Silenzio on the set

ROME—The Bible doesn’t record the young Jesus of Nazareth having a cold—but the boy playing 7-year-old Jesus did. Adam Greaves-Neal and the rest of the cast were on the 31st of 41 days of filming for The Young Messiah at an outdoor set at a studio on the outskirts of Rome, Italy. The end was within sight, but setbacks like colds added to the frustrations of a small budget and a cacophony of interruptions: planes flying overhead and the elderly Italian extras playing Pharisees chatting too loudly off set during one tense scene.

One of the Italian crew members stormed over to the Pharisees and chewed them out in Italian. The entire crew was Italian except for director Cyrus Nowrasteh and cinematographer Joel Ransom. Nowrasteh, an Iranian-American, previously directed the critically acclaimed The Stoning of Soraya M., about the real-life stoning of a woman in Iran, and Ransom worked with him on that movie as well.

The Young Messiah (see review, in this issue) is based on Anne Rice’s best-selling novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, a story of Jesus as a 7-year-old returning to Nazareth from Egypt. Rice had been largely hands-off in the production process, but she was pleased with the movie. Cyrus Nowrasteh and his wife Betsy adapted the book for the screen, remaining faithful to its spirit but adding a major character: Severus, a Roman centurion who slaughtered children in Bethlehem on Herod’s orders and is now tasked with finding whether the foretold Messiah escaped the massacre. Any film is a battle of competing interests: making a movie that is not only a book adaptation but also concerns the central figure of Christianity—and has a tight budget—is, as Cyrus said, “a minefield.”

But he was happy to do a story no one had told before on screen. Filmmakers have portrayed Jesus’ life many times; but his boyhood, an area ripe for artistic creativity because the Bible explains so little of it, hasn’t been depicted. The rough outline hints at cinematic drama: his family living as refugees in Egypt and returning home to find an Israel in the midst of various rebellions against the Roman Empire.

The uniqueness of the story is “a two-edged thing,” Cyrus said. The Nowrastehs felt the pressure of writing a screenplay about Jesus, having to think not just about what worked dramatically, but what the religious concerns with the script might be. “When did he know? always comes up,” Cyrus said. “We’re taking a position on how he came to know, and that’s our fictional take, that’s conjecture.”

‘I just want to make a great movie that honors its subject, and its subject is God.’ —Cyrus Nowrasteh

With a $15.5 million budget, The Young Messiah is an indie in comparison with the big-budget biblical epics like Exodus. Focus Features—the art house movie arm of NBCUniversal known more for films like Lost in Translation, Dallas Buyers Club, and Brokeback Mountain—is distributing the film. Cyrus says Focus “never muscled me on anything.” The film holds onto the central idea in Rice’s book: that Jesus was truly God and truly man, and also a child who was growing in wisdom and knowledge as the Gospel of Luke says.

The movie almost didn’t see the light of day. In late 2012, The Young Messiah had a green light, with a nice, fat, $40 million budget. In January 2013, it “fell apart,” Cyrus said, while the Nowrastehs were in Rome prepping for filming. Betsy contracted acute pneumonia, so they couldn’t fly back to the United States. The film was $3 million in the hole already from pre-production costs.

“We thought it was dead,” Cyrus said. “But it just never died.”

Producer Tracy Price, who Cyrus said rescued Soraya, came and helped financially rescue The Young Messiah. With additional producers, and eventually the backing of Focus, the film got back on track. Cyrus and Betsy cut the script significantly to slash the movie’s budget, but Cyrus says he doesn’t “miss any of it.” He later learned that if they had shot the mostly outdoor movie when they originally intended, it would have rained most of the time.

In the interval between the movie dying and coming back, Cyrus says he became a Christian. It was a slow journey to faith; Betsy was already a Christian, and Cyrus watched his youngest son become a Christian: “I saw how it transformed him.” His conversion isn’t something he likes to talk about much in connection with the film: “Ultimately I just want to make a great movie that honors its subject, and its subject is God. … It’s not the filmmaker, it’s the film.”

CYRUS WAS GLAD TO BE IN A STUDIO NOW, even if he was still shooting outdoors. Filming began weeks earlier on top of a mountain in Matera, near the heel of Italy’s boot. The conditions on the mountain were grueling, especially working with child actors and animals. He wrenched his back during the filming of a river scene there. On this 31st day of filming, the crew was supposed to shoot scenes of a young Jesus meeting a rabbi in the Temple in Jerusalem. Even without colds, minors can only work four hours a day. To save time and money, Cyrus had doubles for Adam (who portrays Jesus) in shots where his back would be to the camera.

