My interview with Steve McEveety and Jim Caviezel, the producer and co-star respectively of The Stoning of Soraya M., went up at CT Movies yesterday.
The article focuses pretty narrowly on that one film, but I also asked McEveety about a couple other films that his company, Mpower Pictures, is working on – so here are a few "deleted quotes" from the interview.
First, I asked about Left to Tell, a movie currently in development about the Rwandan genocide that is based on a book by a woman who survived the genocide and attributes her survival to her Catholic faith. I asked if Mpower was especially interested in films with religious content, and McEveety replied:
I would say we're not interested in religious material, but then, I'm a faith-filled guy, so how could I not be? So in the course of– Having been a producer on The Passion of the Christ, you can imagine that I get every script that has anything to do with any kind of Christianity coming through my office, because people just send it to me, so sometimes there's some great things, but in terms of Left to Tell– Left to Tell is about forgiveness and it's something that is so much needed in today's world, and how she gets to a point where she's capable of forgiving the people who have slaughtered in the most violent way her family members, her most loved ones in the world, so I was attracted to that element of it. But I've always been really interested in spiritual warfare, and there's an element of this film that really gets into spiritual warfare, and for the genocide to happen like it happened in Rwanda, in my crazy imagination there must have been demons everywhere. It was like God stepped away for a second. So for me it would be a blast to just explore that, both in the story but visually, so i think that film is going to be very– Though it's set in Rwanda during the genocide, it could be set anywhere. So I'm excited about that film. But it should be very visual and it's a sound-design movie, and very hip, I think.
Then, I asked about Snowmen, an upcoming family film written and directed by my fellow UBC graduate Rob Kirbyson. Noting that most of Mpower's films – which also include the pro-life drama Bella (2006) and the Michael Moore parody An American Carol (2008) – seem to have some sort of political angle, I couldn't resist asking, tongue in cheek, what the political angle was on this film. With an audible grin, McEveety replied:
Snowmen is just a wonderful– Snowmen is so great because there is no political side to it. It's just a fun story, a commercial movie, a kids' film, a family film, and something that I really enjoy doing. I very seldom get to do family films, so I was really excited about this movie. But it's a real heartwarming emotional movie that's fun and you'll cry and you'll laugh and it's got a great ending, so it's pretty exciting to have this movie, which is absolutely non-political. (laughs) Which is really what I want to do. I'm not really interested in politics. I don't really want to explore that arena too much. I'm a Christian guy and if I can explore Christian values without being religious about it, that would be ideal. But you know what, I'm not afraid of talking about God either.
As a side note, Snowmen writer-director Kirbyson is a Christian too, though to my knowledge he has never made a "Christian film". Snowmen, which is currently in post-production, marks his first feature film, though he has directed a few short films, as well. One of them, Ctrl Z (2007) – which co-stars Zachary Levi of the TV show Chuck – is particularly amusing:
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