The Nativity Story

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke

It’s to be expected that The Nativity Story finds itself emblazoned on movie marquees at this time of year, along with films like Deck the Halls, The Santa Clause 3, Black Christmas and other releases that capitalize on the holiday season like so many bedazzling department store windows. Business-wise that makes perfect sense, yet The Nativity Story—which is, as its title advertises, about Christ’s birth—purports to be essentially non-commercial, non-exploitive in its rather reverential and straight forward cinematic narrative of the Bible’s brief and somewhat contradictory accounts of the conception and arrival on earth of the being whom many then and now have called Messiah.

Director Catherine Hardwicke says, when she first saw the script, she thought the project wasn’t for her. “My agent sent it to me, and I didn’t understand why; it wasn’t what I’m usually drawn to. But as I read the script, I was fascinated by the way the story was told: It’s a story everyone thinks they know, but the details in Mike Rich’s script connect the story to the historical period and to what people’s lives were and what they believed,” says Hardwicke. “I saw it as a kind of revelation, and I knew I wanted to bring it to the screen.”

Mary and Joseph were Jewish. And what was life like for them and their families during Herod’s reign? We’ve got basic historical information, but the details of life were what we wanted to flesh out. We sent the cast to what we called “Nazareth Boot Camp,” where they lived as people lived then, eating foods they ate, working with tools they used. Oscar Isaac [who plays Joseph,] helped build the house he and Mary [Keisha Castle-Hughes] lived in, and he actually carved the walking stick he uses when he and Mary make their arduous journey through the desert.

I’m trained as an architect, so accuracy regarding physical environment was particularly important to me. We filmed in Southern Italy, which looks much like the area around Nazareth, which now has too many modern elements for us to have shot there. We constructed a town using historical records and local rock. The only elements we used to create shelter were those they had then. As an example, when the journeying Magi sit among their camels, they’re using the animals to shelter themselves from wind and sand. We had to do the same thing to shelter ourselves while filming in the desert.

So, the story has miraculous elements, but in the film, the environments are authentic and the characters are very human.

Not entirely. Herod’s an antagonist in the story, but he was a complex man who faced the difficulties of being a tenant king under Roman rule. He was paranoid about the prophecy of the Messiah and other issues, and [he] had a personal history of extreme violence: He killed his wife, slaughtered innocents. Yet, he was a great builder and, in some ways, a visionary. We reference these aspects of his character in the film.

They’re about authenticity. Colors are limited to what people had. I told my costume designer to use colors from materials available to them—basically the colors of their sheep. People were poor and hard working and couldn’t afford time or money for anything but basics. That’s why it’s dark much of the time. Oil for lamps was so expensive; they used it sparingly. In such circumstances, I imagine the stars observed by the Magi seemed that much brighter.

We aren’t challenging people’s beliefs. Some questions about the birth of Jesus don’t have clear answers. Or, rather, we’re told that things happened that can’t be explained except by belief or faith. This is a story that’s been told and interpreted for centuries. We wanted to put that story into its original historical context so people whose lives are touched by it could see and feel the times that the story itself was born into. We don’t think that’s controversial.

Have you read Raymond Brown’s The Birth of the Messiah? It’s the seminal book about the nativity: 500 pages of detailed analysis of every account of the birth of Jesus, of who said what and why they said it. It gives a good understanding about why certain writers wrote what they did about the birth of Jesus—that they were telling a story so it would appeal to masses of people and would resonate with some beliefs they already had. This book—which is embraced by the Catholic Church and other churches, too—consistently points out that legends or oral histories, like the Nativity story, are usually based on some kernel of truth. In the end, you see that this story has had emotional resonance for people for 2,000 years, and I believe there’s truth in it.