In Rome, where centuries of human history tumble past in stone, marble and paint, Academy Award®-winning director Mel Gibson recently recreated an even more ancient world: that of Jerusalem on the final day of Jesus Christ’s life for the film The Passion of The Christ . Collaborating with an accomplished cast and a devoted crew of artisans, Gibson revisited this eternal story with the uncompromising realism and raw emotion of contemporary cinema.
“The Passion” (taken from the Latin for suffering, but also meaning a profound and transcendent love) refers to the agonizing and ultimately redemptive events in the final 12 hours of Jesus Christ’s life, of which there are four separate accounts in the New Testament of the Bible, and the legacy of which has been reflected upon for the last 2000 years. The powerful imagery surrounding The Passion has long inspired the artistic imagination, becoming a deep and abiding influence in Western painting as well as inspiring numerous motion pictures in the last century.
As early as the silent movies of Thomas Edison, The Passion was a theme addressed by the most ambitious of filmmakers. In 1927, Cecil B. DeMille directed the first epic treatment of Jesus’ life and death with the silent film The King of Kings. Then, in 1953, 20th Century Fox kicked off the new CinemaScope technology with The Robe, starring Richard Burton as a Roman tribune who seeks redemption after the crucifixion. By the 1960s, Biblical epics had become a whole film genre unto themselves, with George Stevens creating the monumental The Greatest Story Ever Told featuring lavish sets and an all-star “cast of thousands.”
Around the same time, the Italian film master Pier Paolo Pasolini approached the subject in an entirely fresh way with The Gospel According to St. Matthew, which featured a completely non-professional cast, a naturalistic style and language taken directly from the Bible, and became the most successful film of Pasolini’s career. In the 1970s, The Passion was represented in two counter-culture musicals: Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. More recently, director Martin Scorsese was also drawn to examine Christ’s final days with his own controversial The Last Temptation of Christ.
But never before has any filmmaker attempted to bring this story of passionate sacrifice to life with such intensely focused cinematic detail and realism. For Mel Gibson, creating such a film was a long-lived dream, taking a significant amount of his own passion and that of many others, including his Icon producing partners Bruce Davey and Steve McEveety, to turn into reality.
“My intention for this film was to create a lasting work of art and to stimulate serious thought and reflection among diverse audiences of all backgrounds,” says Gibson.
He continues: “My ultimate hope is that this story’s message of tremendous courage and sacrifice might inspire tolerance, love and forgiveness. We’re definitely in need of those things in today’s world.”
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