Saving Lives Is 'Your Job'
Teen sex. Teen pregnancy. Parents who get divorced. Kids who cut. Hypocrisy. Depression. Suicide.
To Save a Life takes on these issues and more from an unmistakable but sometimes understated spiritual point of view. It is perhaps a glimpse at the future of Christian film, where inspirational themes stand alongside gritty reality, where Hollywood professionals deliver Sunday morning sermons—and where kids sometimes swear in church.
Plugged In had a chance to chat separately with To Save a Life's screenwriter, Jim Britts (a youth pastor at New Song Community Church in Oceanside, Calif.), and director, Brian Baugh (a professional cinematographer whose credits include An American Carol and The Ultimate Gift). The two talk about the film's making, its themes and why the high school party scenes had to look so fun.
Paul Asay: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us. Jim, you've got an interesting background for this film, being both a screenwriter and youth pastor. I'm guessing you showed the film to your kids. What did they think of it?
Jim Britts: They saw it kind of through two lenses. They absolutely loved the film, first of all. We've shown it to a lot of youth workers, too, and they loved it. But teenagers love it more than anybody. My kids loved it as a movie, [but lots of them were in it, too, so] every 12 seconds you hear someone go, 'Hey, that's me!' So I try to tell them that once it's in theaters and you have all your non-Christian friends there, you can't do that every 12 seconds or they're never going to get into the film.
Asay: I imagine you see quite a bit of yourself in there, too, not literally, but figuratively. How much of this was based on your real-life experiences as a youth pastor?
Britts: I would say every character was definitely based on a student that I have had in our ministry, and in writing the script, a bunch of the scenes were based on real life. The whole story isn't a true story, but I sure have had to pick up kids at parties before. The beer pong scene was actually based on a kid in our group who's now a leader in our junior high ministry. The first time he came to our church he came hung over. But he started going to our high school group and he became a Christian not too much later. He shared with me how he was the top beer pong player in the area and, just after accepting Christ, was in a match. It was the exact scene. He dropped the ball in the cup and walked away. What's cool is that that kid is actually the guy playing against Jake in that scene. That's his story and he got to be the guy in the scene.
Asay: I gotta say, though, that party almost looked a little too fun. You can definitely see the attraction of being a really good beer pong player.
Britts: That scene and the other party scene were the hardest for me to be a part of. Two or three times in between takes I had to say, "I have to remind you that this life leads to sorrow," because they were looking like they were having a lot of fun. It was hard for me as a youth pastor to watch, even though I knew they were acting.
Brian Baugh: Parties are fun and that is why you go to them: There's community there. That's what it was for me, and we had a great time—it just wasn't a time that was based in anything substantial. We received flak that the parties looked too fun, but they have to be fun or Jake wouldn't be giving anything up.
Britts: I have seen so many faith-based films where the party scenes look so dorky and cheesy it's hard to imagine that people would ever want to do this. But we really wanted to convey that what God can do in someone's life is so much better. People have no idea that it can get so much better than that.
Asay: Brian, what really drew you to this project? What made it something you wanted to be a part of?
Baugh: It was a hard decision, frankly. I wasn't excited about the low budget. …
Asay: I imagine you had to work with fewer digits than you're used to.
Baugh: Yeah, and I had just come off one of the bigger ones I had done. And it's always a risk working with people you don't know and people who hadn't done it before. But I just love doing things that—whether it's filmmaking or not—doing things that are a benefit to youth and the next generation, and this to me was a chance to do that and I had been busy enough that I hadn't been able to do that. … Another big component of it was that I felt a strong connection with what the main character was experiencing. It didn't completely parallel my life, but I had a lot of those similar experiences, and a lot of the scenes in the story and settings I could have taken from my own life.
Asay: For example?
Baugh: When I was just entering high school I had a friend commit suicide, so I knew some of the feelings surrounding that. In college I had another friend commit suicide, so just some of the things you go through as a bystander, wondering what you could have done.
Asay: That's one of the things that struck me about the movie was that feeling of powerlessness, a chance to maybe have made a difference in someone's life and not know how to do it. I think that is something a lot of people can understand.
Baugh: I think even more so when you care about this person—when you don't understand what they're going through. So, yeah, I think there was that connection. And then some of the transformation that [Jake] went through, I felt was similar to some of the things that I went through at that stage of life—being challenged with what you're going to live for and what's going to be important to you.
