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Spend virtually all of your waking hours dwelling on hell, and it’s bound to change the way you look at death, life, God, religion and pretty much everything in between. Musings, confusings, newsings-you’ll find it all here. And that includes guest posts from some of the people who were interviewed for this film. But all in good time…
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Impress your friends! Provoke your adversaries! Do it all with our new web banners
In the interest of pushing a few buttons-and enlisting you folks in helping us promote Hellbound?-over the next several days we will be releasing some new web banners that you can put up on your blog, Facebook page or the Westboro Baptists’ web site. (If you can figure out how to hack into it.)
As you might guess from our first version, our banners will feature a rogues gallery of terrorists, mass murderers and dictators who would make almost anyone’s list of the “Five People You Meet in Hell.” All except the last one, that is. But more on that later…
Incidentally, the idea was inspired by news coverage of Osama Bin Laden’s death last spring, which gave rise to several news stories like the one below, which expressed absolute certainty that Osama is in hell.
I’m not saying Osama isn’t in hell (Who knows? And whose version of hell would he be in anyway?), and I’m certainly not condemning the all too natural feeling of elation and relief that people who were directly victimized by him felt upon news of his death.
However, I do want to provoke us into re-thinking our tendency to rush to judgment about anyone no matter how heinous their crimes. As my friend Archbishop Lazar Puhalo says, “It’s always someone else who’s going to hell.”
Best of all, we’re offering the banners in three sizes. Hint: The horizontal one should work just perfectly with Facebook’s timeline layout. Just a thought…
To use a banner, all you have to do is right click on it and then choose “Save image as.” And if you do post one, please let us know!
Want a sneak peek at our teaser trailer?
If you live in or near Vancouver, BC, you’ll have a chance to watch an exclusive screening of our teaser trailer at a live event with the filmmakers on Sunday, January 29th. If you’d like to know more, just email us for details.
Traveling is disruptive-but also productive
Just returned yesterday evening from a quick trip to LA for some marketing and distribution meetings, only to wake up to a blizzard today. Visibility outside my window is around 50 feet right now, and the snowfall is horizontal. As a transplant from Foam Lake, Saskatchewan, I couldn’t be happier. This weather makes me feel right at home.
Of course, it also makes me think of the Norse version of hell, which is ice cold. Come to think of it, so is the lowest level of Dante’s Inferno. So what does that say about me?
Hmm…
Just bury me in my parka and everything should work out fine.
At any rate, our LA meetings went well, and we should have an announcement on that soon. Meanwhile, I’m psyching myself up to get back into the edit. I ended last week kind of stuck, but the long weekend away gave me some insight into how to move forward. However, there’s always that soft voice of fear as I’m about to take the next step. Can I really do it? Do I actually have something important to say? Will anyone care?
Only one way to find out, and that’s to stop worrying and get on with it.
Oh yes, somehow in the midst of our trip I managed to watch Red State, Dogma and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy. All three films were interesting in their own right, but Dogma was far and away my favorite. It’s relentlessly crude, but it’s also full of good, honest questions and even a few profound answers-some of which bear directly on hell. So if you have a strong tolerance for profanity (growing up in Foam Lake gave me that, among other things), you may want to check it out.
If you think reviewers jumped the gun on “Love Wins,” wait’ll you get a load of this
This may be old news to some of you, but I’m (optimistically) assuming that much of the more recent traffic to this blog is comprised of new visitors.
At any rate, back in July, at which point we had only shot about three days of footage, this “review” of Hellbound? came out. I read it with great anticipation, hoping against hope that the writer of the piece had some sort of prescience, that he had seen a vision of the future, and that he could tell me how the movie would end-and maybe even how it would begin-and perhaps even what the box office numbers would be.
Alas, freelance writer Mike Stanwood displayed no such abilities. Instead, he demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for fear-mongering, guilt-by-association, religious gate-keeping, rampant speculation and making potentially libelous statements based on a few scraps of circumstantial evidence. All of which led him to conclude:
Given the facts, it’s not unreasonable to offer a more than strong word of caution about this upcoming film. Those seeking answers about their eternal destination could be sent in the wrong direction by listening to the voices in Hellbound?
