Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E248: The Untold Story of Maximilian Kolbe w/Anthony D’Ambrosio | Lila Rose Show

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E248: The Untold Story of Maximilian Kolbe w/Anthony D’Ambrosio | Lila Rose Show · The Lila Rose Show

• 0:00
  They were singing songs, they were praising God from inside of
• 0:02
  this starvation bunker. And I immediately realized like
• 0:05
  some sort of miracle of hope happened inside of that cell.
• 0:08
  He was God's face to these men and it felt like he was becoming
• 0:12
  God's face to me. How did you imagine and then
• 0:14
  write and direct the experience of starving to death?
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  I was experiencing extreme sleep deprivation for years, both the
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  torture of the sleep deprivation itself and then also the torture
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  of not knowing if it would ever end.
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  I really felt Colby saying I have picked you to do this
• 0:30
  movie. I've never made a movie before.
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  If you're going to ask me to do it, then you have to heal me.
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  What does singing sound like when you're starving to death in
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  a bunker after giving up your life for a stranger?
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  Today I sit down with Anthony Dambrosio, a young director who
• 0:47
  shares about his debut film, Triumph of the Heart.
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  Anthony shares about his own years of debilitating and
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  unexplained sickness, including years of almost no sleep.
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  During this time, Anthony had profound spiritual experiences
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  of Saint Maximilian Colby and felt called by God to make a
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  film about his life. Both this St. and this movie is
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  one that our culture needs to make sense of suffering and to
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  experience the transformative power of Jesus's love.
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  This is the real story of Saint Maximilian Colby.
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  Go to triumphoftheheart.com today to get your tickets and
• 1:21
  support this incredible film. Also, don't forget to subscribe
• 1:24
  to the channel. Thank you to all of you have
• 1:25
  been subscribing. The channel continues to grow
• 1:27
  because of all of you. Don't forget to like, subscribe
• 1:30
  and comment. Anthony Dombrosio, welcome to
• 1:33
  the podcast. I'm so grateful to be here.
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  I'm glad to be have another Italian on the show I.
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  Know paisan I. Love it.
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  And you're southern Italian, I think you're saying?
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  Southern Italian from Naples. Nice.
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  Yeah, pretty crazy and creative. Yeah, very creative, just a
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  little bit off the wall. When I was there first time
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  visiting my, my family, I asked my great aunt Renata, who's
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  like, you know, probably like 100 years old and she's, you
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  know, just completed her second autobiography.
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  So it's just kind of amazing. But she, I was like, are there
• 2:04
  police here? And she was like, it's like,
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  this is my kind of city. That is awesome.
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  Yeah, but a lover of beauty, a lover of culture.
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  So I'm, I'm grateful to be doing what I'm doing now.
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  I feel like it's a sort of a modern maturation of that, I
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  guess, Italian, Florentine kind of Renaissance approach to life,
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  so. Yes, huge congratulations on
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  your film that's out Triumph of the Heart.
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  It was incredible. It was it was gorgeous.
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  I might I'm always crying in the interview.
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  Sorry guys, but when there's beauty, you bring tears to your
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  eyes. But I was deeply moved and
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  surprised. I knew it was going to be
• 2:45
  quality because everybody was a quality film.
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  I like, you know, because, you know, you know, new
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  entrepreneurs in their films, sometimes you don't know what
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  you're going to get. I knew it was going to be
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  quality, but I was stunned by the quality of your film.
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  And it was moved. And a huge congratulations
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  because that is an incredible labor of love.
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  Yeah. Thank you so much.
• 3:01
  Let's go ahead and take a look at the trailer.
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  Come. On go ahead.
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  What are we here to do? I can.
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  No. You are here to break the wheel
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  of Poland so the Reich may reset the bone.
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  You know the rules. I will choose 10 of you to
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  starve until the missing prisoner is found.
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  Or until death. This is fun.
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  I can see you now. I can take his place.
