This follows up on Mr. Bush's comments to us the other week. Do what the Lord leads you to, and if you love it, good things will happen..

SUMMARY: The director/star of a hot new film with unabashedly Christian themes says prayer is the secret to his success.

The new movie Facing the Giants is drawing rave reviews. Since it opened at the end of September, the movie has grossed more than $4 million -- and attendance continues to grow.

Produced by a church-based production company, Sherwood Pictures, and directed by Alex Kendrick, a minister, Facing the Giants is the story of a football coach (played by Kendrick) who has never had a winning season and learns how to face the giant issues of his life.

The low-budget Christian production is getting rave reviews from the moviegoing public, who praise it for its quality and impact.

CitizenLink talked with Kendrick recently about the film and how it came to pass.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Q. A lot of people who have seen Facing the Giants love the film. How did you come up with the idea for doing it? How did you get into the motion-picture business?

A. My brother Stephen and I both serve as associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga. He is the preaching associate when the pastor is away and also teaches some of the classes, and I am the media minister there -- associate pastor of media. I've been there since 1999; Steven has been there since 2001.

Growing up, we wanted to do Christian movies. Our father was in ministry -- he now operates a Christian school -- but we just saw the need for that. In 2002, we read a George Barna survey in which he basically concluded that movies and television were among the top three most influential factors in our culture. The church was not even in the top 10.

Since we already had a desire to make movies, we approached our pastor, Michael Catt, and asked him if he would consider allowing us to try to make a movie. At first he was real skeptical. He said, "Don't movies cost a lot of money?" And we said we would probably need to do a low-budget movie and shoot it digitally.

He said, "OK. The only thing is, I can't allow you to take the money out of the church budget. You're going to have to pray it in." And since we believed God was in it, we began praying, and the Lord, through several members of our church -- unprompted, we never asked for money -- they gave us $20,000 to make the first movie.

Q. A different movie than Facing the Giants?

A. My brother and I wrote this script -- it's called Flywheel. It's about a dishonest used car salesman that comes to Christ and begins changing his ways. We used church members and locations that belonged to members of our church for the movie. Once we were done, we went to our local theater. We only had it on DVD, and we asked the manager of our local theater -- it was a brand new, state-of-the-art theater with 16 screens -- if we could show it there on a weekend. He looked at us like we were crazy. So we asked if he could call the home office of his theater chain, and see what they thought, and he said he would.

So we went back to our church and prayed, and the home office told him that they saw it as an investment in our community in Albany, Ga., and to let us do it for one weekend.

So we took our video projector and put it in their window -- hooked the DVD player up to their sound system and began selling tickets. They thought they would sell a few tickets just to the members of our church. But we ended up having 4,200 people come out.

Q. That's a great turnout for just one theater on one weekend.

A. It was. The local news and the newspaper did stories, and the owners kept prolonging it for six weeks in their theater. We were the second-highest-grossing movie of their 16 screens.

Blockbuster Video picked it up and put a copy in every Blockbuster in North America. Netflix picked it up. And then several Christian television networks -- TBN, FamilyNet, Faith TV, Cornerstone -- all started showing it.

The response was just phenomenal -- literally thousands of e-mails, phone calls, people coming to Christ, people rededicating their marriages. Especially fathers telling us they had rededicated their role as father to the Lord.

We saw a need to continue doing these movies, and so Steve and I prayed again, and we wrote the script for Facing the Giants. We asked the Lord for $100,000 this time, so we could bump up the quality. And He provided it again, without us asking anybody. People would just come up and say, "What are you guys working on now?" and we would tell them we were writing a script for another movie. The word got out, and people said, "What do you need?" So we told them the amount of money we were praying for -- and doctors, contractors, real estate agents and just ordinary members of our church gave us the money.

We rented a high-definition camera this time, and cast the movie out of our church members. Our Sunday School department cooked all the meals -- we never had to buy any food for the crew. We got five guys from Orlando that do commercials professionally to come up and do a "boot camp" for our church members on how to do lights and sound and camera work.

Then we shot Facing the Giants. When we finished it, I edited it on my office computer -- I have a Macintosh -- and we asked the Lord to get it into theaters, instead of it going straight to DVD.

My brother Stephen called Provident Music Group, in Nashville, Tenn., to get permission to use one song in our movie from the group Third Day.

When he called, they said, "Why do you want permission?" And we told them, "We're a church and we've made a movie." And they said, "What do you mean, you're a church and you've made a movie? Churches don't make movies." And we said, "Well, we made a little one called Flywheel, and God just blew it out of the water, and we feel like this new one will really impact the culture."

They told us they wanted to see the movie before they would give their permission. So we sent them a DVD, and they fell in love with it.

The president of Provident, Terry Hemmings, called us up and said, "We're in."

And we basically said, "Who is this, and what are you talking about?" And he said, "This is Provident. Not only can you use the song, but you can have any music you want. And I want to send this to our parent company -- they may want to distribute this in theaters."

We said, "Who is your parent company?" And he said, "Sony Pictures."

We didn't even go knocking on their door -- Sony looked at it and loved it.

We had been praying for 40 theaters. They said, "How about 400?"