On set, smoke rose from the torches lighting the Temple, straw covered the ground, and various birds filled carts in the Temple courtyard. A crane with elaborate lighting dangled over the structure. One of the producers, Mark Radcliffe, was buzzing around the set, and said they decided to let Adam “rest for a bit.” Radcliffe has worked with many child actors over his career, from the Home Alone movies to Harry Potter, so he knew they couldn’t push Adam too much. The crew began with filming a scene without Adam, one where Roman centurion Severus (Sean Bean) questions passersby at the Temple about Jesus’ whereabouts.

“Here we go, SHHHHHH,” yelled a crew member as Bean’s scene started. “Silenzio per favore!” yelled an Italian crew member. “Action!” Cyrus ordered. Bean and Clive Russell, who plays his slave Weer, wove through a sea of extras. The air smelled of hay and smoke from the flames burning in the Temple. “Cut cut cut,” Cyrus said, asking one family of extras to take a different path and sending Russell and Bean on a path over the camera tracks. These minor details consume a director’s day.

Adam came to the set eventually, apparently overpowering his cold, though at one point in filming he did toss out the idea of a “super-nap.” Hundreds of extras, crew members, horse wranglers, and carts of various fowl were gathered around for a scene involving Jesus and a blind rabbi. Adam took deep breaths and closed his eyes and snapped into character. The rabbi was revealing to Jesus the circumstances around his birth and the killing of the babies in Bethlehem.

“He needs some tears,” said Betsy Nowrasteh, standing with the crew. Some of the extras off-screen popped cigarettes in their mouths as the afternoon dragged on. Cyrus was endlessly encouraging to Adam, and Adam was captivating—serious and boyish at the same time—though he could not produce tears on demand.

THIS MOVIE, LIKE MANY OTHER BIBLICAL MOVIES, was filming in Italy partly because the landscape near the Mediterranean is similar to the landscape in Israel. Conflicts in the Middle East eliminated locations like Jordan, especially with child actors to consider. Cinecittà Studios, on the outskirts of Rome, had seen more glamorous days, when it was known as “Hollywood on the Tiber.” The studio made numerous “spaghetti Westerns,” so called because they were filmed in Italy. The water tank used for the ship battle in the 1959 film Ben-Hur sat in disrepair behind the Young Messiah set.

The legendary Italian directors Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini made films at the studio in the 1960s and 1970s, as did American Joseph L. Mankiewicz. But Martin Scorsese burned some sets for the Draft Riots scene in Gangs of New York, and a 2007 fire burned others, leaving skeletons of sets with scorch marks. With its aging buildings and burned-out sets, Cinecittà was the perfect place for a small-budget film. The studio hasn’t seen a lot of work in recent years.

The costumes department started working around 3 a.m., and with hundreds of extras the staff was busy most of the day. The main cast members and crew arrived at 6 a.m., primarily so they could start filming early with the sunlight. Once everyone was dressed, they would return for refittings around 2 p.m. And then staff had to handle all the undressing at the end of the day around 6 p.m. With limited space, they had to use one dressing room for female extras, and then later the same room for child extras.

Seamstresses whirred at their machines; they had created about 1,200 costumes, recycling parts of costumes when one round of filming finished for other parts. One afternoon as the crew was filming in the Temple, the costume department was pulling together costumes for a scene coming up in the next few days. Shirtless men in Egyptian soldier costumes stood in a hallway; one held a sign that said, “Egyptian #101,” while one of the costumers inspected him and took a picture.

“This is the new trend of this business, you never have enough time to prepare everything,” said Stefano De Nardis, the costume designer, who had been working since 3 a.m. De Nardis had also worked on Exodus.

The production team recycled some sets. The production designer appropriated 12-year-old sets from the HBO series Rome and rebuilt them in 11 weeks into the city of Alexandria, a maze of winding streets and markets where the movie’s Jesus grows up. Crew members were hauling clay pots through the streets and filling baskets with spices, prepping Alexandria for filming that would start there in a few days. They also recycled parts of their own sets as filming wrapped on certain scenes. After filming at one house finished, the crew retrofitted the interior to be a different house.

The American producers were enthusiastic about the quality of work from the Italian crew, which did everything: sets, costumes, makeup, hair, sound.

“For the money we have to spend, the production value is …,” said Radcliffe.

“Three times!” said Enzo Sisti, one of the other producers.

“Four or five!” Radcliffe waxed. Then he added: “Nothing against U.S. crews.”

A week later, Cyrus finished filming a day early and “well under” budget. In the intervening months between filming and release, editors edited the film, the composer scored it, the distributor marketed it, and the MPAA gave it a rating of PG-13. (It’s “PG-13 lite,” Cyrus argued, and he’s right.) Now the director can only hope that audiences come to his movie, in the midst of a burst of films targeted at Christian audiences, like Risen—which also has a Roman soldier as a main character (see “Epic renewal,” March 5).

“Let’s face it, Romans in the Holy Land—no one’s got the copyright to that, that’s just the way it was,” said Cyrus with a laugh. “Almost every weekend you’re getting from four to eight or nine movies opening, so it’s always competitive.”