It has been over one year since Rodrigo Garcia’s challenging, breathtaking drama Last Days in the Desert premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The movie stars Ewan McGregor as Jesus Christ, who wanders out of the desert after his fast and directly into the lives of a troubled family. The mother is ill, the father is adamant and the son wants to leave home any way he possibly can. Simple problems made complicated by complex personalities, the sort of thing you’d think Jesus Christ could solve with ease, when in actuality the opposite is true.
Although Last Days in the Desert is a new story, purely fictionalized by writer/director Rodrigo Garcia, by the film’s conclusion it plays with as much subtlety and portent as a real religious parable. So when the time finally came for Garcia’s film to premiere in theaters – it is in theaters now – I jumped at the chance to ask him about his incredible portrayal of a historical and religious figure. How do you humanize God? And for those who don’t believe in God, how do you make Jesus Christ seem realistic but impressive enough to warrant two millenniums of adoration?
Read the interview below, watch my initial reactions from Sundance 2015, and see Last Days in the Desert in theaters this weekend. You won’t be disappointed.
Broad Green Pictures
Crave: Would you describe Last Days in the Desert as a Bible movie, or a Christian movie? Or does it just happen to have Jesus in it?
Rodrigo Garcia: It is a movie… [Thinks.] I don’t know how to reduce it. […] Originally for me it was a story about Jesus getting involved in the life of a father and a son, but the themes were fathers and sons, and destiny, and how parents impact children and children impact parents, and whether you can be your own person and how boys become men. But if Jesus is in your movie there’s no way your movie is not going to be about Jesus, so it ends up being a movie also about Jesus, and inevitably it has to bring up some religious questions.
But I never thought of it as a religious movie or a Bible movie, nor was I against it being a religious movie. I was just treating these characters, a well known one like Jesus and three fictional ones, in a way that made sense for my story. But I was never thinking “this is an art house film,” “this is a Bible film,” “this is a Jesus film.” I don’t think that’s how I thought about it.
It’s interesting if you look about it from that perspective. It’s about a family and then Jesus comes in. Could theoretically this story have been told with another figure who isn’t Jesus? Like, there’s a family, they’ve got these problems, and then… I don’t know, Batman comes in and tries to help solve their problems?
It could be, but then what was it about and who was it by? Meaning, first of all the movie is about me, meaning it’s about my interests and my obsessions, and if I chose Jesus it must have been for a reason. Yes, this can be done with anyone but given the subject matter of fathers and sons, and fathers and sons communicating or not communicating, and whether a son can have a fate that is separate from what a father wants for him, then I think this is why I thought of Jesus. Because Jesus was a good figure against which to play these themes. But yes, you could do Napoleon running into a family but then I am sure the themes would be power, rather than fathers and sons.
It would be interesting to see that movie.
I’d like to make it.
Broad Green Pictures
If you’re going to put Jesus in that narrative, you picked a time when Jesus was young and figuring out how he was going to solve in the problems in the universe to begin with. It’s very humanizing in a way that feels very exciting, and almost potentially subversive.
Again, I was dealing only with the human side of Jesus. How do you dramatize the divine side? How do you dramatize God? The only Jesus I can conceive of, maybe for lack of imagination, is the human one. So that person must have had a learning curve, must have gone through a learning curve, must have had insecurities. There’s a reason why he went to the desert to fast and pray for 40 days, looking for guidance, looking for growth. He wasn’t born ready, or he wouldn’t have needed to go out into the desert. My idea was that he was probably coming out of the desert still feeling a little unsure whether he was up to the task.
And I came to think of the movie a little bit as the adolescence of Jesus. Of course he’s not an adolescent, he’s 30, but in terms of his ministry this was still college and grad school. I put that in the movie. A couple times he says, “Choose better words.” Do this, don’t be foolish. Talking to himself, still getting his feet wet. What a silly image! But sort of getting his feet wet in the art of being a rabbi, a leader. So yes, I don’t know if it’s subversive. It might be in very strict conservative terms, it could be seen as subversive. In human terms there must have been a learning curve, there must have been insecurity, there must have been growth.
For example, I am not a Christian, but I know there are those who have very rigid ideas about The Bible. I wonder if in the development of this, was there ever any concern that some audiences wouldn’t accept a “new” story about Jesus?
I think I did not [have concerns]. I think there is of course, everywhere, in every country, there’s always some portion of the Christian population that is very, very conservative evangelist, and many of those viewers either don’t watch movies or watch movies that stick strictly to the book. So a movie like this wouldn’t even be looked at, do you know what I mean? It wouldn’t even be worth looking at. But for many, many Christians – and there are many types of Christians, and certainly I’ve spoken to a lot of Christians who have seen the movie – you know, they have found nothing offensive in it. And in fact it’s a source of satisfaction to me that the comment I most often hear is that Christian audiences have been happy to see a Jesus that feels like a person, that feels like someone who’s actually there, that you could talk to.
Broad Green Pictures
I’ve watched a fair amount of Christian cinema, and I find some of it hard to get grasp. In this film I felt like I was invited in, like I was invited to actually relate and not just exalt.
Yeah. In so many movies Jesus is so starry-eyed, is so rarified that you can barely feel that there’s a human there. Not in all of them. Of course there are good ones.
What would you say are the good ones?
I was going to say that even in cases like The Last Temptation [of Christ], for example, which is a very tormented and angry Jesus… I love the movie by the way but it’s a very tormented and angry Jesus… at least he’s profoundly human. That’s what I find fascinating about the movie, you know? He’s more tormented and more torn and more neurotic than a Jesus that I made, but that takes nothing away from it because that Jesus is [Martin] Scorsese’s and Paul Schrader’s vision of that Jesus. And I love that movie but what I like most of it is that it is a human Jesus.