So consider yourselves warned, good people. You have no idea what sort of powers you’re messing with by poking around this blog. Thankfully people like Mike are manning the gates to keep the rest of us safe.
I can only imagine how many other Mike Stanwoods will emerge when we release our teaser trailer (the final version of which I just approved today, BTW).
And I can only hope at least one of them might truly be able to see the future.
It’s not Rolling Stone, but we made the cover!
Faith Today, Canada’s answer to Christianity Today, has just released its latest issue, which features a photo from the production of Hellbound? on the cover.
I was interviewed for an article called Writing for Hollywood: How Canadians in the film industry bring their best to the big screen. In the article I champion the films of P. T. Anderson and sound a note of caution about buying in to myths of redemptive violence, among other things. (And BTW, I have no idea what Anderson’s faith position is, contrary to how I’m quoted in the article.)
Give it a read!
Progress! And a few publicity ideas…
As of this moment, the first 9 minutes and 48 seconds of the film is assembled. That’s essentially 10% of the finished length, so I’m feeling good about that. And when I say assembled, I actually mean a bit more than that, because I tend to overdo things before handing the footage off to Simon, my editor. Partly because I’m a frustrated editor at heart, and partly because I need to make things feel as complete as possible so I’m able to envision each segment. So by the time Simon is done with it, we’ll have a fairly tight cut.
Meanwhile, Simon has been hard at work putting together our teaser trailer. I just watched the first draft today, and I can already tell it’s going to be great. I still haven’t decided exactly when to release it, but we may offer a sneak peek at a live venue toward the end of this month. More news on that soon.
Next week Dave Rempel (my co-producer) and I are making a quick trip down to LA for some marketing and distribution meetings. That should help fill in a few blanks in terms of when, where and how you’ll be able to see the film. Stay tuned.
While you’re waiting, please help us spread the word. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Like our Facebook page
- Follow us on Twitter
- Choose 10 people at random out of the phone book and give them a call.
- If a telemarketer calls you, before you hang up, tell him or her about “Hellbound?”
- Get ten buddies together, paint the letters “H-E-L-L-B-O-U-N-D-?” on your chest and see if you can get on the jumbo tron at a hockey game
- Be the first person to get a “Hellbound?” tattoo!
- Ask your pastor/priest/professor/teacher if he or she has heard about our film
- Ask your local theater owner if he or she has heard about our film
- Drape a banner with the film’s logo and web site on it across a freeway overpass
- If you’re riding on a plane or a bus, tell the person next to you about “Hellbound?”
- After you tip the waiter/waitress, tell them about “Hellbound?”
- Write our web site on a piece of paper, seal it in a bottle and throw it into the ocean. Then again, if you care at all about the environment, how about just sticking the note into the bottle before you drop them both off at the recycling depot?
- Wrap your car in the “Hellbound?” logo
- Vow to occupy Wall Street until the film comes out. On second thought, I think that’s been done…
- Write a song about “Hellbound?” and then go out and sing it in the street. Not only will you help promote the film, if you put out a hat, you’ll probably make enough to buy a ticket to see it.
- Buy a handbasket and a globe. Slap the “Hellbound?” logo onto the globe. Put the globe into the handbasket. Then go to a public space and stage an interpretive dance using the globe and the handbasket. (Bonus points if you use the song you wrote about “Hellbound?”
- Stage a flash mob where at the count of three, everyone yells “Hellbound?” and then recites our web site address.
- Enter “hell” as a destination on your GPS. When people ask you why, tell them about our film.
Those are my ideas. Now let’s hear yours!
Hellbound? Hard to believe it’s already been one year in the making
Approximately one year ago I looked at the calendar and realized I was going to turn 40 within a couple of months (on February 24, to be exact). After years of working as a screenwriter-for-hire (and before that as a writer and editor-for-hire in the world of publishing), I decided it was finally time I took the plunge and pursued my dream of writing, producing and directing my own film.
At the time, I had two potential projects on the table. Hellbound? was one of them, of course. The other was a coming-of-age drama called Dealey Plaza. Both projects had been rattling around in my head for a few years, nagging me with guilt for neglecting them. But which to choose?
