Views, Visions and Values.

Friday, 13 December 2013

May Our Highest Passion

Thursday, 12 December 2013

Tim Keller on Writing and Ministry

9 Things You Should Know About The Hobbit

Why don't we make war films that celebrate British courage any more? Screenwriter claims producers won't glorify UK soldiers fighting in modern conflicts because it's too politically sensitive

By TOM WILLIAMS

PUBLISHED: 23:57, 11 December 2013 | UPDATED: 01:42, 12 December 2013

View
comments

This Christmas, like many men up and down the land, I shall doubtless find myself settling down with a mince pie (or three) to enjoy a great British war film.

It won’t matter to me which staple of the Christmas TV schedules it is: The Dam Busters, The Bridge On The River Kwai, Cockleshell Heroes, The Great Escape, Where Eagles Dare or The Guns Of Navarone.

Yes, I’m aware those last three were made with mostly American money, but so are many ‘British’ films today, and The Great Escape and the others celebrate British heroism and were dependent on British talent in front of and behind the camera.

Courage: Royal Marines are pictured during an operation to clear Taliban from Kajaki, Helmand Province in 2007. But why are film producers too scared to make a modern British war film?

Such films, mostly made in the Fifties and Sixties, brilliantly showcase the nobility, the camaraderie, the black humour, and the raw courage often displayed by the British Armed Forces in the most perilous of situations.

But then look at that list again. They’re all films set in World War II and were made nearly half a century ago. Have our forces stopped fighting wars since then? Of course not. So why aren’t the stories being told?

More...

As someone who writes screenplays, I’m forced to draw the conclusion that there is a disturbing tendency for the British film industry to ignore the heroic exploits of our brave men and women in uniform.

This question has been occupying my mind following the success of my first film, Chalet Girl, a romantic comedy starring Bill Nighy, Felicity Jones and Brooke Shields.

In its wake, I was considering what to write next. As I well know, there is always a market for romcoms, and as someone who needs to pay the rent, I decided to write some more.

But as any good writer knows, you also have to find a new gap in the market, and try to fill it. And what puzzled me — and continues to do so — is that there is a huge gap marked ‘Great British War Film’.

Silver screen: Geoffrey Horne, William Holden and Jack Hawkins in 1957's The Bridge Over the River Kwai. But films celebrating the courage of British forces are now deemed politically too hot to handle

Our finest hour: The film Battle Of Britain was a box office smash in 1970

Star studded: A Bridge Too Far from 1977 starred a incredible array of top actors including Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Edward Fox, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, James Caan, Laurence Olivier and Robert Redford

Star studded: The cast of A Bridge Too Far from 1977 included Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Edward Fox, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, James Caan, Laurence Olivier and Robert Redford

In fact, hardly any films have been made about the many wars Britain has fought since 1945. There has been the odd TV drama, such as Tumbledown about the Falklands, or Occupation, about the invasion of Basra, which largely focused on what happened when the boys came home.

More...

And then there was a TV ‘comedy’ about a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan called Bluestone 42, which many soldiers I know found in poor taste.

There was also Bloody Sunday, in which the British Army is the bad guy.

When I rack my brains, the best and perhaps the only post-World War II Great British War Movie that I can think of is Who Dares Wins, starring the great and very recently late Lewis Collins, but that was a terrorist thriller and hardly a classic in the mould of The Dam Busters.

Screenwriter Tom Williams laments the demise of the great British war film

This huge gap was made even more apparent to me when I came across the story of what happened one day near an Afghan village called Kajaki, which I immediately knew I wanted to turn into a war film.

At 11am on September 6, 2006, a three-man patrol from 3 Para left an observation point on a ridge overlooking the Kajaki Dam in Helmand Province.

As he hopped over a dried-out gully at the bottom of the ridge, Lance Corporal Stuart Hale stepped on a land mine, blowing off his right leg.

A rescue party was hastily assembled and soon a dozen men were helping to clear a route across the minefield to a spot from where a helicopter could winch Hale to safety.

Then another mine went off. Then another. Then another.

In four hours, the lives of ten or more men were changed for ever. Three soldiers lost limbs, and several more were badly wounded.

Corporal Mark Wright, who co-ordinated the rescue effort and kept his men’s spirits up until he drew his last breath, died on the helicopter ride back to Camp Bastion. He was posthumously awarded the George Cross for his efforts.