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  Where have you been these past two years to believe in heaven
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  or God? Certainly you couldn't have been
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  living in this world. We have our voices, we must hold
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  on to our hope, don't give up, finish the race.
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  This is not possible to tell me how is this in the life?
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  I believe that somehow at the other side of this savage life,
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  everyone always gone before us is watching, beholding this
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  moment. To treat a torture scene in the
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  Holocaust, but to bring make something beautiful out of it,
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  out of it that's watchable and yet real is really tough to do.
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  And you did it. Yeah, I had a lot of people who
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  were like Anthony, don't please don't do this for your first
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  film. You have you can't do this and
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  not do it perfectly. You can you can do like, you
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  know, if you want to do some sort of faith-based thing like
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  orphans winning a sports tournament, like that's what you
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  should try for your first. A little more forgiving than an
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  Auschwitz movie, but a torture, yeah, like 12 Angry Men style in
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  one, in one sort of constrained place.
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  It's a, it's a very difficult, I guess, way to thread a needle.
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  But I think that somehow we were given the grace to to sort of
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  pull it off and it came together, Miracle, miracles and
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  much better than we deserve to have made.
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  But I think that's God definitely supplied the grace
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  where that met human weakness. So I'm excited to get into the
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  film and we're going to watch a few scenes from this film, if
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  that's OK. I don't know.
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  If we I. Don't know if we like talked
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  about that in advance, but I wanted to do that with you.
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  But I wanted to, there's a lot of back story here about why you
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  made this film because you were an entrepreneur, you had a
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  marketing agency or you have, I should say.
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  And then you get into film and it was very much a calling.
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  You felt called to do this. So I want to hear that story.
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  And also I love that you were talking about Naples being
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  Italian. I do feel like God has a special
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  gifting that he gives certain people.
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  And Italians clearly historically have been given
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  that. And you're, you're living that
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  today, which I love. Yeah, I do love that.
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  I love, you know, I think that being an artist is, is always
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  this sort of risky thing, not the responsible direction to
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  take in life. But for those of us who care
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  about culture and who care about restoring Western values,
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  Christian values to culture, it's one of those I guess roles
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  that we as Catholics, as Christians have not sort of
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  taken. We haven't sort of gone on the
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  crusade to, to regain that pride of place that we once had, I
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  think as the the leaders in art and culture.
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  And so I am super grateful to just be a part of, I think a new
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  renaissance that is taking place as we speak of amazing art
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  that's being created to, I guess, bring the the glory of
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  God to the culture. It's beautiful, yeah.
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  I think about the, you know, obviously the great art of, you
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  know, that originated in Italy. I think about the Sistine
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  Chapel, of course, and we have beautiful searches throughout
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  all of Italy, especially in Rome.
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  And everywhere you go, there's the works of the masters and
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  these, this was art that was oriented towards glory and God
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  bringing God to God glory. And even in Naples there's that.
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  Have you been to that hidden kind of museum that the Princess
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  of Naples? They paid for that where there's
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  the OK, this is great. So the only reason I know about
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  this is my husband lived in Naples for two years with the
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  Navy. So he's very Italian, a file
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  guy. Thankfully for me, I'm Italian,
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  but there's this beautiful little museum and it has the
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  Jesus Christ, this incredibly lifelike sculpture of Jesus with
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  the wrapped in his shroud, the Veiled Christ.
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  This is the image right here, The Veiled Christ 1753 marble
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  sculpture by Giuseppe San Martino and located in the sense
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  of Vero Chapel in Naples, Italy. And it was one of the most
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  incredible things I've ever seen.
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  This is it right here, but it's just the.
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  The you've. Probably seen this image.
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  I mean, when you're in Naples, but no one really knows about
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  this because people don't usually go to Naples for the
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  art. And this is there.
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  But what's so compelling is this was basically the the, the, the
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  wealth and the power of the day. The Princess of Naples would
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  Commission the great artists and it would be religious art.
