I posted this over at the Wrestling For Jesus site. I thought it fit on this blog as well.
Now that Wrestling For Jesus is basically complete (except for color correction and audio editing) I find that I am often asked about the “tone” of the film. I think people are asking, “Are you sympathetic to your characters or mocking them?”Here’s my (sort of) answer.
Andy Crouch, a close friend of mine, likes to say that one of the things he does as a journalist is, “make complex issues simple.” (In fairness to Andy, he also writes books and speaks where he is anything but simple.) When making a documentary, whether it be short or long, this is one of my tasks. How do I take what is a very complex story with all sorts of characters and life twists and boil it down to a three act structure with major conflicts every thirty minutes, minor conflicts every ten and movement in every scene? The answer is to simplify.However, when it comes to exploring motivations of characters, I find I do the opposite. When people hear about Wrestling For Jesus I find they basically fall into two camps. Camp one are people who are licking their chops at another film that shows the shallowness, hypocrisy, and simpleness of evangelical Christians. Camp two are people who believe that the best films are those with redemptive themes, which is code in the Christian community for saying, “Christian films but we can’t call them Christian.”With both of these camps, my goal is not simplicity but complexity. I want to muddy the waters a little bit. For the past two years, my goal with Wrestling For Jesus is not just to explore the “What,” of my subjects, but also the “Why.” I find documentaries really sing when you get beyond behaviors and begin to explore motivations. Those documentaries challenge our assumptions about how we see the world, other people, and even ourselves. So what is the tone of Wrestling For Jesus? How about meddling?
