As Christians across the country prepare for Easter celebrations, we bring to your remembrance “The Passion of the Christ,” a top-grossing Christian film of all time that was produced by Mel Gibson.
American actor Jim Caviezel, 48, played Jesus in this movie that depicts the Passion of Jesus largely according to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
The film primarily covers the final twelve hours of Jesus’ life, beginning with the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, the insomnia and grievance of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and ending with a brief depiction of his resurrection.
While the star picked up a few nominations and one award for his role, the story in general was lauded, critics could not get over its graphic nature, claiming that the film subliminally promoted antisemitism.
Film critics suspected that it was the subject of Jesus that prompted the MPAA to give Gibson’s film an R rating, as opposed to a likely more deserved NC-17 rating.
In a recent interview with CBN, Caviezel went to great depths to help people understand what it means to play the crucified Savior.
….
CBN: What did you bring to it, not just as an actor, but how do you prepare to play the Son of God?
JIM CAVIEZEL: It’s a great question. How do you prepare? By fire. Looking back, there were two words, ‘unquenchable fire.’ What was hard was the physical, the suffering. Makeup time started from 2 a.m. and it went until 10 a.m. — that alone right there, the boredom, not just the boredom, but the uncomfortable position. You’re never sitting down. After day in and day out of this, plus the hypothermia, plus I had a separated shoulder, it forced me to pray. I had to go to a place of something really deep because I was going crazy.
CBN: You said you went into prayer. Is that something you believed anyway prior to the part? You are a believer?
JIM CAVIEZEL: Well, there’s no question that I believe. I think many of your viewers know what I’m talking about. Why would you subject yourself to persecution unless you know that that’s the truth? And let me tell you, I was on that cross. Many people who looked up there, I may be playing Christ, but a lot of times I felt like Satan. I had obscenities wanting to come out of me. It was so cold it was like knives coming through me. I had hypothermia. I don’t know whether you’ve dealt with that, but on one day of hypothermia I was so cold I could barely get the lines out. My mouth was shaking uncontrollably. My arms and legs went numb. I was suffocating on that cross. In the mean time, you watch people have coffee and laugh. They were very indifferent about what I was going through.
CBN: The whipping and the scourging are hard to watch because that goes on for so long. I was literally counting the lashes. I watched people in the theatre in front of me, a small viewing theatre, turn their faces away because they couldn’t continue to look.
JIM CAVIEZEL: You said something very critical there: People turn their eyes away when they see it, and what they’re seeing is their own sin. It is not wanting to deal, at times, with their own sin. It’s that hard to look at. But this film forces you to see yourself, not the way you want to see yourself, but as God sees you. There are no passive onlookers here.
CBN: What part of this had the greatest affect on you? Is it possible to isolate a moment or time?
JIM CAVIEZEL: Oh boy, I’ll be honest with you, there are things that I went through that I can’t even talk about. I felt like a great presence came within me at times when we were filming. This prayer that came from me was, ‘I don’t want people to see me. I just want them to see Jesus. And through that conversions will happen.’ That’s what I wanted more than anything, that people would have a visceral effect to finally make a decision whether to follow Him or not.
CBN: And that’s the only choice; either you do or you don’t. You’re either for Me, or you’re against Me.
JIM CAVIEZEL: Throughout this, when people put on Christ when they go outside, that is all nonbelievers see. And we’re going to have people reject it, but there are others who make a living at being Christian. This is serious because they know the Body of Christ. They know what that is. And for them, it’s even more serious. Many of our Jewish brothers are terrified. I have people come up to me and say, ‘Jim,’ — they’re Jewish — ‘some of the e-mails, have you read these things? This is frightening. I didn’t kill Christ.’ I say, ‘No, the people standing before Christ and Pilate during the judgment scene do not condemn an entire race for the death of Christ anymore than the actions of Mussolini condemn all Italians, or the heinous crimes of Stalin condemn all Russians. We are all culpable in the death of Christ. My sins, your sins put Him on that cross.’ I bring this up because it’s very important to address. I want my Jewish brothers to see this film. I want people in my own faith who think it’s anti-Semitic to see this film. I want non-religious people to see this film. This film does not play the blame game at all. We’re all culpable in the death of Christ.
