Interview with director Michael Offer and production designer Simon Elliott
For director Michael Offer and production designer Simon Elliott, the task of recreating first century Judaea presented challenges of sometimes biblical proportions.
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When Michael read Frank Deasy's dramatisation of The Passion he just fell in love with it.
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"I responded to the complexity and layering of the script but most importantly its humanity. Although the story of Jesus is the emotional heartbeat, the multi-angled point of view made Frank's script unique."
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Michael saw immediately the approach needed to bring the story to the screen.
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"It was a privilege to be invited to work on this by Nigel. The story is so important for so many that to tell it badly would just be pointless and a wasted opportunity to dramatise arguably the most important narrative of our time. I wanted to project the experience of what it would have been like to have been living in that place in that moment in time," says the director.
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"I wanted the audience to understand what happened in the space of a mere week after a desert preacher rode in through the East Gate of Jerusalem and then within days was crucified. It was important that the visual interpretation came from a fresh place."
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Michael wanted an audience to "perceive the drama as fresh, with the story unfolding before their eyes as if they were actually there and witnessing these events for the first time. We lensed classically with a hand-held edge to give it that feeling of immediacy.
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"We were all enormously responsible to the script and the drama – sometimes it became a pressure. It wasn't the ambitious scale of the production – it was the responsibility of telling it well – but it did focus us on telling the story with all the passion we could find."
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Michael, director of the 2006 Golden Globe-nominated The State Within, was clear about how he wanted to bring the script to life. And that was not by making a biblical epic in the traditions of Cecil B De Mille and Fifties Hollywood. So when he began preparing for filming in Morocco midway through 2007, he began looking for very specific locations.
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"Morocco was great. It was such a brilliant canvas. But sometimes the locations were just too big and epic. Our story was more intimate," he says.
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"We were constantly looking for locations that weren't overbearing or overwhelming. The important thing about this was to be true to the humanity of the story. That ruled every choice I made."
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Offer had also the challenge of recreating the scale and proportions of a town bursting with pilgrims in Jerusalem for the Passover celebrations. The ancient village of Tamnougalt was chosen to double as Jerusalem.
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"One of the attractive things about the village we chose was that it still had the patina of life some 2,000 years ago," says Michael. "It was against this backdrop we recreated the claustrophobia of a Jerusalem that was swollen to four times its normal size during Passover. To capture that intensity we made the frame packed – an intense experience.
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"Every day saw us shooting iconic sequences, whether it was the entry into Jerusalem, the Last Supper, Gethsemane, or the Crucifixion – the list was endless. These iconic scenes needed coverage and images with spectacular scenery.
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"There were a few key shots that we had to achieve," says Michael. "Not least the Crucifixion and the Garden of Gethsemane. With those you just have to go for it."
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It was fate that led Michael to find his Golgotha. He only stumbled across the location, a small, rock-strewn valley, off the main road north out of Ouarzazate, after rejecting another location.
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"We were just driving around in the Land Rover and took a turn off the main road, sensing there might be something there. After a while we came up on the spur of this ridge with a great view of the Atlas Mountains behind us. It seemed perfect," he says.
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"I was flying back to London the next morning and as the plane took off I looked out and saw that we were flying over the site. I thought that's it – it's absolutely right."
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To add drama to the moment when Jesus's cross is raised, Offer had the idea to attach a camera to the top of the cross. It may prove to be the drama's most powerful and eye-catching visual moment.
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"This shot took weeks and weeks of planning in pre-production, we talked about how we were going to mount the camera, worried about whether the cross might overbalance, how many people we'd need to lift it. But it came off and I'm particularly proud of it," says Michael.
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The cast and crew arrived in North Africa during summer.
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"The heat was challenging, particularly for the actors wearing beards and robes and mad dogs and Englishmen pretty much sums us up!"
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Ironically, however, it was the distinctly un-summery weather that caused Michael the biggest problems. On several occasions filming had to be abandoned or cancelled because of unpredicted storms. The first came when filming of the key Garden of Gethsemane scene was hit by freak weather.
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"We were driving out there the morning of filming when we discovered that what previously had been a road was now a raging torrent. There had been a huge storm and the water had come down from the Atlas Mountains," he explains.
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"The location we were going to use as Gethsemane was completely flooded and we would have been working in mud for two days. So we had to call it off for the day and reschedule," says Michael.
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A week or so after that, filming of the crucifixion was washed out by another unexpected storm which made filming at the site impossible.
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Michael and his team were based in Morocco's leading film facility, the Atlas Studios.