This was the kind of raw courage I had been wanting to write about. Undoubted heroism, extraordinary regimental spirit and life-saving sacrifice. The story didn’t hang upon questions of why we were in Afghanistan, who the enemy was, who was right and who was wrong.

After all, the mines detonated that day had been laid down 25 years earlier by Russian troops during their own invasion and occupation of the country in the Eighties. The enemy was invisible, inevitable and lethal. The enemy was war.

Together with director Paul Katis, I researched the story in more detail. We read the Army’s own Board of Inquiry report, and the subsequent coroner’s inquest.

We met Bob and Gem Wright, Mark’s parents, and got their blessing for our endeavours. We met some of the personnel involved who have since left the Army, including the 3 Para Commanding Officer, who experienced the day’s horrendous events via radio back at Camp Bastion.

Chocks away: The Dam Busters from 1954, starring Michael Redgrave and Richard Todd, is a Christmas TV mainstay

Broadsword calling Danny Boy: Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton disguise themselves as Nazis in the ever popular Where Eagles Dare

British actor Richard Attenborough and American Steve McQueen in 1963's The Great Escape. Many of these classic British war films were made with mostly American money, but celebrate British heroism

Richard Attenborough pops his head out of a tunnel while Steve McQueen keeps watch in 1963's The Great Escape. Although many of the classic British war films were made with mostly American money, they still celebrate British heroism

And once provisional Ministry of Defence approval had been secured, we met or spoke to almost all of the still-serving soldiers who were involved in the attempted rescue that day. I wrote the script, although in fairness, it wrote itself.

So we had a script, a low budget and a tough but totally compelling story about modern warfare. Why don’t we make British war films any more? I was about to find out the answer.

The first people we approached were the various publicly funded subsidy organisations and broadcasters who are the gatekeepers to the British film industry. They all said nice things but, politically, it was too hot for them to handle.

‘This is the kind of film that should be made, but we can’t put any money into it,’ they told us. This, in spite of the fact that politics didn’t come within a thousand miles of the story we were telling.

So we took it out to the industry — the distributors, sales agents and financiers that clog the narrow, noisy lanes of Soho in Central London.

And we got the same reply. Very strong material. Very difficult material. Are people ready for a film about Afghanistan? Isn’t it a bit miserable? Have you thought about TV?

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a moan about why no one wants to finance my precious script. Perhaps the story isn’t as great as I think it is, or perhaps they had concerns about backing a little-known director.

I understand the realities of financing a movie, and I don’t begrudge a single person who said thanks, but no thanks. But there was something more going on here. Something systemic.

While the rest of the country has got behind the military over the past decade, with charities such as Help for Heroes and Walking With The Wounded — not to mention the time-honoured Poppy Appeal — achieving record levels of support and donations, the British film and television community seems to have looked the other way.

Yet if we had attempted to launch our project on the other side of the Atlantic, I am sure we would not have had such problems. Over the past decade, the U.S. has certainly not shied away from making films about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hollywood movies such as The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Three Kings and Black Hawk Down have not only superbly portrayed these modern conflicts, they have also unearthed stories that a mainstream cinema audience wants to see.

With films such as The Hurt Locker, Hollywood has refused to shy away from portraying modern conflicts

But in this country, and in spite of the huge commercial success of most of these movies, the film industry still does not want to know.

Is there a liberal sensitivity within my profession which deems any film showing British soldiers doing anything courageous or worthy of our admiration and gratitude to be ‘not the kind of story we want to tell’?

Has an institutional obsession with victimhood and ‘telling the other side’ led the industry to turn its back on those who defend our freedoms?

I’m not saying that our military adventures over the past decade are without controversy, but surely we can at least depict the human side of these conflicts?

Instead, the industry sticks to the predictable holy trinity of Brit flicks: social-realist misery, escapist romantic comedies and Guy Ritchie-style gangster thrillers.

So now, in our efforts to be the first modern British war movie in more than 30 years, Kajaki has had to look outside the industry for finance.

The Ministry of Defence has supported us. The soldiers are behind us. The general public is behind us. But still the film industry looks the other way.

■ To help fund the film, visit indiegogo.com and search ‘Kajaki’.

The Real St. Nick Saved 669 Children From Hitler

With the Christmas season ahead, plastic statues of the man they call Santa Claus will adorn front lawns all over the world. Grown men will dress up like him, and children will sit on his lap, sharing their Christmas wishes.

That Saint Nick is a fairy tale. He doesn’t come down chimneys, and word has it he’s probably diabetic and lactose-intolerant—so don’t leave him milk and cookies.

