Art, Truth and Fiction

An Interview with Director Jim Hanon

I recently had the opportunity to run some questions by Jim Hanon, director of the feature film End of the Spear, due out from Every Tribe Entertainment on January 20. The movie tells the story of a tribe of Waodani, an indigenous people group of Ecuador’s remote Amazon rain forest. It also tells the story of the missionaries who came in contact with them and were murdered by them—and whose family members later befriended them and lived with them. It’s a remarkable and powerful story of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Two years ago, Bearing Fruit Communications released the documentary Beyond the Gates of Splendor, also directed by Hanon, which tells the same story in a different fashion and for a different audience. Where Gates sometimes feels designed primarily as a cathartic experience for the families of the slain missionaries and the surviving Wao tribe members who participated in the killings, End of the Spear is a fictionalized, streamlined narrative that should play well to audiences previously unfamiliar with the story.

My email conversation with Hanon was so remarkable that, rather than craft an essay around a handful of choice quotes, I’ve elected to run the full text of the interview. Enjoy!

First, congratulations on a fairly stunning feature film debut. End of the Spear is a remarkable accomplishment, especially considering the budgetary constraints and location conditions under which you were no doubt working.

Publicity materials position Beyond the Gates of Splendor as "A True Story" and End of the Spear as "Based on a True Story." Now, I’d seen the documentary prior to seeing End of the Spear, and I must confess that I wasn't able to detect much in the way of artistic license. Which aspects of the film's storyline were fictionalized?

JH: The largest difference is in the character of Mincayani, who in reality wasn’t present for many of the events in which the audience sees him. We needed the story to be about his journey, his and that of the young Steve Saint. The question we explored in the film was how Mincayani could kill Steve’s dad, and yet the two of them end up being in a family relationship. This is the question that drew me to the story.

Mincayani’s character is a composite of many of the Waodani, and many events were combined so the journey could fit within a time frame that the audience could follow. We also needed to save Mincayani’s recognition of God’s grace to be the climax of the last act. In reality he chose to follow God relatively soon after Dayumae brought Rachel and Betty into the tribe.

The final scene takes full dramatic license. In reality, Steve Saint told us he never once felt the Waodani needed his forgiveness. Well, so much of the story is hard to believe, that one was way off the charts. We knew forgiveness had to be dramatized for the audience to feel the truth of it, so our scene involves Mincayani and Steve confronting these emotions.

Art illuminates the emotional reality of truth in a way that the facts never can, and film is a visual medium. In reality Nate Saint never carried a picture of his son Steve in his airplane. I put the photo in the plane so Steve would have a presence at the attack, and Mincayani could pull his picture out of the plane after Nate was speared, and the audience would know the story’s question was about Mincayani and Steve.

For the same reason we had Steve call his dad on the radio after the attack, which according to the facts did not happen. But like I said, the facts always fall short of the real picture, and though Nate didn’t carry his son’s photo in the plane, he did carry it in his heart. Steve never called his dad at the attack, but his heart called out to him many times since.

The production design and soundtrack for this film are simply brilliant. You said that “art illuminates the emotional reality of truth in a way that the facts never can.” How did that view of art play into your design for this film?

JH: Art has historically been a means of elevating the soul to God. In and of itself, it has the capacity to communicate beyond the rigors of logic. So in my theology, if a film is called “Christian” then that should also mean it is remarkably artful in every category and dimension. Art reaches out to the viewer; art respects the viewer without compromising itself, and art leaves the viewer better for having encountered it.

The aerial shots are particularly beautiful. Some, even the landing strip on the sandbar, look incredibly similar to the documentary footage in Gates. Were any of these filmed on location in Ecuador, or were you able to scout locations in Panama that served as near-doubles?

JH: Everything was able to be shot in Panama, but I’m very glad that you noticed the authenticity. Steve Saint was actually our stunt pilot, and he landed on a river sandbar in the film that was shorter than what his father landed on in the Amazon. East of the Panama Canal, an incredible expanse of jungle stretches into the Darian rainforest all the way down to Colombia. The only problem was getting clearance for small aircraft in some areas where the drug traffic was heavily watched.

According to publicity materials, the Wao needed to be persuaded to cooperate in the production of Gates. Was that true also for the feature film?

JH: To the Waodani, there wasn’t a documentary and then a movie; there was one group of foreigners standing before them asking if they could tell their story. Either they trusted us, and believed the project was worth while, or they didn’t. And they first said no. Only after they heard about the school shootings at Columbine did they grant permission. They told us they used to live that way, too, and if telling their story to the “northern tribes” would help us live better, then they saw it well that we tell their story.