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  And you are following in the footsteps by creating today's
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  religious art form feature film and doing it to bring incredible
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  glory to God. And it takes a tremendous amount
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  of investment to do that. Yeah, it's one of the things
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  that I, I find to be almost just so fascinating about this
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  project is that generally speaking, when you want to make
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  a film, it's it's like making a cathedral.
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  The investment is actually kind of similar.
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  If you think about perhaps what Cabrini cost to make, that was
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  like a $40 million project and we did ours for $500,000.
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  Are you kidding? I did not know that.
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  Yeah, that film was $500,000. $500,000 to make it.
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  And that's because everybody that was sort of rallying around
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  it was doing it on mission. There was no billionaire behind
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  it. There was no sort of Medici.
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  But there was this ecosystem of of young magnanimous many people
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  that you know in Dallas who are sort of who will be the Medici's
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  of the next sort of century, I guess, but who right now are
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  just sort of able to put $5000.10 thousand dollars,
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  $20,000 behind something that is unique and interesting.
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  And when they came across my project, there's a whole kind of
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  cohort of people and Catholic investors, businessmen in one
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  city in Dallas, TX, that really got behind it and made sure that
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  this thing happened. But really it's, it's been a
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  crowdfunded, crowdsourced project from the heart of the
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  church. The people who made it are all
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  like young youth missionaries who were like doing young adult
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  ministry and youth ministry before and, and figured out how
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  to put on events and figured out how to do things on a budget.
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  And we all went to Poland to make this thing together.
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  But it's it's not been done in the typical way that I think
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  films have been made. And part of what allowed it to
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  be, I think, well done is the fact that it was completely
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  outside of any of these normal systems by which films are are
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  both created. But also sort of squashed in
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  that there was no sort of studio or no single voice that could
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  rub out the Catholicism from it or rub out the the, I guess the
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  unique characteristics that really made it authentic to the
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  story that we're trying to tell. Tell me about your background
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  and when you were first inspired by Maximilian Colby.
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  St. Maximilian Colby.
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  Yeah, I so I grew up Catholic. I'm one of those, you know,
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  Catholic homeschooled kids that ran around with massive glasses
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  and just sort of a brain on a stick, you know, like I read all
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  the time and didn't really. I was just very socially awkward
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  and all that. My dad is a a theologian and I
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  eventually went to seminary and launched out actually right
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  around the time that I was going into into youth ministry was
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  when a lot of your kind of videos were coming out and I was
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  deeply, deeply inspired. I wanted to be in the pro-life
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  movement and start really like making an impact politically.
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  And when I started doing youth ministry, I realized that we had
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  a couple of these events where we did live sonograms for the
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  kids. And I had about 404 hundred
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  youth, high school youth that were there watching these live
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  sonograms. And I just realized that no
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  matter what I told them, I needed to show them what truth
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  was. They had to sort of experience
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  it in a tangible way. And I knew from that moment that
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  the impact that I wanted to make was to show people in some way,
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  like experience, help them experience the truth rather than
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  going directly at the, at the problem or whatever through more
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  of that, like apologetic or intellectual discourse.
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  But during that time, as I was sort of preparing for, you know,
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  how am I going to get into media, I became very, very ill
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  with a chronic illness that nobody knew how to diagnose.
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  One of these things that just sort of was a mystery to
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  everybody. And one of the, the, the
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  hallmarks of it or the the more difficult symptoms was the
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  complete inability to sleep. We after many, many years, it
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  took about a decade to diagnose, but it was a chronic fungal
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  infection. And the way that that the toxins
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  that it was creating, they sort of shut off all of the hormonal
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  processes that allow for sleep to happen.
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  And so I was experiencing like extreme, extreme sleep
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  deprivation for years. And in the midst of that, I was
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  about to get engaged and was sort of about to go on the
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  speaker circuit and had all of these things in front of me that
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  were like my life was about to really get started, if that
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  makes sense. And then it all kind of fell
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  apart all at the, this moment. And in the midst of that and in
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  the midst of the suffering there, I really lost my faith.
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  I lost a even a desire to live in the, in the sort of ongoing
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  kind of torture. And I came across the one thing
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  that I could do was I could write.
