Even Saints Have a Past

“I THINK you have mountains to climb,” a girl in a madhouse tells Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, in Roland Joffé’s new film, There Be Dragons. “But that will make it sweeter when you get there.”

For Ignacio Gómez-Sancha, the Madrid-based producer of the movie which opened last month in Spain and is released in the US on 6 May, the line has a special meaning. The making of There Be Dragons has at times been like St Josemaría’s epic journey across the Pyrenees during the Spanish Civil War – which makes its arrival in the cinemas to critical acclaim and packed houses all the more gratifying.

 

Unlikely partnership

 

The movie is all the more special for the unlikely partnership between Joffé and Gómez-Sancha which lies behind it: on the one hand, the 66-year-old, thrice-married British director, a self-described ‘wobbly agnostic’; on the other, a 40-year-old Spanish member of Opus Dei, a financier married with three children.

When they first met in March 2008 at a hotel in Madrid, Gómez-Sancha had spent six years overseeing the unification of Spain’s stock markets. A week earlier he had been approached by the film’s original producer, Heriberto Schoeffer, who had contacted him as a potential investor. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” he said. “Joffé was my favourite director. The Mission and the Killing Fields had a huge impact on me as teenager. The idea that Joffé planned to direct a film about St Josemaría and the Spanish Civil War just bowled me over.”

What Gómez-Sancha learned pleased him even more: that Joffé had rejected the idea of a ‘bio-pic’ about Escrivá, and had written his own script, insisting on complete creative freedom; that Opus Dei as a body had had nothing to do with the film; and that Joffé wanted to put the story of the Spanish saint in the context of the Civil War, with a message of forgiveness at its heart.

“Instinctively I knew this movie had to happen,” he says. “It was a truly unique opportunity to have someone like Roland, who is an non-believer and a leftist, treat St Josemaría in the same way as he treated Fr Gabriel in The Mission – in other words, taking him seriously, on his own terms.”

 

Fascination with Josemaría

 

Joffé had become fascinated by the founder of Opus Dei after seeing a film of one of his famous dialogues – in this case, with a group in South America. A Jewish girl had told St Josemaría that she had wanted to convert to Christianity, but that her parents were opposed. The saint told her in reply that the love of his life was Jewish, and that God valued and honoured her parents. Joffé, the adopted son of the Jewish British sculptor Jacob Epstein, was amazed at the humanity of that reply. “He put himself in her place and he put himself in her parents’ place; and he understood the full humanity of the position he was in. He recognised this was a life dilemma that will involve, as love does, sacrifice on somebody’s behalf; but that sacrifice can only be chosen. God does not ask that people come to Him treading on others.”

Joffé sat down that night and wrote what would become an early scene in There Be Dragons: of Escrivá as a young priest uttering those words to a dying Jewish man. The director realised, after writing it, that the scene contained the kernel of a whole film – one about the triumph of humanity over ideology. He wrote to Schoeffer agreeing to take on the project – on condition he could rewrite the script from scratch.

Gómez-Sancha had read the script by the time of his meeting with Joffé a week after his conversation with Schoeffer. He could barely contain his excitement. “I just couldn’t understand how a non-believer could have had such an astonishing grasp of who St Josemaría was and what he stood for,” he recalls. The three hours he spent with the director would prove life-changing for both men. Joffé told him the film might not be made, because financing it was proving problematic, and he was ready to move on to another project. “Can you wait a little?” Gómez-Sancha asked him. “I think I know how to finance this.”

He didn’t know ‘the first thing’ about movies, but he was impressed by Joffé’s sense of ethics. The director, for his part, was struck by Gómez-Sancha’s “calm but gutsy way of looking at what we needed to make the project work” – and the importance the Spaniard placed on trust. Although he had had no experience producing films Gómez-Sancha was “a natural producer,” says Joffé.

 

A hundred investors

 

Gómez-Sancha dropped his other commitments, and became the film’s main producer, along with his partner, Ignacio Núñez. “What I had to do was dig and build a fence around Roland to ensure he had free space for his creativity,” says Gómez-Sancha. “When you give an artist full freedom to do as he wants, he suddenly feels a great responsibility: not only does he have to make a movie that moves his own heart, but one that moves the hearts of audiences too. I think that’s exactly what happened with Roland.”

They quickly raised the first few million dollars from well-known Spanish investors. But then came the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the financial implosion of September 2008. Dozens of meetings with investors they had lined up on the east coast of the US were cancelled. What followed were months of pain and suffering. The producers realised that they would need to find investors from outside the usual circles. It took more than a year and hundreds of meetings, but they raised enough to begin the shooting in 2009. More than 100 investors from 10 countries have put nearly $40m into the film – enough to ensure frontline actors and lavish war scenes, with the Argentine shrine town of Luján standing for 1930s Madrid and the Spanish town of Sepúlveda taking the part of Escrivá’s Aragonese hometown of Barbastro.

