DAVID ADAMS speaks to Christian film-maker David Nixon…
It’s probably not typical practice on a movie set to start every day with a 10 minute devotional. Nor would it be considered the norm in Hollywood to have ‘prayer warriors’ standing by during filming, charged with the task of ‘bathing the set in prayer’.
But Christian film-maker David Nixon – who’s just finished production of Letters To God – believes both are critical to the success of his latest production, Letters To God.
A DREAM COME TRUE: ‘Letters To God’ director David Nixon.
“There was just a wonderful spirit on set that you don’t get with a typical Hollywood movie.”
– David Nixon
An Australian who’s worked for more than 30 years in the US film and television industry, Mr Nixon says that throughout filming of the movie, the set was “bathed in prayer”, an approach to film-making he learnt from working with the Georgia-based Sherwood Baptist Church when making the 2006 release Facing The Giants and the 2008 film Fireproof.
“(T)hey just bathed those projects in prayer and that’s really the key to the whole thing,” he says. “We have what we call prayer warriors on the set with us everyday while we’re shooting. And I told the rest of the crew (who included a lot of non-Christians)….‘These guys over here praying for you, they know nothing about making movies; they wouldn’t know which end to look in of a camera, but they know how to pray. And they are the most important crew members on the set’.”
The volunteer prayer warriors stayed on the set throughout each day’s filming.
“And if we ever ran up into any problems with equipment breakdown or somebody was sick, we would just stop and pray about that and we saw miracles happen on set everyday,” says the 54-year-old father of three who was the movie’s director. “And doors were opened. There was just a wonderful spirit on set that you don’t get with a typical Hollywood movie.”
Letters From God tells the story of an eight-year-old boy named Tyler who is dying from brain cancer. He starts writing letters to God and then putting them in the post. The postman who collects them can’t bring himself to put the letters in the ‘undeliverables’ bin and instead ends up reading them. To his surprise, he finds that the boy’s letters aren’t about his own suffering but the effect his disease was having on family and friends around him. Not only do the letters have a life-changing effect on the postman, but, after he decides to give them to the people they are written about, they also deeply impact their lives.
The story is based on truth – Tyler actually lived in Nashville, Tennessee, and did succumb to cancer in 2005. In fact it was his father, Patrick Doughtie, who wrote the screenplay and it was after a meeting with him that Mr Nixon decided to make the movie.
“It’s really a tribute to little Tyler who succumbed to cancer,” Mr Nixon says. “Now he lives on through this movie and he’s touched thousands of lives already through his story.”
Mr Doughtie, Tyler’s father, was on set everyday throughout the shooting of the film and while Mr Nixon says one could only imagine how difficult it was for him to live through the events again, “I knew we were getting something authentic when we would be shooting a scene and I would look over at Patrick and he would be either grinning from ear-to-ear or bawling his eyes out.”
While Mr Nixon started out in the film industry about 30 years ago with the dream of making Christian films, it’s only about seven years ago that he started working on his first, Facing The Giants.
The son of missionary parents Les and Martha Nixon – founders of missionary organisation Outback Patrol, Mr Nixon grew up in Sydney and, while he says he remembers accepting Jesus as his saviour in a Sunday school class when he was seven-years-old, he adds that it wasn’t until he was baptized at the age of 19 that he really gave his life to the Lord.
Like his father before him, Mr Nixon then went to the US to college. Unlike his father, whose passion was for the people of outback Australia, he was inspired by the idea of using films to present the Gospel to people.
“But back in those days you couldn’t get a Christian film…in theatres in the US,” he says. “It just wasn’t accepted. So I kind of gave up on my dream about seven years ago.”
“I had (by then) a very successful production company doing television commercials and documentaries but I never could get theatrical distribution for a Christian film. So I had literally walked away from it and said, ‘Well that was a stupid idea’.”
“It was a month later that I got a call from the Sherwood Baptist Church – the group that did Facing The Giants and Fireproof – and they were thinking about making movies and they’d seen what I was doing in the industry and said ‘Will you help us? We need somebody to give us a kind of Hollywood look in these films we’re making?’ And I said we’d love to and they sent me the script for Facing The Giants.”
Mr Nixon moved to Albany in Georgia and there assembled a production team and, with the help of about 500 volunteers, made the film “never knowing where it would go – we though maybe they would just sell it in the church”.
ACTION!: Director David Nixon speaks to Tanner Maguire, who plays Tyler Doherty, during the filming of ‘Letters To God’.
“But we finished that movie in the summer of ’05 right when Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ was making $US600 million,” he says. “And that kind of opened the eyes of Hollywood and they said ‘Hey looks like Christians are going to see films, we better make a God film. And we came along with our little $US80,000 high def video called Facing The Giants and Sony Pictures snapped it up and put it in theatres and it was very, very successful.”
Mr Nixon credits the success of Facing The Giants with opening the door for other Christian films.
“Now as I’m seeing the doors open, more and more churches and more and more film-makers are making these kind of films. It’s a brand new industry – the faith-based genre…but I think you’ll see a lot more of these films.”
He’s already working on a further two films and future possibilities include filming an inspiring Australian story about a family living in the opal mines.
Mr Nixon, meanwhile, describes the reaction to Letters To God as “phenomenal.”
“I don’t think they expect to be touched so much by it. Some people are speechless, some people shake my hand and thank me. A lot of cancer survivors come out and go, ‘Nobody’s ever been able to capture what I went through. Thankyou so much for making this movie so that my family can see what I went through’. It’s helping so many people and we’ve heard so many stories of people coming to the Lord through this movie. It’s just an amazing reaction.”
He says that fact lives are being transformed as a result of the film is the “only reason” he made it.
“I could see that 30 years ago – that this was such a powerful medium and we needed to use it to present the Gospel to people that would never go to church or talk about faith but go and see movies all the time. So I thought what a great evangelistic tool and that’s the only reason we’re doing it.”
Mr Nixon says that people watch movies to escape their regular lives and “let their guard down” in a way they don’t do with other mediums.
“When they go see a movie they drop all their barriers and they start to empathise with those characters on the screen and they see themselves in those positions and the movies touch their hearts profoundly like no other medium does.”
Letters To God is on release in the US and is expected to be released in Australia later this year.
