The Passion

[Sam Or I]

How many of you will go see this movie when it comes out?

[Enforcer Talen]

havent heard of it.

[Sam Or I]

The controversial movie directed and produced by Mel Gibson about the life of Jesus. Completely in Aramaic and Latin no subtitles, taken from the bible as close as possible.

[Sam Or I]

Mel Gibson has committed to return to the director's chair with "Passion," starring James Caviezel in a chronicle of the final 12 hours in the life of Jesus Christ, reported Variety

Helming gig will be Gibson's first since winning multiple Oscars with "Braveheart" in 1995, he will limit himself to off-camera duties.

No U.S. studio (not even Fox, where Icon is based) has so far taken distribution rights to the spiritual drama, to be shot in Latin and Aramaic. "Obviously, nobody wants to touch something filmed in two dead languages," Gibson explained at a news conference Friday in the Sala Fellini at Cinecitta. "They think I'm crazy, and maybe I am. But maybe I'm a genius.

"I want to show the film without subtitles," he added. "Hopefully, I'll be able to transcend language barriers with visual storytelling. If I fail, I'll put subtitles on it, though I don't want to."

"The idea came to me 10 years ago and has been rambling around in my empty head, very slowly taking shape ever since," Gibson said. "I think this is a pretty timeless and timely story to tell, involving an area where there's turbulence now just as there was turbulence then because history repeats itself.

"I want to show the humanity of Christ as well as the divine aspect," he continued. "It's a rendering that for me is very realistic and as close as possible to what I perceive the truth to be."

Remaining cast flanking Caviezel as Christ will be Italian actors. Gibson is in advanced talks with Monica Bellucci to play Mary Magdalene ("Malena"). Sunday, Jan. 19, 2003
You may expect a certain tense solemnity when an Academy Award — winning director is shooting a film on the life and death of Jesus Christ. On the sound stage of The Passion in Rome's Cinecitta studio, the famed auteur prepares a scene for Maia Morgenstern, the Romanian actress playing the Virgin Mary. She is to enter the abandoned temple where her son has just been removed in chains on his way to Calvary. The director needs an enshrouding silence, so he shouts down some workmen's chatter. Then he coaxes the actress into a long, slow walk that hits the perfect notes of apprehension and anguish.

But since this director is Mel Gibson (who got his Oscar for Braveheart), the tone isn't always pious. Gibson loves to goof. Playing practical jokes is a way of keeping the crew loose, asserting the primal jester inside the armor of a star's machismo. So to wrap up the temple take, he has a quiet word with Morgenstern and steps back to leave the actress alone — staring dolefully into the camera with a bright-red clown nose he has stuck on her face. Cut. Print. Amen.


Don't look for levity in The Passion, an account of the day Jesus was crucified starring James Caviezel (The Count of Monte Cristo) as Christ and Italian sex diva Monica Bellucci (soon to be seen in Matrix 2 and 3) as Mary Magdalene. Gibson is life-after-deathly serious about the project, which his production company is financing on an estimated budget of $25 million. (He doesn't yet have a distributor.) "This has been germinating inside me for 10 years," he says. "I have a deep need to tell this story. It's part of your upbringing, but it can seem so distant. The Gospels tell you what basically happened; I want to know what really went down."

In the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon series, in Ransom and in Signs, Gibson was the loner battling impossible odds. He seems to feel that way about The Passion, which should be ready for Easter 2004. A conservative in reflexively liberal Hollywood, and a devout Catholic in an industry whose products often mock religion, Gibson senses opposition to his film. The star, who had kept the set closed to the press before allowing TIME to visit this month, was angry that friends and relatives, including his 85-year-old father, had been pestered by an unidentified reporter preparing a story on The Passion. He suspects this is part of a media attack on a Christian testament.

