God On Trial: a new 90-minute drama for 91Èȱ¬ÌýTwo
Executive Producer Mark Redhead
The idea of filming God On Trial is one that Mark Redhead of Hat Trick Productions has been nurturing for a long time.
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He says: "For more than 20 years I have been haunted by a story that a group of inmates of Auschwitz, appalled by their suffering and by the cruelty of the Nazis, had put God on trial.
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"The madness of 9/11, acts of terror committed in God's name and events like the Indian Ocean Tsunami, a so-called 'Act of God', brought the story into focus for me.
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"I felt it was a film that cried out to be made: not only did it seem that God was on the stage of human history, I could not imagine there was anyone alive, whether faced with the death of a single child or by a huge catastrophe, who had not asked the question 'Why is there so much suffering in the world?' and questioned the idea of a God who could allow such suffering to occur."
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Some four years ago, Mark turned to the writer Frank Cottrell Boyce: "I knew he combined a brilliant intellect, a compassionate nature and a profound interest in religion, and together we set about researching the background.
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"Reading accounts of the Holocaust, we found that time and again its victims had wrestled with the question of God's role in the catastrophe, and asked 'Where is God?' with both examples of faith being lost and strengthened in the face of it."
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The very nature of the drama would make it a challenging subject to realise: "We were conscious that a trial of God was a controversial concept, but found Jewish scholars welcomed the idea of a robust exploration of man's relationship with God and pointed out how such arguments dated back to the book of Job and beyond.
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"Indeed the question asked daily in the camps – 'My God, why hast thou forsaken me?' – goes back to the Psalms and were words apparently spoken by Jesus on the cross.
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"We found too that the massive scale and cold-blooded systematic nature of the Holocaust had been a turning point in theology and that there was a large body of literature on God and the Holocaust from almost every religious perspective and especially from Christian and Jewish ones."
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So Frank, not himself Jewish but a practicing Catholic with seven children, buried himself in the books of the Old Testament, the Torah of Judaism: "He emerged with a stunning script which animated the great questions with human drama.
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"He framed the charge that God had broken his covenant to his chosen people to care for and protect them and set the trial over one day as the inmates of an Auschwitz blockhouse await the selection of those prisoners who are to be taken to the gas chamber.
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"Drawing on his research and his imagination, Frank brought to life a gallery of characters including a nuclear physicist, a glove-maker, two rabbis, a professor of law, and at least one criminal; believers, doubters and atheists, the young and the old all flung together in the hell of the camps and all engaged in the desperate struggle not simply to survive, but to make sense of their existence."
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Next a suitable director needed to be found: "With a large cast in a contained space we felt a conventional approach to shooting the drama would kill it stone dead; we needed the arguments and the conflicts to be alive and vital.
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"Andy de Emmony undertook to approach the piece in an unusual way, cross-shooting in extra long ten-minute takes with three cameras on high speed film with simple very naturalistic light sources without any of the re-lighting normal in film drama – a major challenge for the brilliant young Polish Director of Photography Wojciech Szepel – nailing up to 15 minutes of material per day instead of the usual five, and shooting a 90-minute film in a remarkable 11 days.
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"It was a technique which had the actors telling anyone who'd listen that all films should be made like this."
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Casting proved to be exciting: "The conventional approach to film drama is for scenes to be broken down into bite-sized chunks; our extended 'live' approach would demand major feats of concentration, discipline, skill and generosity from the actors.
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"There's an old saying that good scripts find good actors, and a very special group of actors were drawn to the piece, attracted by both the content and the challenge of the actor-centred, bold production approach which gave them a chance to play the drama to each other rather than to the cameras."
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With the script in place and a sudden commission from 91Èȱ¬ Scotland, casting could begin in earnest: "Very quickly we secured the legendary Swedish film actor Stellan Skarsgard, whose presence was in turn to prove a big draw for his fellow actors.
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"He was quickly joined by Steven Dillane, who first came to prominence on Frank Cottrell Boyce's acclaimed Welcome To Sarajevo; the rising young star of The History Boys, Dominic Cooper; leading man Rupert Graves; French screen actors Francois Guetary and Andre Oumansky, and Sir Antony Sher, perhaps the leading Shakespearean stage actor of his generation."
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They were soon joined by Jack Shepherd, Eddie Marsan, Blake Ritson, Rene Zagger and Lorcan Cranitch: "Such was the quality of the performances that Sir Antony – whose character the Rabbi Akiba remains almost entirely silent for the duration of the film until he stands at the climax to deliver a blistering seven-minute tour de force – confessed to terror at the height to which the bar was being raised.
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"He nonetheless rose to the challenge, and the rhetorical force and emotional impact of his performance brought crew members to tears."
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Mark concludes: "God On Trial is set in an extreme situation, but wrestles with the great questions we all ask ourselves.
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"To have shared in the exploration of such important issues with such an awesome battery of talent has been an extraordinarily exciting and moving experience."
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