Tyler Smith, director of Real Redemption and co-host of Battleship Retention, traces Hollywood’s fraught relationship with religion, from the 1960s shift away from biblical epics to The Passion of the Christ (2004) reviving faith-based cinema. He critiques modern films like Noah for superficial spirituality and praises First Reformed and Midnight Mass for depth, arguing today’s industry often prioritizes marketability over authenticity. His documentary, available on Faith Life TV ($5/month), suggests Hollywood’s struggle to balance profit with genuine religious storytelling remains unresolved. [Automatically generated summary]
So I'm really happy to have my pal Tyler Smith back on.
It's been a long time since we've talked to him.
He's a film critic, a college professor in LA.
He's written for a lot of outlets and he runs a co-host of podcasts Battleship Retention, which recently put out the book, The 101 Best Films of the 2010s.
But he's made a documentary called Real Redemption, which is about religion in films.
It got a rave review from Christian Toto at Hollywood in Toto.
Here is a trailer.
The story of the church's relationship with Hollywood is long, complicated, and even a little melodramatic.
This is my church!
The Bible, of course, is terrific, but for millions of people, pictures will be their reference point for the story.
While faith is a difficult concept to nail down visually, the impact of faith is not.
I want to compare faith to running in a race.
It's hard.
To show God is to limit him.
So when depicting God, the filmmaker has his work cut out for him.
Yes, why do we have to have evils?
I mean, it's something to do with free will.
The intersection of faith and film is more active, more aggressive, and more alive than ever before.
Why now?
Tyler Smith, it's good to see you.
How you doing?
Oh, I'm doing all right.
How are you?
All right.
Congratulations on that great review from Christian.
Oh, thank you very much.
So it's actually been reviewed by a number of outlets.
Only one had some bad stuff to say about it, which is Movie Guide, which is a Christian outlet.
But you know what?
Based on other stuff I've seen, I feel like I win.
Yeah, and they have a very narrow point of view.
I mean, they want very specific things.
And you have always said that just because it's Christian doesn't mean it's good.
And apparently in this documentary, you put that forward.
Hollywood's Tense Relationship with Religion00:11:58
But Hollywood has always had a kind of tense relationship with religion, right?
I mean, this is an actual history.
Yeah, absolutely.
The film is split up basically into two halves.
The first half is sort of history, and then the second half is, for lack of a better term, analysis.
And so it's just talking about the, yeah, tense is a good word for it, the tense or at least tenuous relationship between Hollywood and the church, which can mean, in this case, the Catholic Church, the Christian church, that sort of thing.
And then probably, I mean, honestly, probably around the 1960s or 70s is when it started to kind of split because of, I mean, I don't want to go through the entire history because everything leads to everything else, but essentially Hollywood, in an attempt to pull people away from television, they made some major stylistic changes like really embracing color and a different aspect ratio, that kind of thing.
But the thing that they realized is like, well, you know what?
Like when it comes to just what we can feature from a content standpoint, we've all just been agreeing not to incorporate sexuality, profanity, stuff like that.
Whereas TV is required not to do that.
So you know what?
Let's just drop this and embrace the rating system and we'll bring people in.
And that's literally what happened.
And then there was really, and the church felt, and of course it's silly to talk about the church as one monolithic thing.
So I'm speaking broadly, but like the church felt a little bit betrayed and felt like, well, we've always been sort of catered to, so why aren't you doing it now?
And then they say like, well, it's just about money.
It's like, well, it's about money to a certain extent.
But some filmmakers also really appreciated that level of freedom, like Martin Scorsese and that sort of thing.
So there's so many reasons.
But yes, it definitely parted ways probably around the 60s or 70s.
And it does seem to me that at some point, Hollywood actually had respect for actual religious content.
So Bing Crosby could be a lovable priest.
And, you know, the pictures about, like Ben-Hur was a very, very respectful picture about the Christ where you never see his face.
And there was all kinds of religious content, which seemed to be made almost by, if not by religious people, at least for religious people.
Yeah, it's, I mean, because if nothing else, like Hollywood, and there are multiple reasons, but like Hollywood loves spectacle.
And hey, the Bible is a big spectacle.
So it's like, let's have Ben-Hur.