"When you do touch this subject, it does have a lot of enemies," he told Fox News channel host Bill O'Reilly last week. Asked whether The Passion will upset Jews, Gibson replied, "It may. It's not meant to. I think it's meant to just tell the truth." Gibson's company recently signed a lucrative deal with Fox TV's film-studio sibling and has optioned O'Reilly's novel Those Who Trespass. So his TV anger may simply be the latest form of media synergy. Besides, Hollywood likes Gibson; moguls wish him well. "If anyone can pull it off, it's Mel Gibson," says Richard Cook, chairman of the Walt Disney Studios, for which Gibson made the megahit Signs. "The project is fraught with all sorts of issues, but I would never bet against him."

The Passion will be told — boldly, perhaps perversely — in two dead tongues: Latin, used by the Roman occupiers of Palestine, and Aramaic, the language of most Semites at the time of Christ. If it's hard for the actors to speak their lines, it will be a challenge for the audience too: Gibson wants to show the film without subtitles. "The audience will have to focus on the visuals," he says. "But they had silent films before talkies arrived, and people went to see them."

Jesus has been the subject of a hundred or so films, from Edison's The Passion Play at Oberammergau in 1898 to a quartet of Stan Brakhage experimental shorts in 2001. The story has been filmed by Cecil B. DeMille, Nicholas Ray, George Stevens. The Messiah has been portrayed with stolid reverence (in Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth) and Surrealist blasphemy (Luis Bunuel's L'Age d'Or). Often he sings: in Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, in a born-again Bollywood musical and in the Canadian kung-fu horror comedy Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

Gibson has few kind words for previous Passion films. Mention Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (which, like Gibson's location shots, was filmed in the Italian town of Matera), and he fakes a big yawn. On Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ: "You've got Harvey Keitel as Judas saying"--and here Gibson shifts into a Brooklyn accent--"'Hey, you ovah dere.'"

Gibson's film will be Scorsesean in one aspect: its meticulous attention to violence. "It's gonna be hard to take," he says. "When the Romans scourged you, it wasn't a nice thing. Think about the Crucifixion — there's no way to sugarcoat that." Not if you're playing Jesus. Caviezel, a practicing Catholic who met and was blessed by Pope John Paul II, logged 15 shooting days on the Calvary cross — which may have been easier than wearing shackles and getting beaten and whipped. During one trouncing, he separated his left shoulder. "There's an immense amount of suffering on this," the actor says. "Fortunately, God is helping me."

Gibson is a more truculent Catholic. He scorns the Second Vatican Council, which in the 1960s replaced the Latin Mass with the liturgy in the language of the people and lots of perky folk songs. To Gibson, Vatican II "corrupted the institution of the church. Look at the main fruits: dwindling numbers and pedophilia." He might also have noted that Catholicism flourished in those countries where it became a church of liberation — where priests welded traditional doctrine to radical social reform.

It's dodgy to argue theology with an actor-director who seemingly sees a fusion of the movie characters he has played and Christ: feisty, persecuted, able to take whatever punishment the bad guys can dish out. Gibson is determined to walk his own lonely path. But it hardly seems unreasonable that there can be a contemporary film about a Christian hero when there are so many about, say, serial killers. So Gibson pursues his passion to make The Passion.

Got a problem with that? Take it up with your new spiritual counselor: Mad Max.


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 70,00.html

[Joe]

I'll see it, because anyone who's got the balls to make a movie using only dead languages deserve to have his movie viewed.

[weemadando]

Aramaic is a dead language, we can read it, but IIRC we can't speak it.

What are they doing, guestimating how it would sound?

[RedImperator]

I might see it just to hear spoken conversational Latin.

[The Dark]

Aramaic is a dead language, we can read it, but IIRC we can't speak it.

What are they doing, guestimating how it would sound?

IIRC, synagogues still use Aramaic. Get a few rabbis to serve as linguistic advisors, and it would be possible.

[Stravo]

Does Mel realize that people PAY to see movies. WHo the fuck is going to pay to see a movie they don't understand. Not for one SECOND am I going to think about about spending ten dollars of my hard earned cash to see it. Add some subtitles Mel you 'genius' People want to understand their entertainment.

I'm sure this retarded idea did occur to him while he was alone. Thats where it should have stayed.

