Interview with Mike Rich

Mark Moring from Christianity Today Movies has conducted a fabulous interview with Mike Rich, the scriptwriter of "The Nativity Story." An excerpt:

I hear you've just seen a rough cut of the film. How did you like it?

Mike Rich: For a writer, that's always an anxious moment, the first time you see a cut of the film. What you want to see is the diamond that you can polish—and we saw it. The quality of the film so close to the end of production was really remarkable. I'm really grateful to Catherine for that. As a writer, you visualize what the scenes might look like. So it's tremendously exciting to see that what I saw in my mind was actually put down on film—always the equal of what I had visualized, and sometimes even exceeding it.

Do you see this movie attracting an audience beyond Christians?

Rich: I do. Even for non-believers, this is a compelling story. We have sent the script out to those way outside of Christian evangelicals. We've shown it to Jewish scholars, who are appreciative of the fact that we were respectful of their traditions and culture.

I'm often asked what I hope to get out of this, what we're hoping to accomplish. We live in a time where the month of December goes by in a heartbeat because of the hectic nature of the season. There's very little time for families to talk about this story. If this movie can serve as a two-hour window in that season to get families talking about this remarkable, amazing story of faith, then that will be a great thing.