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  And so I was doing some freelance writing for some
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  different entrepreneurs in the area that were kind of throwing
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  me a bone. One of them was Catholic and he
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  had dedicated his practice to Saint Maximo and Colby.
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  And I was writing a biography, a small little biography on the
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  about page for this website and I found on the Wikipedia page of
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  all places, as I was doing research for Maximilian Colby.
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  I had known that this is a St. who gave his life in Auschwitz.
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  Of course, Polish priest brought into Auschwitz stood up in a
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  lineup and decided to to volunteer to take a man's place
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  in a starvation bunker. But that's about as much as I've
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  known. But what I found out was that he
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  lived for 14 days without food or water after that, and that
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  there were other men inside of that cell who lived all the way
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  to the point where they were executed together because they
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  were singing songs, They were praising God from inside of this
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  starvation bunker. And I immediately realized that
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  some sort of miracle of hope happened inside of that cell.
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  I think particularly because of my vantage point from being
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  somebody who was in that moment in despair, who lost my faith,
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  who couldn't see how God could be a good God if he allowed this
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  kind of thing to happen. I, I couldn't imagine what those
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  men would have had to be given in terms of grace to, to stay
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  alive for 14 days and to sing songs and to praise God in the
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  midst of that starvation bunker. And I just began to be haunted
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  by the story and found myself every time I woke up in the
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  middle of the night in terror, like going in my meditation to
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  being inside of the starvation bunker and asking Colby this
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  simple question, which is why? Why live in all of this?
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  Why continue to live? Why continue to have faith in
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  God and have hope if our lives are now sort of shut out from
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  the world and no one can see? And it seems to be that there's
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  no point, that there's no meaning in this suffering.
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  And it felt to me that his answers were, were clearly made
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  by his very presence, that he was God's face to these men.
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  And it felt like he was becoming like God's face to me in the
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  midst of my own sort of dark night of the soul.
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  And over time, as I meditated on this, I began to to heal and I
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  began to find even though my illness was not being, my
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  illness was not being healed, that my heart and my soul and my
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  spirit was by love. And the writing, the process of
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  developing the script and sort of the calling to make the movie
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  all be always sort of nursed in this, I guess, in this sort of
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  dark night where God was healing me.
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  And I realized that this story could be healing for others as
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  well if if I was sort of loyal to it and gave myself to it.
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  So when you're describing these, this period of time, you're,
• 17:53
  you, you mentioned chronic sleep deprivation and use the word
• 17:56
  torture. What, what did that look like?
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  You're, you're only able to sleep a few hours at a time.
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  You're always exhausted. What?
• 18:03
  What was that looking and feeling like for you at the
• 18:04
  time? Yeah, so it was about 20 minutes
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  to 2 hours a night that I could get of sleep.
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  Of sleep. Total, yeah.
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  And I would wake up out of that, whatever, however much it was
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  from like the worst nightmares you could possibly imagine into
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  a panic attack. And I'm not sure exactly like
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  why that was the case, but it was like a timer.
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  It just happened every single night.
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  And until I was able to get medication many, many years
• 18:34
  later, that just was every day and every night.
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  So it was very debilitating and very lonely because in the
• 18:44
  greatest time of suffering, nobody else is awake.
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  So there's nobody to talk to. And I have to sort of find
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  something to do for the next sort of, you know, 5-6 hours
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  until daylight comes, you know, And so that was I think there,
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  there was both the torture of, of the sleep deprivation itself
• 19:04
  and then also the torture of not knowing if it would ever end.
• 19:07
  I think that part was the hardest because there were just
• 19:11
  no sort of medical answers that were coming.
• 19:13
  And you mentioned you found out later what the issue was.
• 19:17
  So it was like a fungal infection of some kind that was
• 19:20
  preventing sleep hormones from flooding your body.
• 19:23
  I mean, obviously, I don't know, I'm no expert on any of that,
• 19:26
  But when did you end up finding that out?
