He’s like maybe we will come up with something different. So it would be cursing and that’s a bad way to start. He thinks that people might hear “salt the earth,” which is like a practice of warfare, like destroying a city and then pour salt over it so nothing could ever grow. There is a really specific line when he is preparing and Matthew is so concerned about starting with “you are the salt of the earth” because he’s worried about the wind. Jesus is trying to make his message reach people, who are imperfect, who don’t listen and who needed metaphor and parable. It’s not that Jesus doesn’t know these things, doesn’t know how they will all turn out to an extent the father does. I feel like the Old and New Testaments are tracking God learning to deal with his creation. That idea started with Tyler and Dallas to explore the fully man part of Jesus. Not everybody saw it that way, and that’s OK. How did you decide to portray it that way? To do that, we created a situation where using what we felt was a true set of characteristics for Peter - what scrape could he have gotten himself into where he, a professional fisherman, would have to fish all night and come up with nothing?ĭN: In Season 2, viewers see Jesus devote serious time to crafting, writing and practicing his profound Sermon on the Mount, which is interesting. We wanted the audience to feel the full weight of what that miracle meant to Peter. It is Jesus gracing a character with, in this case, deliverance. It’s a character who didn’t do anything, didn’t deserve, who didn’t follow a series of steps to overcome to be victorious. So we put it at a moment of prominence, which is right in the middle of Season 1. As a leader of the church, his calling mattered. We needed Peter’s calling to be in a significant place because meta-textually it is significant. This is the place the Bible meets what we do. What was their existence like? What did they leave behind in terms of acts or literature? What critical parts of the Bible were they a player in? Knowing Simon Peter’s arc, we began to look at those moments of behavior that characterize him - the frequent disagreement, the sort of oblivious stumbling, the bombastic, and also his profound ability to lead, as well as Jesus’ trust in Peter, the rock. RS: In a lot of ways it started with reverse engineering the characters. How do you explore and create a character’s motivation from “between the lines?” So we come very much trying to execute that.ĭN: It’s fascinating to watch the story play out with developed characters and backstories, such as Mary’s battle with personal demons or Simon Peter’s debt leading to the miracle of the full fish nets. He definitely wants to tell this story in a certain way and parts of it have crystallized for him in his sleep 10 years ago. We could not have freestyled how much time we were going to spend on one particular section. RS: And to your question, we fulfill Dallas’ vision. And within that source text, there’s plenty of space between the lines of what is said to explore what is the motivation for these characters? Why would they say that? Why would they do that? That’s something that other projects have explored less. At least this section of the Gospels is very much a story, so we are working with a fantastic foundation. Sometimes it’s just collections of wisdom, sayings or laws. Not all sacred texts of religion are so linear. We are fortunate to be working with source material. Tyler Thompson: The Bible is great literature. That’s what is planned and we do that together. Seasons 3, 4 and 5 will be Act 2, and then we will be in the home stretch for Seasons 6 and 7. We’ve got Seasons 1 and 2, they were Act 1. We picked the bookends and from there we figured out the eight points we want to hit every season like a part of an act. Ryan Swanson: It’s a team thing, and we had the Bible. Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.ĭeseret News: How did you approach writing “The Chosen”? Thompson and Swanson discussed their experiences in co-writing “The Chosen” with the Deseret News and other news media in mid August at Camp Hoblitzelle, a camp located south of Dallas where cast and crew are filming Season 3. Both have spent a lot of time in the Bible as they write for the show. Swanson has a minor in religious studies and Thompson says he has an “undergraduate understanding” of the Old Testament. Thompson has worked as a videographer and co-writer with Jenkins on multiple projects and short films portraying Jesus for their church. In addition to working on “The Chosen,” Swanson is known for his work as a writer and producer on such films as “ Mr. “It was a very full-circle moment,” Swanson said with a smile. As it turns out, the candy apple red basement where the trio wrote the script also happened to be the same home Swanson’s family lived in when he was a baby.
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