The Waodani had the most violent society on earth with six out of ten dying at the spears of other Waodani. This meeting made the telling of their story a privileged responsibility that would cover both films.

Have any of the Waodani seen the finished film? And if so, what was their reaction to seeing a fictionalization of their story?

JH: The premiere for the documentary Beyond the Gates of Splendor was held in a Waodani village deep in the Amazon basin where we used generator power to project the film and sound in a make-shift jungle amphitheater. They watched it again and again and laughed and cried.

The Waodani elders, including three of the men who attacked the missionaries in 1956 were also with us in Panama for much of the filming of End of the Spear. Dayumae was shown some of the footage of the spearing attack and broke down in uncontrollable tears. Three of the missionary widows were also with us, and the reaction from Dayumae reminded everyone in the cast and crew of the remarkable reality of this story.

Mincaye has since seen the entire film, and I think he is the only Waodani to have seen it in its entirety so far. He reacted to the film the way other audiences do, with reflection, with tears, with laughter, and in the end with hope.

An international premiere is being planned in Panama, bringing up many of the Waodani and uniting them with the Embera cast so they can all experience the result of their efforts together. The Waodani, like the Embera, have a deeper understanding of actions, rather than words, showing what a person believes. We’ve screened the film in Hawaii to an indigenous audience and have had a private screening with the Tongva leadership in LA. The best responses to the film, by far, have come from these groups—which is fascinating, considering the friction often attributed to missionaries supposedly opening the door for the rest of the world to encroach upon such indigenous peoples. But I think the openness of these audiences has to do with the genuine journey of reconciliation between Mincaye and Steve, and the emotional truth it represents.

I was unfamiliar with all of the actors who portrayed the Waodani, and was fairly stunned to learn that some of them are Hollywood actors while some are native Panamanians. How did you approach enculturating such a diverse cast in the ways and language of the Waodani in order to achieve such a seamless screen portrayal?

JH: We knew an authentic experience for the story could only be captured with an authentic tribe. Only four of the actors who played Waodani were from North America; all the rest of the sizable Indian cast were Panamanian Embera, including some of the major supporting roles. Our casting director Mark Fincannon is awesome, and he found three Embera villages up the Chagris River for us to work with.

The idea of acting was foreign to them, as it is to most indigenous cultures. To them, you either feel a certain way or you don’t, and the idea of pretending to feel something else, or be someone else, carries the stigma of being deceitful. To overcome that, we brought in some of the Waodani to work with both the Embera and the North American cast members. It was a two week cultural exchange and daily training.

We also had a great movement coach, Kathleen Thompson, to help our North American actors blend their body language with the Embera, and to help the Embera with the basic concepts of acting.

The language barrier seemed insurmountable at first, but ended up working in our favor. I told the Embera through translators that I could not understand a single word that they said—but I could completely understand how they were feeling by reading their emotions. I made a deal with them that I would share with them what their characters should be feeling inside, and then let them know after the scene if that feeling was communicated.

Language was off the table. It was completely about subtext, which at the end of the day is what every great performance is about. We did not have the option of falling back on dialogue to communicate emotion. It was amazing to see the Embera start to believe that they could succeed—and when they saw how much we relied on them, they would try even harder.

Indigenous people in most third world cultures are still treated as second class, and we encountered this in Panama. But we were dependent upon the Embera. We could not make the film without them, and we were telling a story from the Indian perspective. All this made our relationship and the journey very special.

Many audiences will find the message of the film hopelessly optimistic, even though the core story is completely true to reality. As a pastor, I understand that it's the work of the Holy Spirit that makes things possible for God which, for man, are impossible. Yet the movie—even the documenatry—never preaches, so the theology behind the story is never really presented.

JH: A movie should never preach. The medium is at its best when it raises a question of universal interest and explores the question with both its darker and lighter sides. In the end, either something resonates as emotionally true, or it doesn’t, and I really believe the truth can be trusted. I like the quote from Henry Kaiser, “When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.”

But is the theology of the story never presented? In a motion picture, what characters say doesn't necessarily make you believe them. The audience only knows the truth about a character from the choices the character makes while under extreme pressure. The old idiom “actions speak louder than words” is at work in the structure of every film, including this one. I think the audience is smart. I think the audience can perceive the theology behind the story—and what’s more, they can experience it emotionally rather than just intellectually. For many, this will cause them to rethink what they hold to be true; for others, this will affirm what they already know to be true.