However, there is genuine, living Saint Nick who is a hero among men. He is a 104-year-old Englishman, where he is known as the British Schindler. Born Jewish and later converting to Christianity along with his family (today we would call them Messianic Jews, not converts), Sir Nicholas Winton lived all over Europe working in the banking industry.

Wednesday, 11 December 2013

What ‘Cool’ Churches Could Learn From Abercrombie & Fitch

If you’ve ever wandered into an Abercrombie & Fitch store, you know about coolness. The retailer markets its line of sweaters, hoodies and overpriced T-shirts using dim lighting, funky music and wall-sized photos of buff models wearing $98 jeans. But the store began losing customers this year when it became known that CEO Mike Jeffries only wanted thin, popular teens to wear his clothes.

“A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes],” Jeffries said in an interview, adding that he only wanted “cool, good-looking people” wearing the A&F label. His policy has now officially backfired. Upset parents threw out tons of the retailer’s clothes, activist teens staged a boycott, and a guy from California launched a video campaign urging people to give the uber-cool A&F duds to homeless people in protest.

All this proved that sometimes being cool is, in fact, not cool—especially when cool becomes exclusionary.

When I read about the demise of Abercrombie & Fitch, I couldn’t help but compare the store with some churches I know. I’ve never heard a pastor say from the pulpit that he “only wanted the cool people,” but sometimes we send this message subliminally. In today’s market-driven church culture, cool is the goal. We pursue it in several ways:

Cool music. I love high-energy worship as much as anyone, and I try to keep my playlists updated. But I hope we aren’t using trendiness as the gauge to measure the depth of our worship. Cool music can sometimes turn out to be a shallow performance. Sometimes it might be best to dig out a 30-year-old chorus or a 200-year-old hymn just to remind ourselves that our generation isn’t the center of the universe. And speaking of age: It might not look cool to include older people in the worship team, but I have a feeling God would prefer to affirm every age group.

Cool technology. I knew a young man who attended a popular worship school for six months. When he came back to his home church, he complained that leaders “didn’t know how to do church” because they didn’t follow the latest rules about PowerPoint, lighting and Internet broadcasting. He was bitten by the cool bug—which can sometimes turn people into jerks. I have no problem with technology, but I fear we are using it as a substitute for the anointing of the Spirit. If God shows up in one of our services and everyone hits the floor, I doubt we will care too much about what we had planned to project on our 72-foot-wide screens.

Cool people. I used to be part of a ministry that targeted university students with the gospel. It was a great strategy, but it had its downside. Since we were trying to reach young people, the old people were not cool. This also applied to blue-collar types, single moms and homeless folks who occasionally wandered into meetings. It got so bad that one woman was asked to get off the worship team because she was overweight. Yet Jesus didn’t judge people based on body type, ethnicity or age. He reached out to widows, dying children, blind beggars, soldiers, lepers and even demoniacs. And sometimes the really cool people—like the rich young ruler—walked away from Him.

Cool crowds. We often define coolness in our culture by the size of the audience. We get an adrenaline rush when we jump on the bandwagon with everyone else. Crowds can be great (it would have been cool to be an eyewitness at the feeding of the 5,000), yet many people in the Bible defined courage by standing alone in defiance of the crowd. I have spoken to large and small audiences and everything in between, and I’ve learned that the Holy Spirit is just as willing to move among a group of 25 as He is in the biggest church in town.

Cool theology. This is where we really need to be careful. Today it’s cool to preach safe, seeker-sensitive messages about love and grace just to get people in the door of the church. To avoid offending anyone, we stay away from certain topics that our culture has deemed off-limits. It’s definitely not cool today to preach about (1) the consequences of sin and the need for repentance, (2) why sexual sin is still unhealthy or (3) the fact that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation.

Abercrombie & Fitch made a huge marketing mistake by pursuing coolness. If we use a similar strategy to grow churches, it will backfire. Jesus never said, “Follow Me, and everyone will think you are cool.” Rather He told us, “If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20, NASB). We are called to make faithful disciples—and that will never be cool in the eyes of the world. At some point, we have to leave the adolescent realm of cool to reach spiritual maturity.

J. Lee Grady is the former editor of Charisma and the director of the Mordecai Project(themordecaiproject.org). You can follow him on Twitter at @leegrady. He is the author of The Holy Spirit Is Not for Sale and other books.