Start Marriage Right / Of Fatwas, Faith and Film: An Interview with Steve Taylor

Steve Taylor is no stranger to controversy, to the notion, as he said,

Criticism comes best from within.”

There was the time, during his 12-year, Grammy-nominated recording career, his album “I Predict 1990,” which opens with the satirical “I Blew Up The Clinic Real Good,” was pulled from shelves at Christian music stores. And the time he claimed “the Christian Movie Establishment” had declared a “fatwa” against his little movie.

The latter was just last month. And that little movie is an adaptation of Donald Miller’s New York Times-bestselling book Blue Like Jazz, six years in the making.

“Blue Like Jazz,” both the book and movie, is a story about relationships. It’s a story about Miller’s relationships with Penny and Laura and all the other students at “the most godless campus in America”—the ultra-liberal, not-very-Christian Reed College in Portland—and how they forced him to look at himself and his faith in Christ. Most of all, it’s a story about his relationship with “God on a dirt road walking toward me.”

It was a story, after reading the book six years ago, Taylor wanted to tell—and tell as honestly as possible. (So did 4,500 Kickstarter supporters who, in just 30 days, raised the $345,000 to make the movie, making it “the biggest crowd-sourced project in American history,” according to RELEVANT.)

It turns out making music isn’t much different from making movies for Taylor. He had finished a 30-day, cross-country bus tour premiering “Blue Like Jazz” for Kickstarter supporters (“a lot like being in a band”) the day before he sat down with Emily McFarlan Miller of Start Marriage Right at the Imago Film Festival, outside Chicago. That tour had ended in Portland.

Start Marriage Right: How did you get involved with making this movie?

Steve Taylor: A friend had given me the book six years ago, and I read it over Christmas, and at that time I was looking, trying to figure out what to do for the next project, and even though it’s not a book that you put down and think, “I see this movie in my head,” I was immediately convinced this needed to be the next movie that I make. I liked how Don’s voice in the book is very winsome. He has a good sense of humor. He kind of feels like someone you want to hang out with. One of my favorite things is I get to tell people he’s the guy you would hope he is. I’ve spent a lot of time with him over the last six years. We just got off a 30-day tour, and I have not laughed as much as I have in the last 30 days in probably five years. It was a blast.”

What was it from the book that stood out to you—one of the chapters or one of the anecdotes—that stood out to you that made you think this would make a good movie?

The big one was there’s a scene that happens in a confession booth that they construct on campus at the end of the big weekend bash at the end of the school year called Renn Fayre at Reed College. They build this confession booth, and the way they subverted this confession booth into something completely unexpected I just thought was fantastic, and I just wanted to see that in a movie. The trick is two people in a confession booth is essentially two talking heads. The subject matter I just thought was so engaging that I thought it would make for a good enough scene that you could end the movie there.”

Your relationship with the label “Christian” is maybe kind of complicated. (Taylor wrote last month in a post titled “The Christian Movie Establishment vs. Blue Like Jazz” on the “Blue Like Jazz” blog, the one genre box he doesn’t want the film to occupy is “Christian Movie.”) Would you label the film “Christian?”

The reason it’s complicated is because it’s odd to have the film—the writers and director are Christians, and the book is subtitled “Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality,” so why wouldn’t we label it a Christian film? The only reason is because in the mind of the public, I think that’s become a very specific genre with a very specific idea of what it’s going to be like, and it’s not. It’s strictly because of that it’s not a genre box we would like to occupy because of the public perception. I dealt with that a little bit when I was working in Christian music. When I first started, it wasn’t the institution that it became. Then it became very much institutionalized, and at that point, it’s easy to write off when something becomes classified. But then artists out of that genre started breaking out into the larger public consciousness and started changing its perception. In a perfect world, that’s what we would hope would happen with a movie like this.”

You’d like to see that perception change with the label “Christian” in film?

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

So how would you describe this film because it is kind of genre-pushing, maybe?

Yes. Well, it’s kind of like a college coming-of-age comedy, I guess, and it’s certainly got drama in it, as well, but we wanted first of all to make sure it was funny. And, yeah, I mean, it’s certainly indie in the sense it wasn’t funded by a studio, and we didn’t have a lot of money, but we got a really good cast together, and most of our cast is from LA, and we had, I think, a pretty good production value, so hopefully it doesn’t come across as a low budget exercise in… I don’t know. I actually like those mumblecore films, but they’re hard to watch after a while, so we were hoping to make something that had a little more production value to it.”

What are you hoping people will take away from the film? People who aren’t even filmmakers and are maybe going to talk, think about stretching the genre—just your general person coming and watching the film—what are you hoping he or she will take away from this?

Don and I have talked about this a lot. Most of us live in this space between. We go to church, and we self-identify as Christian, but we live most of our lives in this space where we’re in the minority or where our beliefs would be considered odd. Whether it’s work or school or most of our lives, we’re not within our kind of smaller group and subculture. In that space, we live between faith and doubt, as well. And I thought that was an interesting story to tell, especially in the context of a journey to college, because college in many ways is that point in your life where you take what you’ve grown up with, and now you’re either going to shed some of your beliefs, many of your beliefs, all of your beliefs, or your going to make them your own. I’m surprised we haven’t seen many stories about that transition, especially in the context of someone who grows up in a very specific religious tradition. It would be interesting to see how they navigate a world that’s completely different than what they grew up with, and will any of what they brought with them survive through the school year? … In that regard, it’s really universal. I was talking to the co-president of our label, Roadside Attractions, and for him, they’re interested in it because they look at it as a coming-of-age story that everyone goes through, and it’s universal. I like that idea.”