It didn’t take me long to decide on Hellbound? It was a practical decision, really. When I first started out as a screenwriter, I never dreamed I’d be working on documentaries. But as the years went by, that section of my resume continued to grow, so I decided it was my best opportunity for success. Not only did I feel a lot more confident about my ability to pull off such a film, I suspected potential investors would feel the same. It would also be a lot cheaper to produce.
So with those thoughts in mind, I resolved to do at least one thing each day to make the project a reality. Soon, one thing turned into two things and more until I had incorporated my production company, created a budget and business plan, contacted potential interview subjects and pulled together a crew-all without any money in sight. It was a scary time, but somehow I just knew things would come together in the end.
Less than two months later I was having coffee with Peri and Brian Zahnd and a number of other people when Peri happened to mention the furor that Rob Bell had kicked up over the weekend with the trailer for his upcoming book about hell called Love Wins. I was mortified. Could this really be happening? Here I thought all of the forces in the universe had aligned themselves behind my project, and now Rob Bell was going to steal my thunder?
I couldn’t wait to get home and read about it. My main concern was that Rob’s NOOMA video series was famous, so if he was writing a book about hell, I could only presume he was also working on a film.
As the uproar continued over the next few weeks, I waffled between elation and despair. Suddenly, hell (and Rob Bell) was all over the news-on the cover of TIME magazine even. Everyone who had a dog in this fight was coming out of the woodwork. That was a good, right? For one thing, it made my research a lot easier. I also knew it was just the sort of buzz that would get investors excited. But a lingering fear remained. Was I the only person out there planning a documentary on hell? All I could do was hope.
Thankfully, we were just finishing up the key artwork for our poster, so I threw together a quick web site and issued a press release announcing our film. We still didn’t have any money, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to mark out the territory.
Over the next several weeks we continued to move forward with the project as if we had our budget in place. As our list of confirmed interview subjects grew, so did my anxiety. My worst fear was having to email all of these people and tell them the film was off. To avoid such a situation, I was even willing to shoot the first leg using a personal line of credit, cut the footage together into a trailer and then use that to entice investors on board. But I didn’t feel at all settled about that idea.
Then in early May, my friend Brad Jersak connected me with a friend of his who might want to help finance the film. It seemed fitting, seeing my experience editing Brad’s book Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell and the New Jerusalem was what gave me the idea for a documentary on hell in the first place.
I called up the potential investor (we’ll call him Dave, because that’s his name) and arranged to meet him the following day. We didn’t meet for long, but he verbally committed to funding not just part of the project but the entire thing!
I couldn’t believe it. After months of hoping and years of dreaming, it was finally happening. Less than a month later, I had the first installment in the bank and we were off to Copenhagen to shoot our first segment at Copenhell.
One year later, I still have a hard time believing all of the great things that have happened on this project. Funny thing is, not much has changed since last January. I still wake up each day focused on moving this project one step closer to completion, because that’s the only way this dream will become a reality.
Which makes me wonder why I’m taking time away from editing to write this blog post… But hey, if my story inspires you to pursue your dream, it’ll be worth it.
Beginning at the beginning
A question that’s been nagging me as I’ve sifted through the heaps of footage we’ve shot for Hellbound? is what image I should use to begin the film. Don’t get me wrong, we have our central metaphor in place, a unifying image that will help us explore the hell debate from many different sides. But which facet of that image should we reveal first?
This is a huge decision for me, because the opening shot or opening scene of a movie needs to set up everything to come. I think of it as a sort of prophecy, a riddle or a word picture that viewers may not understand at first but which will become all too clear by film’s end. I often gauge the competence of a filmmaker by how well he or she crafts the opening shot and how well they pay it off at the end, because if they don’t nail things out of the gate, it makes me suspect they don’t really know what their film is about.
One of my favorite films in this regard (and one of my favorite films period) is Constantine, directed by Francis Lawrence. Even before the opening scene, the studio logos are blown away by the fires of hell, a place that figures prominently in the film. Now that’s beginning at the beginning!
