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THE EASTER offering from the BBC is on an epic scale: a brand-new dramatisation of the Passion, which begins on Palm Sunday and runs through the week like a “ticking clock” to its climax on Easter Day.
The initiative came from Peter Fincham, a former Controller of BBC 1, who was so fired by the idea of a Passion taking place across Holy Week that he took the unusual step of announcing it to the press before anything definite was in place.
The executive producer, Hilary Salmon, had been asked to develop the idea, but was only at what she calls the “musing” stage. The idea of doing a new Passion brought a whole team out of the woodwork, she says.
“I hadn’t really gone beyond one conversation with Michael Wakelin, head of Religion and Ethics,” she remembers. “And then suddenly it appeared in the press. [Peter] had expressed his determination to do it, which is actually incredibly useful if you’re developing something.”
The announcement prompted the BBC producer Nigel Stafford Clarke to step forward and say that he, too, already had something in the back of his mind which he had been thinking of discussing. “He’s a producer we’ve worked with a lot, and who’s done some fantastic work for us, including, most recently, Bleak House. So we said great; thank you,” says Ms Salmon.
A few weeks later, the writer Frank Deasy (best known for the TV programme Prime Suspect 7) did exactly the same thing, urging his agent to initiate a meeting with Mr Stafford Clarke and Ms Salmon. Both had been trawling for writers, and were familiar with Mr Deasy’s work. They were excited by the unsolicited approach, and the vision he had for the drama.
“He knew the story really well. He’d been brought up as a Catholic, but didn’t want to approach it solely from a Christian point of view, which was our interest as well,” Ms Salmon says. “We wanted to make something that would be understandable and appealing to a wide audience: a Christian audience, definitely, but also a non-Christian audience. This was BBC1 prime time, and we wanted the story to be watchable by anyone.”
Mr Deasy’s thoughts matched their own. The Passion is set in the political and religious context of the time, and tells the story from three points of view: Caiaphas and the Temple authorities; Pilate and the Romans; and Jesus and the disciples — whom Ms Salmon describes as “still absolutely at the emotional heart of it”.
Viewers would understand by the end of the series why events had played out as they did, and would understand both the pressure on the players, and Jesus’s determination in driving events throughout that week.
“On Palm Sunday, he already had a plan in his head on how the week would go. There was pressure on the Temple authorities in Passover week — often a time when there’s trouble, and, if there’s trouble, the Romans come in and come down very heavily on the citizens. It’s Caiaphas’s responsibility to keep the peace and keep the Romans at bay; so it’s a security issue from his point of view,” Ms Salmon says.
“Frank was very interested in the whole idea of sacrifice, and what constitutes sacrifice. Jesus’s sacrifice is at the centre of it, but there are also lines in the script where Pilate is saying: ‘Am I wrong to sacrifice one man for the greater good?’ That’s what he really believes he’s doing, sacrificing one man in order to keep the peace and save the many.
“Part of it is also about animal sacrifice; so there is a lot of resonance in the piece which Frank talked about on the day, and which felt absolutely right for us.”
The climate is right at present, too: the Manchester Passion was a significant Good Friday event on BBC3 in 2006, and the same team developed the Liverpool Nativity spectacle in 2007.
“We weren’t directly influenced by the Manchester Passion, but, inevitably, attention to a programme like that is always going to affect programme decisions,” Ms Salmon says. “If there is interest around a subject, it is always going to affect the confidence in moving forwards to making a programme.”
Something on the scale of this new Passion was clearly beyond the BBC to fund, and Ms Salmon and Mr Stafford Clarke approached many different co-producers, mostly in the United States. They had a new but productive relationship with HBO (Home Box Office, a subsidiary of Time Warner), with whom they had worked on Five Days — a multi-stranded thriller tracking five 24-hour periods after the abduction of a young mother. But HBO needed convincing about the potential of The Passion.
“To be honest, their first instinct was to say, ‘We’re not sure we want to do that story. . .’ The Mel Gibson film [The Passion of the Christ] went down very badly in the States with the Jewish community, and HBO themselves have a very sophisticated middle-class audience for their programmes. They worried they might be causing offence by doing the show again,” Ms Salmon says.
“But our approach convinced them that it was right to do a new version, one that looks again at the actions of the Temple authorities during that week — why they behaved the way they did and took the positions they did — so that they’re not just bad men in big hats. They’re much more interesting than that, much more human than that. That convinced them. They liked the ticking clock of the week, events moving relentlessly forward, people making decisions they then couldn’t go back on. They bought into it.”
