Nativity Story Christmas movie flows from pen of busy Oregon screenwriter

By DIDI WILLIAMSON
    Around Christmastime, people have a way of arranging their nativity scene just the way they like it. The three Wise Men have to be on the right hand side, with Mary to Jesus’ left and Joseph to his right, perhaps. Maybe there are also a few miniature animals scattered amongst the hay.
    But, according to Portland-area screenwriter Mike Rich, the story behind these interesting characters is rarely ever told.
   “They’ve become these iconic images, and we know exactly how we want to position them on the fireplace mantel,” Rich said. “But, in a sense, they’re not real individuals.”
   But through the film The Nativity Story, opening nationwide Dec. 1, Rich, who also wrote The Rookie and Finding Forrester, hopes to show people the struggles the real Mary and Joseph must have faced – before their images were molded into plastic figurines.
    “The nativity story, whenever it’s presented at church pageant or a school play, is usually presented as an event. You know, this happened, then this happened,” he said. “Rarely do we try to get inside of the hearts and souls of the characters.”
    What could Mary have been thinking when the angel Gabriel came to her? Did she worry that her family would shun her, an unwed mother? Did Joseph feel disgraced to find out that his betrothed was pregnant? Did Mary and Joseph talk about what it would be like to raise the Son of God?

     “These are some of the things we thought about. Are they in the Bible? No. Did those kinds of conversations actually happen? I think without question,” said Rich, who attends Southwest Bible Church in Beaverton.
    The film focuses on the daily interactions of Mary (played by Keisha Castle-Hughes from 2002’s Whale Rider) and Joseph (Oscar Isaac), as well as the divine moments that changed their lives and the world at large.
   “We wanted to feel what these people felt – definitely what Mary and Joseph felt. I saw the opportunity to get inside the head, heart and soul of this girl,” said Catherine Hardwicke, the film’s director.
    Rich, a 1982 business graduate of Oregon State University in Corvallis, worked the morning show at KINK radio in Portland. He wrote on the side and eventually tried screenplays in the mid-1990s.
Rich admits that he was nervous when writing the script because the story is so important to so many people.
   “Was I nervous sitting down to write those scenes? Absolutely,” he said. “Because if you’re not nervous when you’re sitting down to write this story, you’re the wrong writer for the project.”
    At every turn, the filmmakers sought to make the movie reflective of the spirit and the tone set out in the Gospels, he said.
    In fact, when Hardwicke was hired to direct the film by New Line Cinemas, she immediately got on a plane and traveled to Israel. She wanted to see the real Nazareth.
   “Right when I got the project, I tried to do the research and understand about the real things and the locations we had and make it as vivid and real as we could,” she said.
    In addition, Rich said New Line wanted to keep an open-script policy, which is rare in the entertainment industry. Instead of keeping the script under lock and key, they sent it out to theologians, religious officials and experts from the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish faiths.
    Before writing the script, Rich researched the time period and culture during Jesus’ birth for 11 months. He relied heavily on the Bible, but he said he also learned a great deal from Raymond E. Brown’s The Birth of the Messiah as well as theologians and historians at the University of Portland.
    After New Line took on the project, other experts, such as Bryan Liftin from Moody Bible Institute, Darrell Bock from Dallas Theological Seminary, Gloria Gaither and Anne Graham Lotz were consulted to see if they had suggestions for the script.
    Rich said the project became even more authentic when they began filming in Ouarzazate, Morocco, where scenes from The Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven were filmed, and Matera, Italy, where The Passion of the Christ was filmed. Matera is said to look more like ancient Jerusalem than Jerusalem does.
   “Visually we didn’t want to overly romanticize the town,” Rich said. “We wanted it to look like they really looked like, which were hard, tough little towns, not this stereotypical view we often have of perfect little villages.”
    Everyone on the cast held the story of Jesus’ birth with reverence, according to Rich.
     “We had a fun time making the film,” he said. “But when the camera went on, everybody treated the moment as it should’ve been treated.”

    Didi Williamson writes for The Good News in South Florida, where this story also appeared.