When we get to the first shot, we see the skeleton of a church in Mexico. Nothing is left but the building’s concrete frame, adorned by two crosses. It’s a foreboding place. Smoke from burning trash wafts across the screen as we hone in on two grubby men sifting through the rubble of what was once a thriving place of worship.
One of the men stands up, and his foot crashes through the floor. He reaches down into the hole and pulls out a mysterious object wrapped in a Nazi flag. It’s an ornate spearhead. Cue the ominous music as he senses someone-or something-watching him. Then he gets up and walks purposefully away. His buddy calls after him, but the man with the spearhead doesn’t hear him.
Out of nowhere, a convertible slams into the man. But rather than kill him, the car crumples around his body, killing its occupants. Then the man leaps over the car and runs away, clutching the spearhead in a hand that now bears a mysterious mark. All his buddy can do is look on in amazement-and horror…
On a plot level, this opening scene serves to gets the ball rolling. Something horrible has happened. We’re not exactly sure what it is, but we’re pretty sure it means doom and destruction if the guy with the spearhead isn’t stopped. So, of course, in the next scene we meet the only guy with a hope of stopping it-occult detective John Constantine.
On a thematic level, the open scene says a lot more about why this bad thing has happened in the first place. Think about the first shot-the ruins of a church. The priest and the congregation are long gone. All that’s left are a few lost souls sifting through its ashes. Then, in the foundation of the church, they find an object of death wrapped in a fascist flag. This is a powerful word picture, a critique of Christianity that essentially sets up the big question Constantine must answer if he’s going to survive until the end of film. He’s well aware of the type of religion that leads to death, but is there a type of religion that leads to life? In other words, what does it mean to be saved? That’s the question at the heart of Constantine.
Which brings me back to Hellbound?, because our film essentially asks the same question: What does it mean to be saved? What are we saved from? What are we saved to? Who is saved? Is anyone not saved? Have we embraced a gospel that leads to death, or a gospel that leads to life? And how can I pack all of these questions into a single image?
Well, I’m happy to say I think I’ve finally found it. I’m test driving it right now as I begin our rough assembly, so I still can’t say for certain whether we’ll use it in the end. But at least it gives me what I’ve been seeking for some time now… a beginning.
Logging of footage is now complete!
As of this morning, I have officially gone through all of our interview footage and selected the portions that we will potentially use in the final cut of the film. I actually managed to finish a bit ahead of schedule, with the entire procedure taking me only about six weeks to complete.
Now comes perhaps the most daunting phase of the film making process (although I say the same thing at the beginning of every phase): the rough assembly of the film. Going through the footage, making selects, labeling them and filing them is mostly grunt work. Now comes the creative part of the process, where we begin to pull these disparate pieces together into something that resembles a coherent narrative.
Of course, throughout the process of making this film, I’ve been working and reworking the outline in my head and on paper. But before I actually start dropping clips into the timeline, I’m going to rewrite it one more time based on a number of new ideas that occurred to me throughout the logging process.
So if you stop by my office over the next day or two, you’re bound to find me scribbling barely legible notes onto 2′ x 2.5′ Post It notes stuck to my wall.
And if you do stop by, please remember that I’m partial friends-or strangers-bearing gifts, particularly coffee or beer. 
By what authority?
I’m having (yet another) debate with a Catholic friend of mine re: the role that Tradition should play in belief formation. He’s accusing me, a Protestant, of being my own highest authority. As a Catholic, he defers to the Church as the ultimate authority. A brief excerpt of something my Catholic friend just wrote:
Since they [Protestants] reject the concept of an infallible interpreter of Scripture, whether it be the Church or an individual, Protestants can only put forth their own opinions on what they think Scripture means. They have no way of knowing for certain if their interpretation of the Bible is correct.
To which I responded:
What you’re missing here, is that certainty is a very brittle foundation for truth claims, b/c it requires unanimity-and that can be broken by a single dissenter. Hence the religious pogroms of the past and present as religious authorities attempt to silence those who reject their truth claims-which are often self-justifying.
