Between my sophomore and junior years of college, I hit the pause button on my education, rented a Vail condominium with a couple of other guys, bought a season pass and landed a night job at a fancy restaurant in the village near the original gondola. I love to ski, and I’ve always wanted to “bag” the biggest and best ski areas around.
Well, last week I ventured to snowy Park City, Utah, for the first time—where people wearing $1,000 ski suits and carrying pricey snowboards/skis were everywhere. But my bucket list didn’t change there. In fact, I didn’t even bring my skis. Instead, I was there to join the 50,000 people (give or take) whose focus was seeing movies as part of the Sundance Film Festival.
The highlight wasn’t watching a motion picture, not even Sundance darling Birth of a Nation (which I did get to see, and I’ll talk more about that in another blog). Instead, it was catching a panel discussion titled “Faith & Film: Art, Money, and Message.” This was the second such workshop in as many years at Sundance hosted and moderated by Tim Gray of Gray Media with a panel of four experts in filmmaking/publicity. During these 90 minutes, discussion revolved around the widening world of faith-based films—what works and doesn’t, where we’ve been and where we’re going.
Right off the bat, panelist Ash Greyson (cinematographer, producer) said that “too many times we’ve tried to make [Christian] movies work that had no business [being made].” He illustrated his point further when he compared being a professional golfer to being a Christian filmmaker—and that sometimes Christian moviemakers seem satisfied with a below-par product. “If I was a golfer,” declared Greyson, “I couldn’t just show up [at a tournament] and golf a 123 and say, ‘Hey, I’m a Christian golfer.’” Point well made, essentially challenging the filmmakers/directors/producers in the audience to set the bar higher, not lower.
Have faith-based films failed if they’re not box office successes or if most of America isn’t tweeting the title? Tim Gray took off his moderator hat for a few moments to make two very interesting points along this line:
- Most of the films shown even at Sundance—a forum for the most promising indie movies around—were going to leave the festival without an offer from a major studio.
- No film is for everyone (meaning millions, perhaps, billions of folks will even pass up movies about galaxies far, far away or featuring rampaging dinosaurs).
When film director/writer Daniel Lusko was asked if a Christian movie requires a person of faith to make it, he replied with an adamant, “Absolutely not!” Film marketing expert Nancy Lovell piggybacked on that by reminding the audience, “If the director can’t carry the message to the people, we lose,” conveying the idea that whether or not the director of a faith-film is a believer is not as important as the director’s ability to convey a faith message with excellence to an audience.
Another topic discussed was should Christian films be advertised boldly or be more secretive in regards to the message and intent. Ken Rather of Pure Flix Entertainment made a case for being up front, saying, “You have to identify with your core audience.” Greyson agreed. “You can’t hide the true intention of the movie,” adding that in the case with God’s Not Dead, pastors were contacted directly about how best to “craft” the film, saying because of this, its success “was not an accident.” And yet, it was obvious that manufacturing successful Christian films can, at times, be more of a God thing, pointing out that with War Room, much of the huge box office take was due to a hard-to-quantify “Steve and Alex [Kendrick’s] obedience to God.”
I came away from this panel discussion reminded that some very talented and godly people are at work in the Christian film business. As a body, we’ve had quite a few success stories in the past decade. And yet sadly, we’ve had quite a lot of embarrassing ones, too. We’ve got to get better, and the general feeling at Sundance is that the Christian film industry is doing just that. Not that we’ve arrived. But we’ve come a long way, baby! I’m just glad people of faith some time ago realized that motion pictures were a great way to share Christ and plant spiritual seeds. That’s a whole lot better than even tackling fresh Utah powder.
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