Faith in the Workplace

	Ralph Winter ,producer, whose credits include The X-Men trilogy, Planet of the Apes, Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country, Inspector Gadget, and Left Behind. He is currently filming Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
	Scott Derrickson , director and writer, best known for The Exorcism of Emily Rose. His credits also include Urban Legends: Final Cut and Hellraiser: Inferno. His current project, Paradise Lost, is in pre-production.
	Scott Young , moderator, co-founder of the Coalition for Ministry in Daily Life (CMDL), and co-founder/director emeritus of the City of Angels Film Festival. He is adjunct instructor at Fuller Theological Seminary, the Art Center College of Design, the Los Angeles Film Study Center, and Biola University.

> The Scene:

At Fuller Seminary in Los Angeles, Scott Young leads a special two-person panel discussion for the Coalition for Ministry in Daily Life. Years ago, Fuller began to train its future ministers in media through Reel Spirituality—academics and research into the relationship between theology and film. Both Winter and Derrickson are intimately involved in Reel Spirituality.

Young: Our theme tonight is serving God in the film industry. I would like first Scott and then Ralph to tell their stories. How did they become filmmakers? What projects have they worked on, and what's ahead?

Derrickson: I became a Christian in junior high and shortly thereafter joined a strict fundamentalist church, and I mean strict. I'm a recovering fundamentalist. That was an intense time in my life, and though I've grown and changed in profound ways, I had an encounter with God that has not left me.

I attended Biola, the only Christian college with a film program. Later, at USC film school, I realized I wanted to be a writer and a director inside the studio system, though I could not foresee whether I would find a place for my faith there.

About that time, C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters was getting passed around film school and read by a lot of my peers, so I reread it. At that time, I also read a novel called Lancelot by Walker Percy. Through a character, Percy said that evil was the great clue to the age. He said God may be dead, but what if someone should find the devil? It was just a character quote, but I had an epiphany. I thought something about scary films, with their deep grappling with good and evil, I thought that was a place where, as a Christian, I could tell stories that mattered to me. My thesis film was homage to The Screwtape Letters. It involved a drive-by gas station shooting and two demons—a strange little movie with lots of Led Zeppelin music.

That got me an agent, and I got into the business. Since then, I've written 14 studio screenplays. My first real break was working with Bryan Singer, who saw my short film and wanted to work with me. I directed a small direct-to-video movie called Hellraiser: Inferno, a sequel. I found a way to do it so that it could speak personally to me, and since then I've branched into more interesting material. In fall 2005, a film that I wrote and directed called the Exorcism of Emily Rose did quite well at the theaters.

Winter: I was hanging out around the University of Antwerp in a DVD store and saw Hellraiser V.

Derrickson: In Belgium?

Winter: Yes.

Derrickson: I'm big in Belgium.

(Audience Laughter)

Moderator: Ralph Winter, tell us your journey into Hollywood.

Winter: My story is kind of boring. I grew up not far from here and went to UC Berkeley. I was a history major and just kind of fell into the movie business: right time, right place. Out of UC Berkeley, I got a job at Broadway department stores making corporate videos to teach employees how to ring the register and take inventory and greet customers.

Derrickson: That's scary.

Winter: Yeah, that's terrifying. I actually wanted to go to Fuller or graduate school, but I found myself at a dead end at the Broadway and someone in personnel said, "My husband works at Paramount. You ought to go over and interview." I'd never shot any film, but they hired me. I worked there for about three and half years in post production until I eventually escaped to work on the Star Trek movies—did five of those and a lot of other silly movies. Lately, I finished with the third X-Men movie; we just finished Fantastic Four summer 2005, and we'll be doing a second one summer 2006.

Moderator: Talk to us about some of your major influences, filmmakers, films that inspire and form the way you do your work.

Derrickson: When I was growing up, my family saw a ridiculous number of movies. The drive-in was usually for the R-rated movies, so when the off-limits parts came up, my dad censored the films by making us kids get down behind the seat. The filmmaker in me was born crouching behind the back seat and imagining what was on the screen.

The biggest cinema influence on me was my discovery of Japanese cinema, particularly director Akira Kurosawa. No director in the history of cinema ever had a greater body of work; his films are both art and entertainment, and he always dealt with great human ideas. Those are the kinds of films I wanted to make: movies that people are going to see but at the same time have something to say.