the lingering racial divide that the movie explores.

Steve, you've directed a lot of music videos through the years. Why did you choose The Second Chance as your first feature-length project?

Steve: I had the idea awhile back. The first guy I talked to about it was [the late author and ministry leader] Mike Yaconelli, who had been a longtime friend. I told him about the idea of trying to tell a story that was set in contemporary church life, and trying to make it feel real to those who actually go to church or who grew up in it. He gave me some great advice, but he died [in 2003] before the script was finished. He was an inspiration. Also, my dad is a pastor. So seeing the kind of things he went through provided a lot of inspiration.

And finally just living here in Nashville, which supposedly has the most churches per capita of any city in the country, helped inspire me. The churches here are so segregated, like they are, I'm guessing, in most of the country. I wanted to explore that issue.

Did you always have Michael in mind for the film?

Steve: Ben Pearson, my director of photography and co-writer, was the one who suggested Michael. Of course my first question was the one everyone had: Can he act? We talked to him about it and began running through some rough scenes, and I got the sense that he would be able to do it. So at that point we wrote the part with him in mind.

Alfred Hitchcock used to say the reason he liked to cast stars in his movies was because he could get the movie going a lot faster, because the audience would have an immediate empathy with those personalities that they knew. And I certainly felt like that was one advantage of having Michael.

I have to say, though, he was pretty brave going into this. He's one of Christian music's biggest names, and a lot of people in his position would be concerned about how their public image is portrayed; they kind of want the idealized version of themselves on the screen. Well, there are a lot of things about the character of Ethan Jenkins that are not very flattering. But Michael was fine with it, and it's a better movie because of that.

Michael, what drew you to this film?

Michael: I've been interested in acting since high school. I've been in front of a camera, doing videos and things like that, for the last 23 years. I never felt compelled to move to Hollywood, but always in the back of my head, I thought, If a movie comes my way that I really believe in, and it has some sort of redemptive quality to it, then I would love to consider it.

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