I also liked the Jesus in Jesus of Montreal, and that is quite a… that movie is a confection. These people were mounting a play and it’s very meta. And there are others, for example the Pasolini one [The Gospel According to St. Matthew] is actually very classical. It’s set in Italy and they all look like Italian peasants and they’re wearing this wardrobe that looks a little bit like it’s out of a crèche. There’s something fake about it but it’s done in such a lovely way that everyone comes across as such a human person, that you don’t…
Anyway, those are three very different ones but I feel like in movies like that – and in others – that you are with a person, even if that person was half-God there’s still a human side.
Broad Green Pictures
You bring up a point about the visual look about the Pasolini films, for example, but when it came time to decide about your film, were you particularly interested in historical accuracy? What was most important to you visually?
You know, what is historical accuracy when it comes to the gospels? There are contradictions in the gospels and not everything adds up. I wanted to give an impression of historical accuracy. I didn’t bother to say whether the family were Jews or not. They’re probably not Jews because she has tattoos, and then she burns her husband’s body which is something the Jews wouldn’t do… although in this case she’s not doing it to burn the body, but to allow the boy to go free.
I mean, you want to suspend disbelief. I think it looks like a world that could have been. The way they’re dressed, the way they live, the way they eat or how they sit. But whether it’s particular to Bedouins or Jews or any other group, I don’t know. I think you want the story to have an air of authenticity to it but…
There’s a universality, I think. From that perspective, tell me about casting. There’s a certain amount of disagreement over what Jesus would have looked like. Ewan McGregor in some respects embodies a very traditional idea. Light beard, long hair…
…blue eyes…
Yeah. Did it interest you to evoke that classical image and then apply something else to it, or did it just happen to work out that way?
No. I mean, when you’re thinking about a movie you try to think of everything. I thought of a whole host of people who could play the role. I even thought if a woman could play the role. I didn’t want to make anything so controversial that it would be ridiculous but…
Broad Green Pictures
Are you saying that if a woman had been in the role, it might have potentially been deemed “ridiculous?” Was that your concern?
Well, I didn’t want the movie to be about that. That a women was playing Jesus would have been the only subject in the junket, basically. But it’s just an example that all ideas cross your mind.
I’m sensitive. I’m Latin-American, I’m sensitive to the fact that so many characters are whitewashed, but in the end I was looking for an actor who was not only a good actor but that projected a great deal of humanity and a great deal of empathy and a great deal of connection to the other, that I think Ewan has and Ewan portrays beautifully in the movie. I needed him to be flawed and smart, sometimes insecure. Scared. He has nightmares. Bold in other ways. But 100% human. And that humanity was very much something that he projects in movies and that he does in this movie.
So in the end I understand the problem and I am against the problem, but in the end as a director I had to go with the actor that gave me the Jesus I was thinking of emotionally.
You’ve been talking a lot about making sure Jesus was humanized. Did you have the same concerns about The Devil, or whatever you choose to call him?
I had to humanize him because if The Devil is evil, that is he is the God of Evil, he cannot be portrayed any more than God can be portrayed. You know, how do you portray God? We can hardly wrap our mind around it. So if you cannot portray God how do you portray the demon? So you have to give him a human form and he chose the form of Jesus because that is a form from which he can torture Jesus, by saying to him you’re not ready, you’re not good enough…
Also, “Look at how close we are.”
Yes, look at how close we are. You and I are the same.
“I was God’s favorite once.”
Yeah, I was once the golden boy. Now you think you’re the golden boy. I think it also allowed me to see the movie from different perspectives. I wrote it from the perspective that is in the gospel, meaning Jesus is actually the son of God, and this is actually Lucifer. But people who are not religious see it as a parable and the demon is just the shadow, that voice that says “You’re not good enough.” You know? So in that sense it solved a lot of problems.
Broad Green Pictures
I’ve seen this happen a few times, where God or Jesus and the Devil are played by the same person. I’m thinking of George Burns in Oh, God! You Devil…
Well, there you go! [Laughs.]
It’s a classic, right? But obviously that creates a lot of technical issues.
Yeah, I mean we tried to keep it simple. Here’s what happens. People are so used, now, to seeing extraordinary special effects and to seeing so many things, that we really only had to show Jesus and the demon in the same frame… that might happen maybe six, seven times in the movie? Very little. The rest is over the shoulder with a double, you know? As long as it’s well done. In fact you don’t want to be too showy, because then it becomes about visual effects. People just assume that all this is easy to do, because it is, as far as the audience is concerned. Expensive but easy. So we really only show them together a few times and that was plenty.
It’s the Dead Ringers approach.
Yeah, I mean Dead Ringers, back then it was so remarkable you couldn’t keep your eyes off of it. How did they do that? Right now the question of “how did they do that” no longer exists, so people can get caught up in the story.
I love this approach, the idea of just doing another anecdote or vignette in Jesus’s life. Can you get a franchise out of this? Can we visit him over time? It would be really neat.
I can’t because I shot my load here, with respect of what interests me, but I think it’s a conceit that exists in literature. People will write a book about, like we were saying, the last week of Napoleon, that is completely dramatized. You know? Or Shakespeare in Love was that. You take Shakespeare and invent a story around him. So yes, that can be done many, many times, and it’s certainly done in the case of westerns. You take Buffalo Bill and put him in all types of situations that he may or may not have been in. Shakespeare in Love is a good example. You take a well known character with certain givens, and you do a story around them.
Top Photo: Broad Green Pictures
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon, and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved, Rapid Reviews and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