She is not allowed to quote figures: all she can say is that HBO brought “a lot of money to the table. A lot. . . ” First draft scripts of some of the episodes were ready by Christmas 2006, and the production was shot last year. Some of the episodes were still in post-production up to last week.
It is filmed entirely in Morocco, which, critically, offered the Atlas Studios at Ouarzazate, in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. The location is a favourite with directors such as Ridley Scott of Star Wars and Gladiators fame, and many European companies have used it for biblical epics.
“There are already standing sets there which could be adapted for what we needed — we needed a Herod’s palace for Pilate, and the Jerusalem Temple itself, which was huge and stunningly beautiful,” Ms Salmon says. “We had had to find a way of recreating that without actually building it ourselves, which we would never have been able to do.”
The location also offered a good infrastructure of people who were used to working on film, knew what they were doing, and could support the BBC’s remote heads of department in all the craft areas.
A village three hours’ drive from the studios proved perfect for filming the Jerusalem streets and exteriors. “It looked exactly like ancient Jerusalem — claustrophobic, narrow alleys, sun getting in from the top, cobbled streets. It seems very real, and really works well. And the supporting artists look like they could have been first-century Palestinians completely,” Ms Salmon says.
Casting Jesus was extraordinarily easy. Joseph Mawle was the first person the producers thought of, and they looked no further after he auditioned for Mr Stafford Clarke and for Michael Offer, the director.
The BBC and HBO both agreed that Mr Mawle was perfect; an obvious choice from the start. Ms Salmon had made the urban thriller Soundproof in 2006, in which Mr Mawle played a profoundly deaf man and anti-hero — a man unjustly accused of murdering his flatmate and forced to prove his innocence.
“He has a natural humanity to him, but he also has a slightly strange outsider quality to him. And he’s very intense. He has a hearing impairment and he lip-reads; so when he is talking to you, the intensity with which he is looking at you is different from anyone else’s. It comes very naturally to him, and there is something very special about that, and very charismatic. He is marvellous in the role.”
Mr Mawle, who is 33 and the son of a Warwickshire farmer, says that all his roles have come “by fate, or chance, or whatever you like to call it”. And he has been fortunate that many of them have been roles he has ended up feeling very passionate about. He confessed himself dumbstruck on being told he had got this part.
“At first, I felt nothing. I think maybe it was fear. Maybe I didn’t quite believe I’d got the role — in fact, I was in shock for about three weeks.”
He has been “riding an emotional roller-coaster” ever since, and finds it daunting to follow in the footsteps of others such as Robert Powell, Willem Dafoe, and Jim Caviezel, who have all played Christ.
“It is, in some ways, the biggest role you can take on. There were times I got quite shaky about it and thought, I’m really scared,” he says. One quote that resonated from the research he undertook was, “God didn’t cheat,” and he explains: “What this means to me is Jesus was a man. . . So I would put myself on a reality map. Doing the Last Supper, for instance, I thought: ‘What if I was sitting here with my best friends and saying, guys, this is the last time I’m ever going to see you?’ That is beyond my understanding. The idea of death is petrifying, but particularly that sort of death. To say I am going to actually let this happen is quite a weird thing to get your head round.”
It is a star-studded cast, with James Nesbitt as Pontius Pilate, Ben Daniels as Caiaphas, Paul Nicholls as Judas, Denis Lawson as Annas, and David Oyelowo as Joseph of Arimathaea. Penelope Wilton is Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Paloma Baeza plays Mary Magdalene.
Mr Stafford Clarke says the Passion is “not just the most familiar, but arguably the greatest story ever told. . . Both truthful and simple, it gives back to the audience in a way that will feel as fresh, contemporary, and surprising as if it were happening for the first time.”
The pre-publicity is certainly an appetite-whetter. “It’s the start of Passover week. In the next few days, Jerusalem will more than double in size as thousands of pilgrims come to celebrate the most important festival in their religious calendar.
“As Pilate and his wife move rather reluctantly back into their Jerusalem apartments, and Caiaphas and his colleagues review known troublemakers and insurgents who might be on their way to the city, no one gives much thought to a preacher from the backwaters of Galilee, who is also making his way to Jerusalem with a gang of followers bonded by two years on the road — a tough, resourceful group whose loyalty is absolute. |
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