Individual stories from the Bible had been made into movies, but no one had taken on the arc of the Bible story as one meta-narrative from Genesis to Revelation.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Hollywood has done some of these films, and some of them are ginormous biblical movies, but you can tell the people making these are not invested in the truth of what those stories are biblically. It shows in the work.
I'm a Hollywood kid, and I know that there are only so many stories. Only so many tales around the campfire that we have to tell. Then we have to regurgitate them. Our grandparents' movies were all remakes of silent films - we forget that, but it's true.
At no point do I ever remember taking religion very seriously or even feeling that the biblical stories were any different from fairy stories. Certainly, none of it made any sense. By comparison, the world in which I lived, though I might not always understand it in all aspects, always made a lot of sense.
Biblical movies need not sermonize, just be honest to the foundational story. As powerful as the message is for people of faith, it's really great storytelling.
I was born into a world in which the most compelling stories are through film. But that wasn't always the case. Everything changes; everything evolves.
The films that I've done before were original stories most of the time, I did two adaptations before this, but they were mostly original stories where I had complete freedom to evolve in the direction I wanted.
For the Greeks, there was no single canonical version of creation, but a number of overlapping stories.
Animation had been done before, but stories were never told.
People think that the people in Hollywood have some master plan. They just make the movies that people go to see. I think it's that simple. I promise you if people were lining up around the block to see a Bible movie, they'd make Bible movies from now to the end of time.
You'd have to have one hell of an imagination to completely make up a story, but historians are very anal about what they think should be portrayed on screen. Thankfully they don't make movies; we do.