 

Josemaría and Manolo

 

Although Escrivá and the handful of early members of Opus Dei are all real, the other characters in the movie are fictional creations. Just as Robert De Niro’s character Rodrigo provides a foil to Jeremy Irons’ Fr Gabriel in The Mission, in There Be Dragons Joffé sets up a contrast between Josemaría (Charlie Cox) and Manolo (Wes Bentley) as childhood friends whose life paths go in different directions: Josemaría becomes a young visionary priest, while Manolo becomes drawn into the Spanish Civil War as spy for the Nationalists in the Republican ranks. His secrets are gradually uncovered many years later, in 1982, by Manolo’s journalist son Robert (Dougray Scott), who is researching a book about the Spanish founder of Opus Dei at the time of his beatification. The contemporary drama about an estranged father and son finds an echo in the drama of the 1930s, as Spain splits in two.

 

Hic sunt dracones

 

The movie’s title, borrowed from the words supposedly found on medieval maps indicating unexplored territory, Hic sunt dracones, refers to the experiences in life which cause people to suffer and to react in different ways. Only by acknowledging and dealing with those ‘dragons’, Joffé suggests, can we escape the cycle of vengeance and dehumanisation which so marked the 20th century and today’s world. Says Joffé, “I think that’s what Josemaría was teaching, again and again, to people going through anguishing experiences: to connect to the humanity not only of those who are suffering, but also of those who are causing them to suffer.”

Joffé set the drama against the background of the War because he was interested in the effect of holiness on others and on the environment at a time of extreme stress. But locating Josemaría there also provides a way for Spain to come to terms with the dragons of its own past. Gómez-Sancha and Joffé were determined that the film would not aggravate old wounds, but help Spain confront them. And although the movie shows, for the first time in a film about the War, the anticlerical outrages that left 6,000 clergy dead, it does so in a way that seeks to empathise and forgive. Joffé depicts Josemaría as standing apart from the politicization of the Church, seeking to persuade his followers to understand the injustices behind anticlerical fury, while at the same time deploring the way the left is willing to sacrifice people in pursuit of their ideals. “Above all now, we must be sowers of peace”, he tells his tearful followers after they have witnessed an anticlerical outrage.

 

Grassroots campaign

 

Although the film’s budget, cast and production values ensure a mainstream audience, There Be Dragons is being promoted by a grassroots marketing campaign aimed at ensuring that churchgoers turn out in numbers to see the film. In the US, the campaign is being organised by Paul Lauer of Motive Marketing, organiser of the buzz surrounding the Passion of the Christ. As with that film and Narnia, Lauer has been holding screenings in major US cities attended by bishops, seminary rectors, and active Catholics. Their message: that this is a must-see, faith-friendly film with a powerful and uplifting theme which should be supported.

 The grassroots campaign has been focussing on elements of the film which verge on the catechetical. Joffé shows us that how we respond to the ‘dragons’ of suffering defines us as human beings. From a childhood of suffering, but surrounded by love, Josemaría learns that there is a point to suffering; Manolo, on the other hand, suffers little but is shown little love by his wealthy parents, leaving a child who is isolated and envious. When a nurse tells Manolo that the death of his ailing father is “God’s will,” he has her thrown out, unable to abide the idea of not being in control of his life. Josemaría, in contrast, is shown searching for God’s will, enduring doubt as the price of discernment – of all the characters the freest, and the one most in charge of his destiny. Josemaría is able – literally in one scene – to mortify suffering, and not pass it on, modelling the forgiving victim, while Manolo becomes a vengeful victim, convinced that suffering has no meaning and that what counts is winning. Yet later in the film, Manolo shows he has a saving grace – actions which are other-centred, which become the source of his redemption.

The other main characters in the film are young Republican idealists, Oriol (Rodrigo Santotro) and Ildeko (Olga Kurylenko) in love with each other. As the war drags on, they become aware that they are being sacrificed by their leaders in Madrid, and take refuge in each other. When that fails, there is nothing to keep them from despair.

 

The mercy of God

 

There Be Dragonshas an extraordinary emotional power, not least in those scenes involving forgiveness. The movie breathes with the mercy of God. Asked who was the protagonist of the film, Joffé gave an answer that surprised himself as much as others listening. “The film’s protagonist is Christ. His meaning infuses every moment in the movie… He is there, because this is a movie about suffering, and Christ is in suffering. Christ is in sin. This is something that’s profoundly understood in Christianity – and is its remarkable message.”

Whatever his personal beliefs about religion, Joffé says, “I can’t refute the extraordinary creative and redemptive power of that. Because my attempt is to constitute the ‘stuff of life’ – if I did this honestly and if it was working – in that attempt would be revealed, I think, the ineffable message that was delivered on the Cross.”