Yes, you’re right. The theology is presented through the story, rather than articulated verbally. So how do you hope the dynamic of story and faith play out in connection with skeptical audiences (many of which will include Christians, too)?

JH: I think the Christian audience wants to have a deeply satisfying motion picture experience, same as everyone else, and some of the most frequent moviegoers are Christians because we are open to the wonder of things.

This story is unbelievable, and it is true. What that meant for me as a filmmaker was to help the audience connect emotionally to the characters and story, and see how much they could feel the reality of this journey.

Is the story hopelessly optimistic, as you described it? Or is the truth it explores real; and even though the mind can’t fully grasp it, does the heart still wonder at it? Does it raise a question we all think about in the midnight of our soul?

Well, as an actor myself, I would have to suspect that performing in this film had to been fairly transformational for many of these actors.

JH: You would have loved it, and you are correct that it gave an experience few will forget.

We asked Steve Saint to play the part of one of the search party members because we knew the impact it would have on the female actors in the scene, when the search party tells them of the deaths of their husbands.

The actors who played Waodani next to the Embera were challenged to a level of emotional depth that they would not otherwise have achieved. In the scene at Rachel’s funeral, we used all the real Waodani who were with us including three of the men who actually killed the missionaries, as well as three of the surviving widows. There could not have been more authentic tears in that scene than if it were the real thing.

Most of all, every actor has a gift of empathy which allows them to truly feel and therefore truly communicate what a character is feeling. In this way our actors experienced, and vicariously lived, the reality of this story before any one else.

Thanks, Jim. I truly hope this movie finds a wide and enthusiastic audience.

End of the Spear

Some movies, in spite of their big budgets, deep pockets and all-star casts, can leave us as cold as Saturday-morning pancakes on Sunday night. The Phantom Menace or Troy come to mind.

Other movies rise above their tiny budgets, technical flaws and no-name casts. End of the Spear is one of these. It’s well-made, mostly well-acted and stacks up well, artistically, against the kind of films courted at Sundance and Telluride.

The movie won’t please all audiences, however. In spite of its visual artistry, outstanding lead performances and overall technical competency, it tells a true story that’s just hard to fathom.

In short, End of the Spear is the story of five missionaries who rather rashly make contact with a notoriously violent tribe in a remote Ecuador jungle. The five men are murdered. The next step is not reprisal, however. Instead, two women from the tribe come out of the jungle. And after befriending them, female family members—and children—of the slain men trek back into the jungle to live with the Waodani, love them and “convert” them. But the point of the story is not the evangelistic and proseletyzing project; in fact, there’s less preaching in this movie than in At Play in the Fields of the Lord or The Mission. The point of the story is that, given ample opportunity to take revenge, the son of one of the murdered men overcomes the very natural and human “eye for an eye” instinct. He and his father’s murderer, in fact, become fast friends, as the entire Waodani tribe abandons a settled social pattern of escalating reprisals in favor of a culture of forgiveness and peace.

This is not a perfect movie. In the interest of truthfulness, the screenplay presents us with so many characters that only a couple of them really become completely three-dimensional. We never really understand what makes these missionaries tick, for instance. And the cut-away editing of the story’s countless murders, while undoubtedly necessary to avoid an R rating, is mis-timed just enough that it calls attention to itself in a sometimes jarring way.

But these are quibbles. The biggest problem facing an audience when watching End of the Spear is likely to be unbelief—not lack of belief in the Christian religion, simply because half of the characters in the story are missionaries, but lack of belief in the story itself.

Like other powerful stories of reconciliation, social justice and repentance (such as Final Solution, Gandhi or even The Mission) End of the Spear is its own worst enemy because it dares to tell us that there really are people who are brave enough to put themselves wholly and submissively in the power of their enemies—not because their enemies are so powerful that there’s no choice, but because it’s the right thing to do. And like Final Solution, End of the Spear goes one step further by telling us that this kind of radical peacemaking does, in fact, have the power to transform enemies into friends, without the need for the “satisfaction” of justice.

So moviegoers of any stripe may well come away from End of the Spear simply shaking their heads and saying, “Well, clearly they took some liberties with this story, because such things just don’t happen. It isn’t realistic.” And this is just as likely with Christian audiences as any.

I can’t tell you the number of times that I, in my role as a pastor and teacher, have had devout, educated, faithful Christians insist that Jesus submitted to his enemies only because it was necessary, in the divine scheme of things, that he die. Without God’s demand for an atoning blood sacrifice, they argue, Jesus would have been in smackdown mode. Self defense, even lethal force, would have been the order of the day. They insist that, contrary to Jesus’ own teaching in The Sermon on the Mount, His behavior from Gethsamane to Golgotha was in no way intended to serve as an example for our own behavior in the “real world.”