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The sprawling complex, on the edge of the southern Moroccan town of Ouarzazate, has hosted its share of religious epics over the years, including such diverse productions as Kundun, directed by Martin Scorsese, and Kingdom Of Heaven, by Ridley Scott.
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The giant walled city set of the latter film remains intact, as does a full-scale version of an Egyptian temple from a French production of The Ten Commandments.
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The latest ancient wonder to be recreated in the Moroccan desert is a giant reconstruction of the monolithic Temple of Jerusalem, the work of The Passion's production designer, Simon Elliott.
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Simon, whose previous credits include Bleak House, North & South and the movie Brick Lane, faced entirely new challenges on this production.
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"Television drama is quite domestic, whether period or contemporary. You don't often get pieces with such a big canvas, let alone ones that are supposed to be set in the ancient Holy Land," he says.
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"It was like organising a military manoeuvre purely because of the scale of the film. Trying to convey this seminal story on a small screen in a cinematic way was a huge challenge."
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Simon spent eight weeks building the main sets, which include Pilate's house and backstreets of Jerusalem. But he is most proud of the work he and his Anglo-Moroccan team did on the Temple of Jerusalem.
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"It was a truly awesome building. Some say it was the equivalent of three or four Wembleys," Simon says of the temple. "So it was a challenge bringing it to life."
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His version may be a scaled down version of the temple but it is still big enough to convey the sheer number of people who passed through the temple during Passover.
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"It was incumbent on every family to bring a lamb to the temple, have it slaughtered there and to offer up blood to the Priests at the altar. You then took your lamb to be cooked out in the street and then took it home for your Passover meal.
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"The Romans did a census on how many people came to Jerusalem during the Passover and recorded 600,000 lamb's kidneys. That gives you a good idea of the scale of the event, which we had to try to recreate," says Simon.
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Filming a story with such huge historical and religious significance brought with it other, smaller-scale challenges. For instance, Simon and his team went to great lengths to ensure the Last Supper was an authentic meal from the Judaea of the time.
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Similarly with the crucifixion, Simon and his team researched the most recent historical studies to recreate the scene as realistically as possible.
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"There has only ever been one archaeological find of a crucified skeleton, which was found in the Sixties in Palestine," he says.
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Rather than the iconic position so familiar to churchgoers, Jesus was probably crucified on a T-shaped gibbet with his legs tucked up and under him so that his chest was crushed and he died of asphyxiation.
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"The Romans crucified people on anything they could lay their hands on. They nailed people up against trees," he says. "The Victorian image of Jesus doesn't tie in with the historical evidence. He was probably put on a crude wooden gibbet and made to stand in a loose, foetal position. It was fiendishly designed."
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Simon admits keeping an eagle eye on everything within each scene was a tall order. "My job is to create a believable world that the audience shouldn't be questioning in any way," he says. "Achieving that here was doubly difficult. It was a minefield; you had to watch out for the smallest details."
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During the lengthy filming process, another great challenge for Michael Offer was to get his cast to deliver performances that fitted in with the screenplay's realistic visual and writing style.
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Michael says: "It is a privilege to see the actors become their characters. No matter how much rehearsal there is prior to the shoot day it is a wonderful moment when the lines are spoken out loud – fresh and real for the first time. From that moment on, the process is about trying to preserve that special chemistry."
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The cast presented the story "accent blind". "It was more interesting and vital that way. It was also more real," he says.
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"When actors came to me and asked me how I wanted them to pitch it, I said 'like any other drama, it just happens your name is Judas or Pontius Pilate. Trust the drama and trust the words'."
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Working with Joseph Mawle was a special experience.
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"Joe was the first actor that casting director Kate Rhodes James and I met for Jesus. It was a special experience – a mixture of relief and euphoria. Joe was the perfect Jesus for our story – aged 33 – real and virile. We saw no one else. With 12 weeks to go before shooting it was enormously reassuring.
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"From the moment Joe was confirmed, playing Jesus consumed him. He is one of the most hard-working actors I know and he immersed himself so totally – making Jesus real and human."
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Michael is proud of the way they – and everyone else on the production – responded. He believes The Passion is a drama that will have something for everyone who watches.
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"You can choose to watch it the way you want. If you have a religious sensibility you can view it that way, or you can view it simply as a piece of drama. As for the Resurrection, you can see it as a psychological manifestation of grief or you can see it as real and that he did come back," he says.
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"I think the most important thing about it is its humanity. That's certainly what motivated me in everything I was doing."
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