My interview with Alex Kendrick, the director/co-writer/star of Facing the Giants, is now up at BC Christian News; a shorter version will run in the paper that comes out this weekend.
And just for the record, I don’t think the film is as bad as some of the reviews south of the border led me to expect. In fact, I am rather impressed with it, on the level of “production values” at any rate, when I consider that it was produced by a mostly volunteer or amateur cast and crew, and by a church that is roughly the same size as the one in which I grew up. As one who took part in my own church’s Christmas and Easter pageants, I can’t imagine the church of my youth producing anything nearly as technically accomplished as this, even though our plays were overseen by a UBC film grad who actually worked in the local film industry.
Do I have quibbles with Facing the Giants, on the level of story or script? Sure, definitely. But I find myself wanting to encourage these guys. A lot of people talk about making a movie, but these guys actually went and did it. And even on the script level, I think this is a notch or two above typical “church movie” fare. From the Billy Graham movies of the 1950s to the Left Behind movies of today, Christian movies have typically followed a fairy-tale template in which people hook up with Christ in the final reel, just as the princess marries the prince on the last page and lives happily ever after. But Kendrick, in both this film and one future project that he mentioned to me, seems to be more interested in stories where the big change in the protagonist’s life occurs somewhere in the middle, allowing his films to show more of a “before” and “after”. That’s a definite improvement. I just hope his future efforts don’t make faith look quite so much like the cure for all of life’s problems, or pile on quite so many happy endings.
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