In addition, no matter what authority you choose to follow-and no matter how hard you try to justify that decision with historical facts, etc.-it’s still YOU making that decision. No one made it for you. So you are still your own highest authority, b/c YOU are the one who has examined the competing truth claims and determined which is ultimately authoritative. So it makes no difference to me what authority you choose or what arguments you present in terms of that authority’s validity. It’s still a subjective decision, and I fail to see why anyone would feel compelled to agree with you apart from making their own subjective decision based on your word or their own assessment of that same evidence.
This isn’t the first, and it won’t be the last time this ground is trod and retrod. But it doesn’t raise an interesting and important question-especially as it relates to hell. By what authority-or on whose authority-do you consider your beliefs to be valid? Is there any escape from the subjective nature of belief formation I described above?
One of my favorite tools to help me think through such issues is the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Credited to John Wesley, leader of the Methodist movement in the late 18th Century, the term was coined by Albert C. Outler in his introduction to a collection of Wesley’s sermons. Upon examination of Wesley’s work, Outler theorized that Wesley used four different sources to help him form theological conclusions:
- Scripture
- Tradition
- Reason
- Experience
In other words, when seeking to test a particular belief, Wesley would examine what the Bible had to say on the topic, weigh his reading of Scripture against historical interpretations within the Church , apply reason to his conclusions and then test them against is experience.
I’m not sure if Wesley always proceeded in that order, b/c life is rarely that buttoned down. However, being a Protestant, he likely regarded the Bible as his supreme authority. So even if his questions were triggered by rational reflection or experience or his reading of Tradition, he would probably go straight to the Bible as his point of departure for resolving them.
Now, if Wesley were a Catholic, he would go to Tradition first and then accept whatever the Church had to say on the matter, only reading the relevant Scripture passages and applying reason and experience to help him work out the finer details. And, according to my Catholic friend, he could rest assured in the certainty of his beliefs, knowing they were based on an infallible interpretation of God’s Word.
To be honest, I can see pros and cons of both approaches. As I’ve been told many times, you can either have one Pope or a billion popes, each one offering their own interpretation of the truth. The question isn’t so much whether an interpretation is valid but which interpretation should be regarded as authoritative. The Catholics solve this problem with their hierarchical church structure. Truth is revealed from the top down. The official teaching of the Church trumps everything else. Protestants don’t really have an effective mechanism for settling such questions, hence the proliferation of church splits and denominational divides.
Catholics-and many Protestants-see this as a weakness in Protestantism. I’m not so sure I agree. Because as much as I would enjoy the security of being able to solve all theological disputes by flipping to the appropriate page in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, I can’t help but feel that life-and truth-are more dynamic than that. There’s something to be said for the Protestant’s freedom to innovate and adapt to life’s ever-changing circumstances. And if the Protestant realizes his or her conclusions are provisional and likely to give way upon the acquisition of subsequent knowledge, he or she can avoid the rigidity so often associated with toxic forms of religion.
I could go on, but my point here is really to prod you into thinking which aspect of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral you consider your ultimate authority-and I’m talking in practice here, not in theory. Many Protestants pay lip service to the Bible, for example, but when it comes right down to it, experience trumps all. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. If you give any credence to the theory of moral dumbfounding, this is how all of us arrive at our beliefs-we are emotionally drawn to a particular position and then justify it by back-filling it with rational arguments and a selective reading of Scripture and Tradition. Christians don’t have a corner on this way of thinking either. It’s part of the blessing-and the curse-of being human.
But it also creates some significant problems when it comes to theological dialogue, as I’ve recounted above. Namely, if my dialogue partner and I don’t define these four sources of truth in the same way or grant them the same level of authority, how can the conversation proceed? I can present evidence in defense of one authority or another until I’m blue in the face, but if you don’t regard the source of that evidence as valid, what good will it do?
So while pointing out the four main sources of knowledge is helpful, it merely presents us with another set of questions:
- Scripture - But whose interpretation?
- Tradition - But which Tradition-Catholic? Protestant? Orthodox?
- Reason - But which arguments, and by which thinkers?
- Experience - But whose experience-Mine? Yours?
Is there any way out of this mess? Is the certainty my Catholic friend claims to have even possible? I’m not sure, but I’ll present what I believe to be a reasonable workaround in a subsequent post. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you have to say about this.