…At one point [during the filming of ‘The Passion’] I remember yelling out, “You obviously don’t care! Here we are breaking our backs for you.” At that point this cross is swaying from one direction to the next, and I’m on a thousand foot cliff. If that thing snaps, I’m toast. And Mel didn’t know what to do. We’re in the middle of a shot and all of a sudden the wind started. It’s like going to the Grand Canyon and sticking a cross at the edge of it. It’s all cemented in and you think you’re safe, but the winds blow, it’s teetering back and forth, and hypothermia is horrendous. I’m itching all over the place. I have this shoulder separation. I don’t know if you’ve ever gone through one of those.
But I thought, “Well, we got it.” But the next day we watch the film, and it looked great, but Mel said, “We can’t use it.” And I said, “What do you mean we can’t use it?” You know, literally, yelling at him. He said, “If they’re focused on that cross, they’re not focused on Jesus, they’re looking at that thing going back and forth. Forget it, we’re doing it again.” And that went for another five weeks, just the crucifixion scenes alone.
CBN: In one part of the movie Isaiah the prophet is speaking. He said that Jesus was disfigured and he was beaten and bruised so much that he was hardly recognizable as a person.
JIM CAVIEZEL: We didn’t even go there. We didn’t even go to the full … What we read, you’re reading right there. And we wanted people to get a visceral reaction of he’s human, you can still see him. Because there is something about how it can be so repulsive and so much that you kind of shut off, and we didn’t want that. We wanted to take it to the point and keep people there.
CBN: It’s been rumored, I don’t know if this is true or not, but as you were filming you were hit with lightning? That’s true?
JIM CAVIEZEL: I was lit up like a Christmas tree! I was doing the Sermon on the Mount. I knew it was going to hit me about four seconds before it happened. I thought, “I’m going to get hit.” And when it happened, I saw the extras grab the ground.
What they saw was fire coming out the right and left side of my head. Illumination around the whole body. And during the shot they said, “Do you have it on camera?” What happened was Mel had said, “Action” and the cameras were panning to me and here is where this light just flashed. And by the time the cameras got to me, I hear Mel screaming out, “What the heck happened to his hair?” I looked like I went to see Don King’s hair stylist.
JIM CAVIEZEL: Five minutes after I got hit, Jon Mikalini, an assistant, walks over and says are you okay? And then he got hit. The difference was that they saw the bolt come down and hit Jon; they didn’t see that when I was standing there. All I felt was this giant tremendous slap on my ears and a few seconds of a pink, red static infront of my eyes.
CBN: You had a literal miracle on the set. What do you attribute it to? You could have died.
JIM CAVIEZEL: Yeah. Or I could have been incinerated. Jon, who came up to me, had already been hit. I mean three lightning strikes on one film, one guy getting hit twice, and me obviously getting hit one time. And there were a lot of miracles other than that kind of a miracle.
CBN: On the set?
JIM CAVIEZEL: Well, one of the guys working on the film was a Muslim. He was one of the guards who beat me, and he converted. He had a real big experience there, you know.
But what was going on is that we had so many prayers worldwide while we were going through it, I really believe this is important because when things started happening they were praying for us.
All the actors that worked on this film, some aren’t going to accept it, but the opportunity will always be there for them. Here’s the other thing, it will stay with them the rest of their lives. People will always come up to them, people will always ask them about the movie they were in, it will always be with them.
CBN: What do you think it’s going to do to your career? And if it did blow it out of the water?
JIM CAVIEZEL: Right. This is what I feel. I believe I was called to play this role. When I look out to all my fellow Americans and people in the world, I say to them I want you to do this in the public and shamelessly express your faith in public. That’s what I’ve done here, and I can rest as it is. I don’t know where it’s going, but if it doesn’t turn out where I’m continually working, I’m still an actor. I’ll always be one, whether I get another job or not. I fulfilled my mission right now. I felt what I was right now. That was my opportunity, and I would have done it again.
editor@ugchristiannews.com