So on Sept. 29, it came out -- and we've just been blown away at the response. We've gotten over 500 e-mails that were for professions of faith -- and hundreds more just to say, "This movie blessed us."

I think it's grossed $3.2 million (as of last week). I can't even express to you what the Lord has done with this. I feel like the kids with five loaves and two fish -- and who just watched God do more than we could ask or imagine.

We're now being asked to do more movies, and we feel like we have a third plot, and so we're just trying to take steps of obedience and trust the Lord.

Q. Since you're on more than 400 screens now, is the movie going to go nationwide?

A. Well, this is what they did. The three executives at Sony who thought it was so curious that it made their own families cry also saw that the heart of the movie made people cheer, laugh, cry -- and said to us, "These are the kind of emotions that Hollywood has been going after for years."

And if you go to Yahoo.com and click on "Movies," and look at Facing the Giants from a secular Web site -- people are giving it an A or an F. It's causing that much reaction. Nobody is giving it a C; it's either an A or an F. You can see the difference between the secular perspective and the biblical perspective.

We came out on 400 screens. Now word-of-mouth is getting out, and we're expanding it to about a dozen theaters at a time -- and then, if any theaters are low, we're shifting to other towns.

Sony is watching with great curiosity. They said, "It's interesting that this movie has such high word-of-mouth, and it may have legs for a while." In other words, we may be out for a couple of months, just going from city to city.

Q. The success has got to be gratifying.

A. Yes, especially the reaction. For example, I'll just pull a few from the top of my head. There was a 34-year-old man that wrote in and said, "My entire adult life I have struggled with pornography. I have spent all of my available income on various avenues of that lifestyle."

He said, "I accepted Jesus Christ two weeks before I saw your movie, but I still struggled with it, and I went and saw it, and I believe this is a giant in my own life. When I got home, I took six large garden and leaf bags and filled them with my pornographic videos, DVDs and magazines, and threw them in the Dumpster, even before I took my jacket off. I went inside and I dedicated my life to Jesus Christ. I had already asked Him into my heart, but now I'm beginning to understand what it means to rely on Him each day and to die to myself each day."

I can't tell you what that does for us.

Q. That's absolutely amazing. Alex, the kind of movie you did would not have been possible 10 years ago, would it?

A. I don't think so. We shot it in high-definition video. We did shoot it at film speed, which is 24 frames per second, instead of video speed, which made it easy to transfer to 35 mm film. So it looks like it was shot on film.

But yes, with $100,000 we didn't have money for film stock, so if we didn't like what we we're doing, we just rewound the tape and shot it again. I know that sounds crude, but the digital medium allowed us to do it for $100,000.

Q. Your films are gaining good reviews, but there are other Christian projects coming out now -- and in the days to come. Do you think Christian filmmaking is coming of age?

A. I think so. I think the technology available now will afford more Christian filmmakers to do this. I think what our primary struggle will be is the reputation Christian films have had.

So far, to be honest, Christian films have somewhat of a poor or cheesy reputation, and I admit a lot of that is because of the low-budget nature of them. A movie like The Passion of the Christ is just one in a million.

We took the approach that if God is the best movie director, and the best producer, and the best screenwriter, then we should rely on Him. Not that we shouldn't work hard, but that we should rely upon Him. So every day, the cast and the crew started off every scene in prayer -- and we asked for Ephesians 3:20 -- for Him to do things which were "far above what we could ask or imagine."

But, as far as Christian films, I think you'll see more of these. Our struggle will be presenting them with a level of excellence that is respectable in the wider film world -- whether it's Hollywood or just American culture.

Q. You mentioned that you have the idea for a third movie. Care to tell us about it?

A. I'll say this: I was jogging around the block, and as we did for the first two movies, I asked the Lord for a plot that would impact our culture -- not just be well-liked or be moving, but my brother and I want to impact the culture.

So we approached our pastor, and he said, "Yes, that's what we want to do."

We began praying, and the Lord gave us the direction of marriage to work on, so we have a plot to work on now. And it will be on marriage -- a couple that starts off as non-Christians is heading for divorce -- and then it deals with what the Lord does in their hearts, and how a marriage based on the worldly perspective becomes a marriage based on a biblical perspective.

There are some significant plot twists in there. But we feel like the Lord has given us that plot, and we're very excited to work on that -- hopefully next year.

Q. It sounds great. What advice would you have for somebody who feels the same way that you do -- that they have a call in media, and want to bring Christ to the world through media? What have you learned through all this?

A. We learned that there is a difference between a good idea and a God idea.

It was when we began committing ourselves to prayer and seeking the Lord, He began directing us in very clear and real ways. And as we trusted Him, He opened up the doors to do this. We can see His direction every single step of the way when we made these movies.

As we follow Him, He has blown us away and done more at every step than we were even praying for.

So, I would say -- commit it to prayer; seek the highest level of excellence you're capable of and make sure you wait on God.

The other thing, when it comes to money, we learned that when God gives a vision, that vision breeds passion. People follow passion, and money flows from people. So don't go trying to convince the people to give to you. Seek the Lord first, let Him give the vision, and if it's His, people will buy into it.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
To read Plugged In's review of Facing the Giants, click here.

http://www.pluggedinonline.com/movies/movies/a0002896.cfm