E-mail a friendCatherine Hardwicke
airdate December 14, 2006
Before rising through the ranks to become a respected writer-director, Catherine Hardwicke designed the production of more than 20 films. The drama, Thirteen, marked her feature directorial and screenwriting debut and won Hardwicke numerous awards, including the Sundance Film Festival's Director's Award. The South Texas native studied art in Mexico and earned a degree in architecture before studying film at UCLA. Her newest feature, Twilight, had the highest box office opening ever for a female director.
Catherine Hardwicke
Tavis: Catherine Hardwicke is a talented filmmaker who won best director at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, with her acclaimed film, 'Thirteen.' Her latest project is 'The Nativity Story.' Last month, the film became the first ever to hold its world premiere at the Vatican. Yeah, the Vatican. (Laugh) More on that in a moment. Here now, a scene from 'The Nativity Story.'
Tavis: So Catherine, I haven't quite figured out why, but this 'Nativity' thing is, like, everywhere. We got movies; we got the cover of 'Newsweek' magazine. What is it about this story, (laugh) this time of the year, that it seems to be everywhere? Congratulations on the film.
Catherine Hardwicke: Yeah, thank you. Well, it is Christmas, so. (Laugh)
Tavis: Yeah. Nice to have you here.
Hardwicke: Thank you.
Tavis: I was laughing - not laughing, but it was interesting to me when I saw the world premiere at the Vatican. So let me get this right. You passed up on Mann's Chinese Theater to go to the Vatican?
Hardwicke: (Laugh) Yeah, we did.
Tavis: Tell me how that happened? That's a fascinating story unto itself, I suspect.
Hardwicke: Well, I think the Italian distributor, he got excited about it, and he showed it to some friends or some people at the Vatican. And then somebody else liked it, and somebody else liked it. And they figured they could do it as a benefit for a city in Israel, to build a school that has Muslims, Jews, and Christians all in that school, to show a message of tolerance and peace. So they did a premiere for 7,000 people.
Tavis: Wow. Is that like a Guinness record, like the world's largest? That's a huge premiere.
Hardwicke: I think it, oh, maybe it is.
Tavis: Seven thousand. It may very well be. You couldn't get that many people in Mann's Chinese Theater, that's for sure. Seven thousand people is a massive premiere.
Hardwicke: Yeah, and you walk in, there's all the cardinals, like, in the red, in black robes. It was pretty festive-looking.
Tavis: Had you been to the Vatican before?
Hardwicke: I'd been to the Vatican, but not to this screening room, or this theater, yeah.
Tavis: And the response in the room was?
Hardwicke: Well, like right in the middle of it, when Jesus is born, I thought uh-oh, it started to rain. 'Cause I heard this, like, thunder sound? But it was actually, people started clapping right when Jesus was born, and then they jumped up and started taking flash photos, to capture the moment of the birth. So it was like a lightning storm, and, like, a thunderstorm.
Tavis: Inside the Vatican.
Hardwicke: The people loved it. Yeah, they were crying and all the nuns had kind of little nun crushes on Joseph. They were, like, (unintelligible).
Tavis: (Laugh) That sounds oxymoronic, a nun crush.
Hardwicke: Well, they were kind of, like, blushing, and getting him to sign autographs and stuff. (Laugh)
Tavis: Yeah, I guess if you could have a crush on anybody, as a nun, it better be Jesus.
Hardwicke: Yeah. Or Joseph, Joseph. Say Joseph. (Laugh)
Tavis: Fair enough, fair enough. The pope was where?
Hardwicke: Well, the pope was getting ready for Turkey, but his number two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, all the other cardinals came. But he'd already seen it, the pope.
Tavis: What's the challenge of covering a story that has been covered so many times that a guy like me would be scared to even touch something like this? Because it's out for so many years, and told so many times. As a filmmaker, how do you approach something like this, and, to that point, how does your telling of the story differ?
