| The Passion of the Christ: "You are my friends, and the greatest love a person can have for his friends is to give his life for them."
Written, directed and produced by Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ is the controversial movie based on the life of Jesus of Nazareth. "The Passion" (which itself is taken from the Latin for suffering, but also meaning a profound and transcendent love) refers to the agonizing and ultimately redemptive events in the final twelve hours of Jesus' life, of which there are four separate accounts in the New Testament of the Bible.
A labour of love by the Oscar Winning Australian, Gibson picks up the story of Jesus Christ from where he waits to be arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane and details the events that took place before, during and after his arrest and eventual crucifixion. Using a mixture of emotive imagery and flashbacks, Gibson inter-cuts between scenes of intense torture to concentrate on the human angle of The Passion - the pain and personal torment that Christ suffers before he dies and also offers insights into Jesus' life.
Brutally realistic, the film pulls no punches as Jesus is slowly and painfully put to death. Talking of his decision to highlight physical realism, Gibson says: "I really wanted to express the hugeness of the sacrifice, as well as the horror of it. But I also wanted a film that has moments of real lyricism and beauty and an abiding sense of love, because it is ultimately a story of faith, hope and love. That in my view, is the greatest story we can ever tell".
The cast of The Passion of the Christ including James Caviezel, Monica Bellucci; Maia Morgenstern and Rosalinda Celantano all give incredible performances in a film that required that they each learn the dead language which was spoken at the time - Aramaic.
James Caviezel (Jesus) suffered the most, as he underwent hours of grueling make up sessions and spent two weeks dragging a 150 pound cross (about half the weight of a real crucifixion cross) to Golgotha, only later to be suspended from it. Because he spent these weeks working in a loin cloth, the actor experienced several bouts of hypothermia, often becoming so cold that he couldn't speak. In one of the most literally shocking moments on set, Caviezel and assistant director Jan Michelini were struck by lighting while shooting in the midst of a thunderstorm. Astonishingly, neither man was seriously injured.
Speaking of the role, Caviezel said: "The role changed my life in the sense that now I'm no longer afraid of doing the right thing", he explains. "I'm now more afraid of not doing the right thing".
Behind the Scenes: A Dead Language:
One of Mel Gibson's earliest decisions when creating The Passion of the Christ was to have the Jesus of his film speak the same language that the historical Jesus spoke 2,000 years ago. That language is Aramaic, closely related to Hebrew that today is considered by some linguists to be a "dead language", still used in dialects by only a small number of people in the Middle East.
When Jesus was alive however, Aramaic was the language of education and commerce that was spoken the world over. After his death, early Christians wrote portions of scripture in Aramaic, spreading the stories of Jesus' life and messages across many lands.
To bring Aramaic to life on film was an enormous challenge and Gibson turned to one of the world's foremost experts on the Aramaic language and Semitic cultures, Father William Fulco, Chair of Mediterranean Studies at loyal Marymount University. Fulco translated the script of The Passion of the Christ entirely into First Century Aramaic for the Jewish characters and "Street Latin" for the Roman characters, drawing on his extensive linguistic and cultural knowledge. After translating the script, Fulco served as an on set dialogue coach and helped the cast learn how to speak the language.
Gibson explained why he decided to keep the film so authentic "To bring a cast from all over the world to one place and have them all learn this one language gave them a sense of common ground, of what they share and of connections that transcend language". It also compelled the cast to look more deeply into themselves above and beyond the use of words. "Speaking in Aramaic required something different from the actors", observes Gibson, "because they had to compensate for the usual clarity of their own native language. It brought out a different level of performance. In a sense, it became good old fashioned filmmaking because we were so committed to telling the story with pure imagery and expressiveness as much as anything else".
The history of The Passion on film:
As early as the silent movies of Thomas Edison, The Passion was a theme addressed by the most ambitious of filmmakers. In 1927, Cecil B. DeMille directed the first epic treatment of Jesus' life and death with the silent film The King of Kings. Then, in 1953, 20th Century Fox kicked off the new CinemaScope technology with The Robe, starring Richard Burton as a Roman tribune who seeks redemption after the crucifixion. By the 1960s, Biblical epics had become a whole film genre unto themselves, with George Stevens creating the monumental The Greatest Story Ever Told featuring lavish sets and an all-star "cast of thousands."
Around the same time, the Italian film master Pier Paolo Pasolini approached the subject in an entirely fresh way with The Gospel According to St. Matthew, which featured a completely non-professional cast, a naturalistic style and language taken directly from the Bible, and became the most successful film of Pasolini's career. In the 1970s, The Passion was represented in two counter-culture musicals: Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. More recently, director Martin Scorsese was also drawn to examine Christ's final days with his own controversial The Last Temptation of Christ.
But never before has any filmmaker attempted to bring this story of passionate sacrifice to life with such intensely focused cinematic detail and realism. For Mel Gibson, creating such a film was a long-lived dream, taking a significant amount of his own passion and that of many others, including his Icon producing partners Bruce Davey and Steve McEveety, to turn into reality.
"My intention for this film was to create a lasting work of art and to stimulate serious thought and reflection among diverse audiences of all backgrounds," says Gibson.
He continues: "My ultimate hope is that this story's message of tremendous courage and sacrifice might inspire tolerance, love and forgiveness. We're definitely in need of those things in today's world."
|