But in the case of stories such as End of the Spear and Final Solution, and even Gandhi, radical and lasting moral change in the real world really is brought about by a radical commitment to non-violence. And the fact remains that these stories are true. These movies force us to deal with that truth.

We can either admit that our own rationalized, compromised and temporized ways of thinking are somehow defective, or we can dismiss these stories as mere fictionalizations or myths. The choice is up to us.

But these are stories that aren’t going away anytime soon. And some myths just happen to be true, powerfully so.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

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Can we reasonably expect every movie to be a masterpiece? No.

Can we reasonably harbor such hope every time walk into a theater? Yes.

The public will likely react to Andrew Adamson’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in much the same way they reacted to C. S. Lewis’ short novel. Some will be deeply moved, some will enjoy it but remain fairly indifferent, and some will hate it. But the film is no more likely to be universally hailed as “great cinema” than the book has been universally praised as “great literature.” Take that as you will.

Producer Douglas Gresham is perhaps unfortunately correct in claiming that the success of the movie will hinge on the appeal of the story, not on the craft of the film’s director—for the strength of this movie is the story, which is effectively enough told, if in a journeyman-like fashion.

Adamson is also perhaps unfortunately correct in claiming that “whatever you found in the book, you will find in the film.” I certainly doubt that many viewers will find more in the film than they found in the book.

Is that such a bad thing? I guess not. In fact, according to Walden Media President Michael Flaherty, if audiences even prefer the book to the movie, “We consider that a success.” Why? Because, as long as the movie is a good one, at least the comparison will have been made; and that means another book has been read.

So while I’m personally disappointed that Adamson took the opportunity to make a merely good film rather than a truly groundbreaking one, most audiences are likely to be perfectly satisfied with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But is the movie good enough to be breakout success, generating enough buzz to draw an audience not already familiar with Narnia—in the way that The Lord of the Rings did? I doubt it. There’s just not enough about it that’s really unique.

In fact, the parts of the movie I found most uninspiring were those that will come as no surprise to those who read the book: a meal with the Beavers, Edmund in the Witch’s palace, the disaster at the Stone Table and the battle between Peter’s army and the Witch’s host. And that was the problem with those scenes: they weren’t at all surpising.

But there are still a handful of nice surprises in the film: James McAvoy’s performance as Tumnus, Skandar Keynes as Edmund, beautiful scenery and CGI (surprising, that is, if you haven’t been paying attention to the trailers) and a couple of new action sequences (pleasant, that is, if you care for scenes that feel scripted for gaming tie-ins).

The parts of the movie I enjoyed most, however, were those in which Adamson seemed most at liberty because of the sparseness of Lewis’ narrative. In particular, the opening London Blitz sequence and the Pevensie children’s subsequent exile to a country manor established the setting and characters very effectively.

And through the characters, the major themes of Lewis’ book come through loud and clear, particularly those of responsibility and sacrifice; in fact, they come through too loud for some. Polly Toynbee, writing an editorial on the film for The Guardian, says: “Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict.”

It’s funny how the theme of sacrifice is so appealing to some and so “repugnant” to others. Is the starving refugee who saves the last bowl of rice for her child wrong to do so? Is it better for the child to die than to live with the guilt of watching mom starve?

In a 2001 interview, author Philip Pullman said that if Christians want to find love in Narnia, they’ll have to invent it because it simply isn’t there. If the only significance of sacrifice is guilt, I suppose that’s the case—but that’s a brand of guilt that Christianity didn’t manufacture, because what motivates sacrifice is love. And that seems incredibly obvious to me; certainly, Lewis the narrator took great pains to explain what motivated Aslan’s sacrifice in his book. But if it isn’t so obvious to filmgoers with no prior exposure to Narnia, I doubt that this film will clear things up. If one already understands how loving sacrifice works, one can find it here. If one doesn’t, though, there’s a good chance one might only find guilt on the screen because, to be honest, Liam Neeson’s CGI Aslan is pretty inscrutable. With Lewis’ narration gone, it’s pretty hard to figure out why Aslan does what he does.

And that’s too bad. Like Jim Broadbent’s professor Kirke, Adamson himself has been trying to get to Narnia through the wardrobe for a very long time. He didn’t seem to find much but bloodless scenery and a good story when he got there. Audiences might be lucky enough to find a bit more, if they're willing to try.

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