Let's have like the Ten Commandments and stuff like that, because that gives us the opportunity to really have big movies.
And that's another, and even though that goes back to the silent era, like that's another thing that they have over TV or theater or something like that.
But yeah, and then sensibilities shift.
And I do think that within Hollywood, I think there was a respect for the audience because there had to be.
And then after a certain point, they realized, especially again, like in the 1960s, when they realized like we should try to go for a younger audience, I think they sort of opted out of that.
And whatever potential hostility was there maybe came a little bit more to the forefront.
And that's sort of where it has stayed.
And it's mutual, absolutely.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I was looking recently at the number of biblical films that were made right before the Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's Smash hit.
And there just weren't that many.
And they almost stopped making biblical films.
What did Gibson's film change?
I mean, it's so much stuff.
Like it's the model, the release model because he made it independently and he distributed it independently.
And of course, independently has to be in quotes because he was extremely wealthy, but he did it independent of major studios.
But it's certainly something he could afford.
But yeah, and I think it's just what really changed it was there was a lot of the story around the movie, like shopping it to studios and it being rejected and all that sort of thing.
And so that really sets up from a from a marketing standpoint, from a publicity standpoint, it sets up the us versus them.
And there's this idea, and it still sticks around a little bit with certain Christian films, this idea of let's show them.
Let's show them what they're missing and let's embrace these movies.
Sometimes they're really slick and really impactful, like The Passion of the Christ.
Other times I'll just say less so.
But either way, there is that feeling of we need to send them.
That's the big thing.
We need to send a message to Hollywood that we're an audience that deserves to be considered.
And I think the message has mostly been received.
Like you get Sony buying Pureflix, I feel like in the last year, even maybe just a few months ago.
And you have more films getting a green light.
And then you have a lot of studios sort of having their offshoot, like their faith-based offshoot studios.
And so I think it came as the case with anything.
I think Hollywood sort of forgot that the faith-based audience is an audience and that they can try to cater to them.
Sometimes they do it.
Sometimes they fail, like with Noah, a movie that I actually thought was pretty good and Exodus, Gods and Kings, which I was back and forth on.
And so like there's this, it's been an interesting thing to see in the last 10 to 15 years, like Hollywood trying to cater, not knowing how to cater and then being like, you know what, these people over here seem to know.
So we'll just give them money and they can do it because we're out of ideas.
You know, it's interesting that you say that.
And I had this funny experience.
The God King of the Daily Wire and I, Jeremy Boring, we collaborated on a script about Samson.
And Noah came out.
And I thought the problem with Noah to me was that God destroyed the world for environmental reasons instead of involving sin.
And, you know, with God and Kings, with the Moses picture, Christian Bale came out and said, Moses was a terrorist.
When we handed in the script to my agent, he said, this is the best biblical script I've read in 20 years, but biblical scripts don't make money.
And I said, well, they don't make money because you offend the people who are coming to see them.
It was almost as if Hollywood wanted to co-opt the Bible.
I mean, there is, I guess what I'm trying to get to is, isn't there an actual hostility toward religion and toward the faith-based community at some level of Hollywood?
I would say at various levels, but I don't think it's necessarily universal either.
I do think it's there, though.
And I think, you know, it's probably not a great cause.
Again, with Noah, visually gorgeous, that sequence in which he's telling like the story of the creation, which is just like this long montage, it's some of the most beautiful filmmaking I've ever seen.
But at the same time, if you're familiar with Darren Aronofsky, the filmmaker, he'd made like Requiem for a Dream.
And then he had made, after Noah, he made Mother with an exclamation point, which is also a fascinating film, but one that is absolutely suspicious.
You know what?
I won't even say suspicious.
It's hostile towards religion as audacious as it is.
And I do think that, yeah, there are people who are genuinely reluctant, if not just straight up stubborn, about not wanting to embrace religion the way so many other, the more like devout people do.
Like, yeah, we may put our own spin on it.
We can do that.
But yeah, we certainly don't want to make something just straightforward.
We don't want to make the Ten Commandments.
We'll find some other way to come at it because God forbid or not, we be this, we have anything in common with this group that we so seldom disagree with on many levels.
So one of the things about the people who are making religious pictures, the faith-based pictures, is that they tend to have a certain kind of same-ness, a kind of blithe optimism about life.
