Director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown) brings the story of the birth of Jesus to life in the dramatic film, The Nativity Story, starring Keisha Castle-Hughes and Oscar Isaac.
Catherine Hardwicke Explains Her Connection to the Material: “When I had done a little research and found out that Mary was 13 or 14 years old, I immediately thought of my girls at 13, like Nikki [Reed] and Evan [Rachel Wood]. What if they were in this circumstance? What if any of my nieces or anyone that I know was put into the circumstance where everybody else scorned them, nobody believed them? It just started drawing me in. I just wanted to explore that like what would it feel like to be going through this journey, this amazing journey. How do you find that inner faith to continue?”
Hardwicke’s Religious Background: “I grew up in the Presbyterian Church and I went to church every Sunday. My parents dragged the kids. That’s where I learned to draw on the church bulletins to try to get myself through the sermons, but I actually did love it. You know, I mean I read the Bible from beginning to end when I was 13, Old Testament and New Testament, surprised by the contrast all through to the amazing difference when Jesus came to earth. It seemed like everything changed and got a little bit happier at that moment. It’s always really been a part of my life since [I was] a child.”
Bringing Mary Down from Her Pedestal: The producers of The Nativity Story say it was Hardwicke’s decision to show Mary as more of a typical teenager than how she’s normally portrayed. “I think at the very beginning when I first read the script - Mike [Rich] wrote a beautiful script - but in the very first scene Mary was extremely holy, pious, and the perfect saint, even in the first scene. I thought, well, not that she shouldn’t be a wonderful person, but she was a kid too, you know? She was 13 years-old. I mean all scholars believe that’s how old she was because of life expectancy rates at the time. So she would have been playing.
You look at any kid that especially doesn’t grow up in our age with our troubles, there is that sense of life and joy. I thought it was important to see her that way. Also if your parents told you, ‘You are going to marry this man,’ and you didn’t even like that guy, you didn’t even know him, I think most people would feel something. As much respect as you have for your parents, you’d be a bit taken aback by the idea that you’re going to spend your life with this man. Your father starts talking to you about don’t have sex until you’re married. Those are very personal things and emotionally charged. That’s why I felt it was probably real emotions.”
On Humanizing the Story of Mary and Joseph: “When you look at Matthew and Luke, there are these beautiful passages, but really only one sentence that says a lot. You take one sentence in Matthew that says, ‘Being a righteous man, Joseph decided to divorce her privately.’ You know I’m paraphrasing, of course. And you think, ‘Decided to divorce her privately…’ Well, there’s a lot more to it than just that one sentence. This is a person that he loved. He was a devout Jewish man. All the emotions that go behind that, that’s what we wanted to explore. Be true to every passage in the Bible but really get in there deeper and imagine what’s the moment before that moment and what a heartbreak it was. I didn’t think it was hard to be true to the Bible, but then expand.”
Advising Her Actors: “We tried to actually just be in the moment, in the actual physical moment, not let people think of Jesus or Mary or Joseph 2000 years later, what churches wrote about it many years later,” explained Hardwicke. “’Let’s just try to be there right now.’ Anytime we’d start to second guess, ‘Let’s just go back to the moment. What are you doing physically? You’re building a house. This is a girl you love. This is an angel visiting you. What would you think?’ Just be right there in the moment.”
The Thought Process Behind How to Portray Angels: Hardwicke said it basically came down to keeping it as simple as possible. “We’ve seen so many kinds of special effects in all kinds of other movies, like Star Trek and all that, that even if you might envision that at first, I think that’s going to be a little scary to see. I thought that we read in the Bible that angels did take the form of a man, so a man from that region. Somebody that had the same skin tones as the people that lived in that area but with dignity and power, but also kind of a kind approach when he talked to Mary because he would be talking to a 13-year-old girl. And then also with the wind and the elements that you feel, I thought that probably the energy and the force would possibly affect the olive grove and the branches.”
The Three Wise Men Provide Comic Relief: Although Hardwicke says it was unintentional, almost every appearance of the Three Wise Men in the film contains comedic elements. “I didn’t know that the Three Wise Men were going to be quite that comical, but people seem to relate to them. Some of it came about when we did rehearsals. You might have heard of Nazareth Boot Camp and all that stuff? I wanted the Wise Men to be rehearsing riding camels so you would feel what is it like to be on camels for nine months in the desert camping out with three other guys. That’s probably not the most pleasant experience for most people. In fact, after about mile two, they were like, ‘Uh uh, we don’t want to be riding these camels,’ when we were doing the rehearsals. They started getting crabbier and grumpier and, you know, ‘He’s got a better one than me.’ And the other one says, ‘He’s got a better saddle.’
A lot of things came partly organically from the idea that with each character you try to figure out what would it have really been like to go on that journey or to be in this think tank with these three guys. The King of Persia evidently did finance think tanks of philosophers and astronomers at the time. He tried to keep them separate all over Persia. ‘Don’t talk to anyone else so you can have independent thinking.’ This is kind of fascinating stuff when you really start reading about these guys and what they could have been.”