Asay: As a Christian film, this one felt pretty impressive—different from other Christian films I've seen. Was that your intention, to break away from that Christianese mold?
Britts: We never really set out to make a Christian film. We said we wanted to make a film for teenagers that would never set foot in a church but would go to the movies—something that would reach them. Obviously youth group kids love this film like crazy, but that was not my first thought.
My wife and I watched at least one faith-based film a week for the whole year before the movie was made, and I would say we learned a lot. One of our core values [in making the film] was for sure, cheesiness equals sin, and we said this thing has got to be very real. There are so many films out there for teenagers and most of them deal with the tough issues—even the non-faith-based ones—[but they have] real shallow characters and they laugh at some of these issues that we really dealt with seriously. We wanted to make a movie that mattered.
Baugh: In some ways I wish—and I probably shouldn't say this—that this movie was more subtle. I have the responsibility to tell a good, entertaining story, and if people happen to learn something from that, that's great. But I think if you tell a good story, inevitably that happens. If you start with that objective to teach, you end up telling a bad story.
Asay: One of the things that struck me was that the moment of conversion, when the main character is saved, takes place at about the mid-point of the movie, not at the very end, where we'd typically expect to see it. And, really, once Jake becomes a Christian, we see that his problems are just beginning.
Britts: It was totally intentional. A lot of teenagers pray a prayer at some point, and then nothing happens. This movie is much more about the discipleship than it is about the conversion, so that was intentional.
I've seen it a hundred times, where a student accepts Christ and then their world falls apart and then they blame it on God. If we've given them a faith where they believe that accepting Christ means everything is going to go great, then we've turned them away from God for the rest of their lives because God didn't deliver. And so I really wanted to paint that picture that [faith] is about trusting God, no matter what. The truth is that probably bad things will still happen, and are you going to trust God through that and do what's right anyway?
Asay: Faith is more a path than a destination, then, and the film's not trying to convert anybody.
Britts: We didn't set out to make a film that someone could walk out and become a Christian. Instead, I … wanted to make a film that would empower [teens] to share their faith. So if someone asks, "Why didn't the movie share the faith?" I say, "That's your job."
Baugh: Studies show it takes two years after someone has made a commitment to start learning what it means. It is a journey and we're all in various places.
Asay: There will be Christians who will be troubled by some of what they see in the film: the party scenes, the swearing—
Baugh: The [problem over] language is just befuddling to me. Here's a kid shooting his head off and you're concerned about a minor swear word in the 1940s. It's in some ways absurd. You have a kid cutting himself and you are concerned about a "d‑‑n" or an "a‑‑." We don't want to condone it, and we don't do it to be gratuitous, but one of my favorite comments in our critiques was from some kid from one of the high schools who said, 'Real people swear." He wanted more. There's a crowd we showed it to who wanted us to push it more. In some ways the fun and exasperating challenge of this movie is keeping both audiences happy. It's a real balancing act. You can't keep everyone happy.
Britts: There are probably no other screenwriters that pray over every curse word [they write], as I did. I don't cuss at all, and it's not cool in our ministry. There are just a couple times where we needed to put some B-rated curse words in there—we didn't go to the big ones—so it would be real. And if you look at it, most of them happen at the beginning of the film. Doug [the movie's bully] says one or two things at the beginning, and so he doesn't have to cuss for the rest of the movie because you already get, "Oh, this is a guy who does that." I learned that in screenwriting classes back in college. If you put a lot of violence in the first two minutes of the movie, you don't have to put violence later on because people get that, "Oh, that's what the nature of the film is like." So there are actually very few [bad] words. I wrote it in a way where I didn't have to put very many cuss words in there—just enough at the beginning so people would know this is real. And every kid in youth groups, unless they're home-schooled, are hearing much worse words every single day. It's reality.
Asay: Brian, as a filmmaker, what do you hope this movie accomplishes? What do you hope its impact will be?
Baugh: There are so many things. From the pure storytelling standpoint, I want people to enjoy the experience and the ups and downs of it, and enjoy the story in and of itself. Beyond that, it would be great to have people look around and just consider how they treat other people. Essentially, I think this is a film about reaching out to those on the margins and those that are hurting. The pie in the sky dream would be that people that are in a better, healthier place would have the courage to reach out to those who are hurting and ultimately to make a difference in those lives. In some ways we are all hurting, so we all need to do it for one another.
Read Plugged In's review of To Save a Life.