interview
Are You Ready for Left Behind, the DVD Edition?
By Chris Carpenter
CBN.com Program Director
CBN.com - In 2014, a year that became known as the “year of the Christian movie”, audiences were given the opportunity to see the remake of a film that some believe started the trend of bringing Christian movies to mainstream audiences in the first place. Now it's out on DVD.
Left Behind, a movie that originates from the highly acclaimed book series of the same name, stars Oscar winner Nicholas Cage as Rayford Steele, a commercial airline pilot who must respond to the events of the Rapture, a time when millions of people around the world simply vanish.
I recently sat down with Left Behind writer/producer Paul Lalonde and executive producer Willie Robertson (he of Duck Dynasty fame) to discuss why the new movie is being remade 14 years after the original debuted, why Cage was cast in the lead role, and their strategy to get general audiences to see a movie about the cataclysmic events of the Rapture.
It’s been years since the original Left Behind movie was released. The 2000 version had a moderate amount of success. Why a reboot now?
Paul Lalonde: The main reason to start over with the franchise right now is that we wanted to do it bigger, we wanted to do it better, and most importantly we wanted to do it for a mainstream audience, and right now Christian films and faith-based films are starting to take off. With Left Behind, the first time around it was a movie by Christians, for Christians and some people have seen it by accident on Netflix not really realizing what it was, but for the most part it was preaching to the choir as almost all faith-based films have been. We really wanted to try and take it out again and tell the world about the rapture, and tell the world what the rapture is, why people are left behind, why those who are taken are taken, but package it in a way that would appeal to people who need to hear the message and not just people who want to hear it.
Willie Robertson: With the times that are going on right now I think it was appropriate and obviously a lot of faith-based movies are pretty popular. People want to know and have questions and want to see things. So, we thought it was a great time to re-do this in a big version with a big action packed movie.
Comparing to the original film, how is the new Left Behind different? And also, what’s the same about it?
Lalonde: What this movie really is, is it’s a retelling of about five minutes of the first movie, whereas the first movie tried to cover the entire first Left Behind book in the series. It was a big book with a lot of things going on and you had to sort of brush past the rapture in a hurry because you had so much story to tell. And it always bothered me that the rapture itself should be its own movie, not just an exciting incident in a movie, it should be the whole thing, for I had always wanted to see an entire movie about that day and really think about what would it be like, what would you actually think if this really happened. And we didn’t have time to do that in the first movie, and so this is very different.
Nicolas Cage has been cast in the lead role as Rayford Steele. This is a departure from the first Left Behind movie when Kirk Cameron was the lead as Buck Williams. Two questions; one, why Nicholas Cage in this role, and two, why the focus shift away from Buck Williams to the Rayford Steele character?
Robertson: I don’t have to say that Nicholas Cage is certainly a great actor and has played many roles. I’ve always been kind of a fan of his and his acting skills. He does a fantastic job. As an airplane pilot, I think he played that great – just his strength. Just watching how his character got through these challenges in front of him was amazing. I think he will bring a lot of attention to the movie, which is a good thing. We realized that if we were going to make a good movie we needed to get good actors – A-list actors.
Lalonde: As to your second question, what we wanted in this movie was the emotional reaction of the characters to the rapture, and the fact is that in the Left Behind books, Buck Williams has an intellectual reaction. He’s a reporter, but he’s on the plane that Rayford is flying when the people disappear, but there’s nobody on there that he even cares about. He doesn’t even know anybody on the plane, whereas when we go with Rayford he’s got his daughter, Chloe, who is an important character, obviously, not just because she’s his daughter but going through the story, and he’s separated from her. So she’s down on the ground, he’s up in the plane; neither of them knows what’s happening with the other. And so you’ve got the girl on the ground who doesn’t know if her dad is alive or dead or gone, and the same thing with Rayford in the plane worrying about his daughter, and it allows you that emotional connection which was extremely important to this movie to try and make sure that everybody had an emotional connection at some level. Buck Williams is still on the plane, he still plays a central role in the story, he’s still an important character but he is there exploring what’s going on in the plane and talking to people, and trying to get answers on what people think. So it’s different that way.
The Left Behind series eventually grew to have 16 books in print. Are there any elements of the other 15 books in this movie or are there plans to do a whole series of Left Behind movies?
Lalonde: Yes, there is a plan to carry the Left Behind story right through to the return of Jesus. I certainly don’t foresee there being 16 movies or anything like that because I’ll be 94 years old by the time we’re done. What we’re going to do is follow through the key elements of prophesy; so we’ll have the battle of Armageddon, we’ll have the mark of the beast, we’ll obviously have the rise of the antichrist, we’ll have the return of Jesus. How many movies that is in between, who knows.
Paul, you actually produced the original Left Behind movie in 2000. What lessons did you learn from that experience that is helping you now on this movie?
Lalonde: I think the biggest lesson that I can take away from the first movies is don’t be fooled into thinking that your movie has crossed over into the mainstream, no matter how successful it is. We probably ended up shipping over six million copies of the first movie going on video at the time on DVD. It still sells very well even to this day, but you can’t let yourself think that because it did so well you’ve actually gotten your message out anywhere where it needs to be. The books are a little different in that regard. I know of lots of non-Christians who have read the books, but that’s different than curling up with a Kirk Cameron movie and watching it on a Friday night. So that’s a big one that we learned was it’s great that you’re out and sharing your message with the church and exciting Christians about it and exciting them to even talk about it, but it’s another thing to actually show it to unbelievers. So that’s a big lesson that we learned was that we thought at the time lots of unbelievers were going to see this because it’s such a cool movie and such a cool premise and all that, and it wasn’t the case. So we needed a bigger movie, we needed a bigger cast, we needed an A-list name and we’ve done that.
Final question, what do you want audiences to get out of this after they see the movie? When they walk out of that theater what do you want them to take away from that experience?
Lalonde: The perfect scenario is having believers there with their unbelieving friends and it’s one of those things again that you hear every Christian movie saying, “Bring your unsaved friends and loved ones.” From the people I talk to and from my experience over the last 20 years, it’s not easy to drag unbelievers to go and see a Christian movie. It’s going to be a lot easier to drag your husband who might not be saved to go see a Nicolas Cage action movie. And so I think a lot of conversation is going to take place after this movie. I think a lot of people are going to open up to the Bible and open up to Bible prophecy on the drive home from the theaters that night, and I think ultimately you want people walking out asking is that really in the Bible, does it really say that?
Robertson: I just want them to think and I would like them to search. Search for themselves and figure out where they are at spiritually. I don’t know exactly what is going to happen and how it’s going to happen but I just know that as human beings we are on this earth, we are born, and everyone of us is going to die someday. I want people to really search out where they are at in their lives. My belief is that there is something beyond here. I want people to really consider that seriously. I really believe this movie will cause you to do that.
Left Behind, which also stars Lea Thompson, Cassi Thomson, and former American Idol champion Jordin Sparks, is now available on Blu-Ray, DVD, and various streaming services.
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