God I hate it when these hollywood actors get delusions of their own 'genius'

[Majin Gojira]

Why, the Arty and religous of course, and knowing the number of stupid fundies out their, this actually might work. Hell, I'll see it just because it's different.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Why, the Arty and religous of course, and knowing the number of stupid fundies out their, this actually might work. Hell, I'll see it just because it's different.

Fundies will protest it for it's depictions and for the fact that Gibson is Catholic.

[Darth Yoshi]

It sounds intriguing to me. I might see it, although Stravo's right. Mel Gibson really should put in subtitles.

[Keevan_Colton]

Ahh...dead languages...great gimmick......

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

How many of you will go see this movie when it comes out?

This movie will undoubtedly circulate at the film festivals and pick up film festival awards, maybe even an Oscar. But it will never been seen outside your local uni's theatre. And since I'm not interested in a movie I can't understand, I'm not wasting my money.

[Frank Hipper]

Stravo said this:

God I hate it when these hollywood actors get delusions of their own 'genius'

*vomits* If I ever had any doubts, this does away with them. Mel Gibson, the mysogynistic, homophobic, piece of rectal produce, must be swallowed by the earth, immediately. *vomits again* Ooohh, the pretension!

[Sokar]

As much of a history buff as I am, and as cool as hearing conversational Latin would be , there is no way Im paying $7.50(American) to see this movie. I barely have a knowledge of Clergy level Latin and Aramaic is all hypothetical, as its been said, we can read it, but no one, not even the Rabbis, speak pure ancient Aramaic, its as dead a language as you can find.......

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Oh, I forgot to add that I would be interested in seeing it, subtitles or not (but I would prefer subs).

Hmm, I wonder if Gibson will include Cartaphilus...?

[Ewo]

Mel Gibson is becoming quite religious. Look at Signs. He didn't have faith in God and then gained it in the end. Now he is going all out.
I think people will see it, especially religious fanatics and all those people that took Latin. Most of the movie is supposed to be about symbolism though, so more people will see it than you think.
Personally, I am going to wait to hear a few reviews before heading out first thing opening day. I think it will be interesting. He is certainly taking a risk here.
It's too early to tell if it will be a bomb though.

[Patrick Degan]

I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Seems to me that Mel Gibson is more out to prove how pious and righteous he is rather than to undertake any real artistic or philosophical examination of the inner moral struggle of Jesus to reconcile himself to his fate. And he's definitely going to have to add those subtitles.

His ego's gotten the better of him. He believes himself the Great Auteur, and combined with what appears to be a touch of religious fanatacism, this is making for a very obnoxious individual indeed.

Amusingly, he rejects the entire trend which made the Catholic Church a force for social reform and outreach. I wonder if he ever got those parts in the Gospels about Jesus driving the moneychangers from the temple, embracing the sinners, and challenging the hypocricy of establishment religion? What ever does he think that was about?

[DPDarkPrimus]

Mel Gibson is becoming quite religious. Look at Signs. He didn't have faith in God and then gained it in the end. Now he is going all out.

That's a weak arguement, saying he had the same beliefs as the character he played.

[Ewo]

Mel Gibson is becoming quite religious. Look at Signs. He didn't have faith in God and then gained it in the end. Now he is going all out.

That's a weak arguement, saying he had the same beliefs as the character he played.

It just seemed like his role was changing. That wasn't supposed to be an argument, just a comment.
I am not by any means singing the praises of The Passion. I actually have just heard about it from people at work.

[Enricko]

Hey, it would be soo great if the dialogues, that only a minority of people could understand anyway, were really saying anti-fundies messages like:

- Evolution is the most likely possibility, stop whining;
- Don't judge your neighbor on an out-dated piece of parchment (Ten Comandments, the rest of the Bible);
- Women have rights equal to men, stop bitching your mothers, daughters, spouses and co-workers;
- Saying that God (or gods) are on your side doesn't make it so;
- Blowing up your adversaries is not a good argument in a debate;
- Etc...