I mean, I saw God is not dead and a guy gets hit by a car and they don't even like stop to say, gee, that's kind of tragic.
It's like, oh, he's gone to heaven.
Hurrah.
Yeah.
They intersperse his death scene.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Incidentally, I wrote for Daily Wire like a year ago and I wrote a number of articles and I pitched an article to them of the worst movies of the 2010s because I had done an article of the best.
And I cite God's Not Dead as the worst on a number of levels.
As a Christian, I'd say it embarrasses me.
As a film fan, it infuriates me.
But yeah, there is the thing that tends to bother me about Christian film.
And in this documentary, I try to be as fair to Christian film as I am able to be.
But what bothers me is I don't think anybody's doing it on purpose, but I think it's a dishonesty.
I think it's people who say like, hey, we need to sell this.
We need to sell Christianity either to people who don't believe it or we need to affirm the people that do believe it.
And anytime you're trying to sell something, you're going to reduce it.
You can't help it.
And you're going to put as positive a spin on it as possible.
And so it's this idea.
Now, granted, that character does die and go to heaven, but he's been an atheist all the way through the film, like a very outspoken atheist.
So, in a way, like, yes, on one hand, it's a victory, but on the other, like, it's a triumph for him.
But it's also like, ha ha, see, when the chips, you know, when the chips are down, this hardcore atheist, he's going to agree with us.
And it's just that sort of thing.
Like, and I feel like it's starting to change even in the time since I put this documentary out, where you start to see a little bit more acknowledgement that, like, hey, just because you believe this doesn't mean your life is going to go great.
Like, there's no guarantee of that.
The Bible certainly doesn't guarantee it.
It simply guarantees you a deeper hope in order to get through that harder stuff.
But I feel like a lot of films for a long time were like, well, that's not going to sell.
So let's cheer this up a bit.
Yeah, you know, it's funny.
You know, there was a film that I kind of liked with Leonardo DiCaprio called Revenant.
And I thought that was.
Yeah, deeply religious film.
And I wrote about it and I just got lambasted.
I mean, for weeks, people were writing me hate mail.
How could you call this religious film with all the violence and language and all this stuff?
What do you like in terms of current religious films?
Are there films where you say, like, yes, that's the direction we should be going?
Oh, absolutely.
I'm a big fan of Terence Malik, and I know that a lot of people aren't.
He's not a story, even when he has a story to tell, he's not a story guy.
He's a feeling guy.
He's an ethereal guy.
And he, whether it be with Tree of Life or most recently, 2019, he made a hidden life, which I loved.
I absolutely loved it.
It's almost three hours long.
He gives it the epic treatment, even though it is the story of just one guy who refuses to, it's man for all seasons in that regard.
He refuses to publicly support Hitler, even though there are some religious figures in his town that are good with that.
And as a result, he winds up being put in jail and taken away from his family.
And it's a visually gorgeous film with wonderful acting.
And it really brings up this question because obviously, from a faith standpoint, we're very much in favor of living out our faith publicly.
But one thing that is said over and over again to him while he's in jail is no one is going to know about this.
No one is going to be inspired by your story because it's not going to get out.
And at the time, it didn't get out.
Epic Faith Drama00:01:10
Thankfully, it's out now.
But so movies like that.
And then I also find the movie First Reformed fascinating.
It's very complex, as one would expect, because it's written and directed by Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver.
And he wrote Last Temptation of Christ.
So like there is good stuff being made right now that is as complex as it should be.
And then I've also been hearing good stuff about Midnight Mass, but I haven't watched it yet.
Everyone says that I should watch it, but I haven't gotten a chance to see it.
It's funny.
I started and I thought it was going to be, I thought it was going to insult me.
And then I started getting calls that, no, no, it's really good.
So I'm going to go back to it and finish it.
Tyler Smith, and the film is called Real Redemption.
Where can we see it?
It is available on the Faith Life.
It's a very small streaming service, the Faith Life TV streaming service.
It's five bucks a month.
But don't tell anybody.
You can get two weeks free if you want.
And then just, I know we got to go, but I will say, I actually have another documentary I feel like you would find it interesting.
It's called Valley of the Shadow, The Spiritual Value of Horror.