What has been the reaction from people who have seen the movie?

It’s been overwhelmingly positive. I get a lot of people who are relieved because, No. 1, they couldn’t imagine how you’d turn this book into a movie. And far and away, for the most part, people are really into it who loved the book. They kind of have low expectations. I’m all about working with the genre of low expectations. You can only look good. But you never really know how the public is going to react until it opens, so we’ll see what happens on April 13.”

You’ve said (again, in the March 21 “Blue Like Jazz” blog post) there is a “fatwa” against the movie and that the Christian Movie Establishment is “out to get us.” Can you talk a little bit about that and where you think that’s coming from?

The post came out of two very specific instances from what I refer to as “the Christian Movie Establishment.” In the first case with the executive pastor of Sherwood Baptist (Michael Catt), which is where the Kendrick brothers make their movies, and I think he’s also one of their producers, he just put out the edict that anybody who worked on “Blue Like Jazz” would not be working with them in the future. We immediately had one group we were working with in particular, that I really loved working with, that had to drop out. They couldn’t afford to lose a bigger account. We don’t have a lot of money. They were very sorry about it, and I understood and wished them well. It struck me as odd since the movie wasn’t out. Not only wasn’t it out yet, but nobody had seen it yet at that point. I can’t imagine this guy would have seen a screenplay since that wasn’t circulating, so I have no idea where it came from. And then the thing that happened a few weeks ago was another instance you can relate from the blog. But at that point it felt like something else is going on here. This sure doesn’t smell like a coincidence to me. And since that time, when the blog came up, I know the pop culture editor at Christianity Today asked for a comment from the gentleman at Sherwood Baptist, and he finally got two days ago an official “no comment.” Which was like, What? No comment? Let’s just say if was the Kendrick brothers, and I found out about this—that someone on my team had done this—No. 1, I would want to know how that came down, why that came down, and I would be issuing something very quickly because that doesn’t speak well of anybody. And to have nothing forthcoming for 10 days, and then the answer was “no comment?” That just strikes me — that doesn’t seem like a very courageous response from somebody who produced “Courageous.” I still have no idea what it’s about and would love to know, but it’s hard to find out when the response is “no comment.”

What is it about this movie then, before anybody had even seen it, that would make them uncomfortable?

I honestly don’t know. The one thing I’d said early on, because it was four years trying to make this movie, was, “This is not a family movie. You cannot tell this story in the context of a family movie. You can’t do it accurately.” The overwhelming response I got from that blog posting years ago was a combination of, “Duh,” and, “Well, of course you have to have (that kind of) content. Why would we see a movie like that if it didn’t feel real to us?” So I don’t think this is an issue for most people, and I think most of us would agree that as much as we all love the idea of family entertainment, the thought of any media that has to do with Christianity having to be de facto safe for the whole family — that’s not a good development. I don’t see how anybody would think that was a good thing. I understand why some Christian radio stations might want to brand themselves that way, or some media companies might want to brand themselves, but if the public starts thinking that they’re interchangeable, that’s not good for Christianity, and that’s not good for family entertainment.”

Do their movies or their take on what makes a Christian movie make you feel uncomfortable?

Yeah, I understand where it comes from, and it’s not my cup of tea, but a lot of people love those movies, and they look at them — I think they’re made in lieu of sermons, and they go to them expecting a sermon, right? My issues are probably less to do, less artistic issues because there’s a whole spectrum of that out there. I’m still working hard at being a better filmmaker, too, so it would be more to do with (how) it’s tricky because we gotta be careful if we present a version of Christianity where Jesus comes and fixes everything because we know that that doesn’t happen. We know that that’s not true. The first movie of theirs that I saw—“Facing the Giants”—there were things I admired about it. But the thing that I didn’t like about it was it played like the Baptist version of the prosperity doctrine, where you do this, and everything, everything gets fixed, everything gets solved in your life. I don’t know if they even necessarily intended it that way, but I think a casual viewer would assume from that, “Oh, if I give my life to Jesus, He’s going to make everything, He’s going to fix everything.” That’s not how it works, you know. We all know that’s not how it works, and the Bible never makes any promises in that way. On the other hand, the same criticism could be leveled at a lot of Hollywood entertainment, right? All this wish fulfillment stuff. Again, I don’t want to be picking on them necessarily. You know, it’s tricky when we take our Christian faith and we create things that are born out of that way of looking at the world. One of the tricky things about it, and the reason it’s so hard, is because we believe that, you know, God can change us from within, change the way we view things, but that’s not something you can put on film. You can’t put an inner transformation on film. That has to be externalized. One of the big dramatic problems… the term deus ex machina—“god in the machine”—that’s a no-no in drama. You can’t come in and just fix it because God fixes it. There’s nothing dramatic about that, and those stories don’t work. So it’s a much trickier proposition doing stories with any kind of transformation or conversion than, say, other genres, other types of movies, and I don’t want to act like it’s easy because it’s not.”

What’s next? You said you’re working on being a better filmmaker. Are you planning to do more films after this?

Don and Ben (Pearson), our co-writer, and myself are working on another idea. We’re going to take a little break after May 1, after this is done. But after that we’ve got another script we want to get cracking on. Hopefully, it will turn out well. We just really like working together.”

Is it going to be the movie adaption of “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” (Miller’s book about “editing” his life to turn “Blue Like Jazz” into a movie), where you’re making a movie about making a movie?