| Not Just Any Nativity Story |
| Written by Brad Balfour | ||||
| Monday, 18 December 2006 07:59 | ||||
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Keisha Castle-Hughes and Catherine Hardwicke on set of "The Nativity Story"
 Former production designer Catherine Hardwicke made her reputation as a director by creating the hard-hitting and authentic coming-of-age drama, "Thirteen;" that film garnered actress Holly Hunter another Oscar nomination as a result. Then she made another teen-rebellion film, "The Lords of Dogtown," this time about championship skateboarders. Going against the grain of those very modern and edgy films, Hardwicke has made "The Nativity Story," an attempt to give an insider's look at the days preceding the birth of Jesus Christ and show just who the people involved, such as Mary and Joseph, really were. In order to create the sense of authenticity of her earlier films, Hardwicke enlisted some of the best international actors--Shoreh Agdashloo, Alexander Siddig, Hiam Abbas and Keisha Castle-Hughes--to play people from that region as they would have been 2000 years ago. Another thing Hardwicke stressed through the film is that it is a story about people who were Jewish, and one of the great challenges was to give a sense of what it was like to be Jewish in those times. www.thenativitystory.com
Oscar Isaac as Joseph and Keisha Castle-Hughes as Mary
Keisha Castle-Hughes as Mary in "The Nativity Story"
Catherine Hardwicke on the set of "Thirteen," her directorial debut
A scene from "The Nativity Story"
CH: The incredible thing to me was that I grew up knowing the nativity story, but I didn't even know the first, most basic thing about it: Mary and Joseph were Jewish. Wow! That's like 101, and I didn't even think about that. They don't advertise that in your Church Sunday School classes and I realized that's what I was probably the least educated about. So we got a Jewish scholar to come down from Rome and we made a small synagogue there in the Nazareth village, and he taught us about how people prayed in the first century. And the thing that was really cool, I thought, was that you would pray with your eyes open, try to have a closer connection to God, you were encouraged to have your own gestures, not in a ritual way, but you would really try to bring God into your heart. You could move your hands, kiss it, touch it. So the thing that was fascinating was that you needed to be grounded or it doesn't make sense, and Mary wanted to have that closeness with God, but maybe got a little closer than she was expecting, a little more personal. But I still think it's very important to know, what were their feelings and what were the rules at the time and all that? Q: So that's why you created the idea of a Nazareth boot camp where your actors got familiar with the characters and the conditions of the time? CH: Yeah, because I wondered about how we would get people to go back in time. I did the boot camp in both of my previous movies, in a way. In "Thirteen," it was more like slumber parties. [My leads] Nikki [Reed] and Evan [Rachel-Wood] would stay over at my house, and Holly [Hunter] and everybody had slumber parties and we really tried to bond and live in that house. For "Dogtown," we had two months of surf and skate camp. The boys did not wash their hair because the ocean washes your hair if you're a surfer, I'm sure you probably know that. We really tried to live the life, in a way, and that's the only way that you can just go into a total immersion, the best you can do to make it real, and that's what we tried to do in all the movies. Q: There have been so many biblical epics, like "The Ten Commandments." Did you watch any of them for inspiration? CH: No, I don't go for those kind of movies. It's a different style, and I can't relate to them to be honest. They're very stiff and formal. I've tried to sit through them but no. Q: Since you didn't use those films as a point of reference--how did you approach such scenes as the one with the angel Gabriel? Was that how it was scripted or did you add your own take on it? CH: No, that was a real struggle. How much do you show and not show? How would an angel appear to somebody? That was a tricky thing. It's interesting to think of if you really go to the source material, the Bible. Every time an angel appears to somebody, he says, "Fear not." So there has to be something a little exciting and electrifying when this person appears. So I tried to get a little bit of that feeling, with the natural environment where you see the wind, and you felt this presence of an energy when he comes near you. In the temple, it's the smoke, or it's the olive branches. Try to think of the most beautiful, spiritual place and I found that olive grove and I thought, this might be the place that you could feel connected to that spirituality of another world. Then have it be a man that looks like the people, because at first people are scared, but then they do start listening and talking and interacting so he probably did look like the people that he came to talk to. Q: You're certainly familiar with making films about teenage characters... CH: Exactly, or those that have a teenage mentality [laughter]. She was the most famous teenager in the world--that's what was kind of cool [about her]. We don't usually think of Mary that way, but when you do the research you realize that she was 13 or 14 years old; life expectancy was so short at that time and people died during childbirth. That's what really drew me to the film, to think about all the teenagers that I know... What if they were faced with this kind of thing, and these kinds of challenges? It's an incredible idea, so it got me interested in getting inside of her [head] and to figure out what she would have thought and how she would have felt. Q: You have been categorized as this indie director since you created such a low-budget, edgy hand-held camera styled film like "Thirteen" and even the similarly styled "The Lords of Dogtown." What led you to do this film with its far more mainstream concerns and relaxed camera style? CH: Well, in each movie I tried to do what was right for that character in the story, so when I did "Thirteen," of course I wrote it with Nikki, the 13 year old girl. The whole time I was writing and working with her, if a song would come on the radio, even if we were having a really heavy conversation, she'd be distracted or go on to this or that, or her phone would ring. So I think our life today is very fractured and very frenetic, and I was trying to capture that with the camera movement. And then when I did the skateboard movie, "Dogtown," it's that, but now you add wheels to the kids, so I had to actually be on a motorcycle cam with them half the time just to chase them around. Now in this case, we go back in time, we've got the pace of a donkey, and life was at a little different pace so I thought it needed to be more like the pace of life at that time too. Q: Did you approach them about this film or did they approach you? CH: Well, I heard that the Pope really liked Thirteen. Yeah, he's been TiVo-ing it and he just watches it on a regular basis. [Laughter] No, I think it was random and actually, accidental, that my agent sent me a stack of scripts in January of this year that needed a director, and they often do this, they say, are you interested in any of these things? If you are, we'll ask if they're interested in you. And I think they were probably just as surprised that I was interested. But I read it and I started getting excited about the idea of going deeper than I'd ever gone into these characters. Usually you just think of them with their halos, not as humans, so I thought, this is fascinating and I want to explore that world and I went in with a big pitch, with ideas and photographs, and talked about how I really wanted Mary to be somebody from the region. I wanted her to look not like the Swedish, a blonde, or a blue-eyed Mary, but somebody that looked like she could live in that Mediterranean region; someone with that skin--beautiful olive skin tones--and I wanted her to be thirteen or fourteen years old. I suppose they decided to go with me because no one else would take the job, but they went with me regardless, and then they said, yes, we'll go with your take, your idea for Mary, and of course, I walked out of there going, well who in the world am I going to cast now? There are no A-list actors, there's nobody from the Middle East, a young fourteen year old girl. I was just like, why did I say this? And suddenly one day, Keisha just popped into my head because I loved her in Whale Rider and she was so moving and just really soulful.
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