Hardwicke: Well, that's what I kind of thought when I first read the script. I thought nativity story, seen it a million times at the pageants at church and stuff. But really, when I started reading the script, Mike Rich, the writer, he got into it in a whole different way. He made Joseph seem like a real person. Like, how would you feel if your fiancé comes back home, she's pregnant, and you know you're not the dad? (Laugh)
Like, what do you do? How do you handle that? And this is a girl he loved, and he trusted her, and he thought she was this woman of virtue. But now he's got this moral dilemma. Do you stand up, stand beside her and, like, the rest of the townspeople at that time, the Jewish family values, like it says on the cover of 'Newsweek,' that would bring shame to the village, to see an unwed mother.
So that person is supposed to be cast out, and you're supposed to throw stones and kill this woman who's pregnant without being married. But he has to struggle with that dilemma. Does he stand by Mary, or not?
Tavis: I'm glad you went to that point, 'cause I wanna follow up on that. On my public radio program this weekend, and I know this, 'cause I just recorded the conversation today, I just recorded a conversation with a wonderful author named Elizabeth Berg, who has a new book that's out now. I think it's called 'The Handmaiden and the Carpenter,' but Elizabeth Berg, B-E-R-G, is the author.
Wonderful story, just got through reading it, and she'll be on my radio program this weekend. Her book comes to mind, as you share this story of your filmmaking, because I was fascinated by her story, because she did the same thing that you did, in written form, which is to try to tackle how a couple would deal with this kind, this is a major moment.
Your wife comes home and says she's pregnant, you ain't the father. (Laugh) How do you deal with this, and this guy - and not only that, but you're told that this baby is going to change the world as we know it. There's a blessing...
Hardwicke: Be the son of God.
Tavis: The son of God, you got wise men bringing - this is a huge impact on the lives of two ordinary people, in this case named Mary and Joseph. So, Berg's story tackles it from her perspective. I only raise that because I'm curious, from your perspective, as to what the lessons are to be learned from this struggle that you put on film that we see two everyday people go through?
Hardwicke: Yeah, I think for Mary, she had to make this choice to do what she thought was right, and stand up against the people. There's a line in the movie where she says, 'There's a will for this child that's greater than my fear of what they may do to me.' There's a lot of times in our life, for Joseph, too, where you have to do what you think is right.
Maybe it's not what the government says, maybe it's not what your religion says, but you know in your heart this is the right thing to do. And how do we struggle with that? I think every day, soldiers in the war have to figure this out. Am I doing the right thing or not? What is my heart telling me?
Tavis: The flip side of that, though, the flip side of that, Catherine, is that there are people, certainly certain purists, I suspect, I suspect, who might say that our problem is Catherine's problem, Elizabeth Berg's problem is that you're taking a story that is supernatural and trying too much to humanize it. Trying to bring it down to the level of everyday people.
That ain't the story of Jesus. If you are a believer in Christ, I happen to be a Christian. But if you were a Jesus believer, if you were a believer in the son of God, then maybe there is a danger in our trying to - how might I put this? Trying to normalize, trying to bring the story down to the level of us when it really is a story about the savior of the world. Your response? Is there a danger in doing that?
Hardwicke: Well, the amazing thing is that God sent his son to the world, and made his son a human.
Tavis: Flesh, yeah.
Hardwicke: And flesh, and human, and suffer, and have pain, and feel all the feelings we had. He didn't stay up there in the heavens, (laugh) that's what's kind of the amazing part of the story, I think. That he wanted to, like, relate, and become human. So I think that's actually part of the whole message of the New Testament.
Tavis: Yeah. How did you get - I'm curious now. How did you get into filmmaking?
Hardwicke: Oh, okay. I was an - I got my degree in architecture from the University of Texas, and I love building buildings and everything, but I thought that everybody's kind of conservative with their money, 'cause you save up all your money and build your house, and it better look like everybody else's house, in a way. (Laugh) And I thought, 'I wanna do something more creative.' So I thought that filmmaking would be just, like, really creative and encouraging you to just do all kinds of neat stuff. I was a bit naïve. (Laugh)
Tavis: I was about to say, yeah. (Laugh) And then you came crashing down to Earth.
Hardwicke: (Laugh) Yeah. Yeah, I got into UCLA film school and I realized, oh, that is not the case. It is more conservative, if anything. But I started finding, like, interesting projects to do the set design for, like 'Three Kings,' and 'I'm Gonna Get You, Sucker' is one of my first movies. And 'Tombstone,' 'Posse.' I did some westerns. And, like, really, like, getting to build, like, neat stuff.
And then I wanted to make my own movies, so I started writing screenplays, and, like, trying to break through that ceiling. I'm gonna make my own films. And then I made 'Thirteen,' which was a low budget, one point five million dollars.
Tavis: There is an obvious answer to this, but I wanna get below the obvious. 'Cause a simpleton like me can see the obvious parallels between architecture and being a director. Are there deeper parallels?
Hardwicke: Well, for architecture, it's like structural visualization. You have to stand there and imagine what could that house look like? What could that space feel like? How will the light come in in the morning? Same kind of thing. Like, we'll go out, like, say on the movie 'Tombstone,' we go out to just an open field out in the middle of the desert and think, I could build a town here that'll look like Tombstone, and we could have the horses riding in.
So you're previsualizing stuff, and trying to, like, make it come alive. And then you have to figure out how to carry it through, either draw the blueprints, write the screenplay, do the storyboards. All those ways to make it real.
Tavis: Right. What were the challenges - so the visual thing you got pretty quickly, because you came out of that world. What were the challenges, then, to getting the writing thing?
Hardwicke: Well, I took a lot of screenwriting classes in between each job, and I would try to really get in there and learn. How do you make a moment come alive? How does it sound like real people talking to each other? I cut you off, you cut me off. (Laugh) And like a lot of people, like, they'll actually tape record, like, real conversations, so they get the real flow of conversation and stuff. So I tried all of the different techniques, learning from every screenwriting teacher, and every book, and every movie. Anything I could.
Tavis: I'm laughing inside, 'cause I'm thinking this is the woman who did 'The Nativity Story' and 'I'm Gonna Get You, Sucker.' (Laugh) The two just don't, and that's not - yeah, it's not like that cookie cutter formula for building houses that all look the same. I say all that in jest, but seriously, I assume, though, given your list of films, that you work at trying to pick stuff that's different.
Hardwicke: Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I think that's what makes things interesting. Like, you've got all these different, crazy guests. You're the same guy every day. (Laugh) We're gonna be all sleeping on the couch, huh?
Tavis: That'd be true, and we won't name certain guests who I think might do that, but that's (unintelligible). So to that point, what happens next, beyond 'Nativity Story,' which is doing quite well. What happens next?
Hardwicke: Yeah, oh, well, when I was scouting 'Nativity Story,' we were, like, in the middle of Morocco, and we're looking for locations that haven't changed in 2,000 years, right? You realize how much we have messed up the world. So my next one is kind of like an eco-activist film about, it's called 'The Monkey Wrench Gang' and it's about four people that love the land, and they're willing to fight and do a few little mischievous acts to bring attention to saving the planet.
Tavis: 'The Monkey Wrench...'
Hardwicke: So it's pretty fun, yeah.
Tavis: 'The Monkey Wrench Gang.' It sounds like my friends, but that's another...
Hardwicke: Ah. (Laugh)
Tavis: That's another issue. Did you have a good time? I was in Morocco for the first time this summer. I loved it.
Hardwicke: Isn't it cool?
Tavis: Did you love it? Isn't it a cool place?
Hardwicke: Oh, I loved it, yeah. I love all the Berber rugs, and all the arts, and the landscape's gorgeous.
Tavis: It is quite a - I'd been to any number of parts of Africa, but never to Morocco.
Hardwicke: Me too, yeah.
Tavis: It's just so different than everything else.
Hardwicke: Oh, it's not like, I've been to Kenya and Tanzania and South Africa, but it's its own people.
Tavis: I'm glad to have you on the program.
Hardwicke: Yeah, thank you so much.
Tavis: 'The Nativity Story.' Check it out at a theater near you. That's our show for tonight. Catch me on the radio this weekend, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. Thanks for watching, and keep the faith.
Back to December 14, 2006