• 19:30
  How many years did you go waking up every single night after just
• 19:34
  20 minutes to 2 hours of sleep in a panic attack?
• 19:37
  I mean, it sounds madding like. It was madding.
• 19:40
  I mean, that was that was exactly the experience.
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  And I think that's part of why I was able to authentically tell
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  the story. I might not have been starving
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  for food, but having something that's like a core function of
• 19:55
  your body removed sleep is perhaps a similar is similar
• 20:01
  enough to have an idea of what it might have been like to to
• 20:04
  have food removed and not to be able to eat for 14 days the way
• 20:07
  that these men were were starved with Kobe.
• 20:11
  But I think, yeah, it was about a decade where I didn't, I
• 20:18
  didn't have any sort of. Answers for what was happening.
• 20:23
  There were certain times when it sort of calmed down and I was
• 20:26
  able to to have like a brief respite.
• 20:29
  You also mentioned an engagement and it sounds like that was
• 20:32
  broken off, right? And were those things connected?
• 20:36
  If you're a, you know, open to sharing.
• 20:39
  Yeah, I, I was about to get engaged with the person that I
• 20:42
  had, you know, fallen madly in love with and that I was, had
• 20:46
  been pursuing for the the last few years.
• 20:49
  And the experience of the illness hit just sort of at that
• 20:55
  moment where we were about to get engaged and the like you
• 21:02
  sort of mentioned it was madding.
• 21:04
  I could not function as a like normal human being anymore.
• 21:10
  And that, at least for me, I was like, I cannot sort of hold on
• 21:14
  to this relationship and move into marriage like this.
• 21:18
  And I had hoped that that would be sort of a short term, like,
• 21:21
  you know, we'll kind of break up for now.
• 21:23
  And if I'm able to figure this out fast enough, I can't before
• 21:26
  somebody else picks you up, I can get, you know, come back to
• 21:29
  this. And it of course, like, didn't
• 21:31
  work out that way. And so I had to sort of watch
• 21:34
  her move on and, and marry a friend of mine and, and to, to
• 21:39
  have to let go of sort of the dreams and career that I, I
• 21:42
  thought that I was going to have and to do so just without any
• 21:47
  sense of whether or not this would, you know, be healed or to
• 21:50
  change. And so that lasted for many
• 21:54
  years actually, until I went to Poland and finished the script
• 22:00
  and. You were still experiencing
• 22:03
  debilitating sleep deprivation. Yes, yes, yeah, that was in
• 22:07
  2022. I was in Poland and I was in
• 22:11
  Auschwitz on Colby's feast day and I they have all of this, all
• 22:19
  of the Poles from around there and process to Auschwitz and in
• 22:23
  front of the the starvation bunker they have a mass.
• 22:28
  And it was one of the most powerful experiences of God's
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  sort of presence and triumph over evil that I could, I've
• 22:35
  ever experienced. Sitting on the doorstep, really,
• 22:38
  that's where I was sitting for the vantage point was like on
• 22:41
  the doorstep of the the prison block that was like this torture
• 22:46
  prison block where Doctor Mingo's horrible science
• 22:50
  experiments were happening, where Colby was tortured, where
• 22:53
  the death wall was. And we're singing the songs that
• 22:55
  Colby and the men inside of the cell would have been singing.
• 22:59
  And praising God and having this like mass and as I went up to
• 23:03
  reverence the cell at the end of mass and then to reverence the
• 23:07
  first class relic that kind of everybody processes in and does
• 23:10
  this like it's a Good Friday mass.
• 23:13
  I really felt Kobe saying, I've picked you to do this movie and
• 23:18
  to tell my story. And I was like, I I now realize
• 23:25
  the gravitas, the weight of this story.
• 23:28
  It's not just a personal story. This is a national hero.
• 23:33
  And I'm not Polish like I do. I have I've, I've never made a
• 23:36
  movie before. How could I be the one that
• 23:39
  you're picking to, to do this? If you're going to ask me to do
• 23:43
  it, then you have to heal me. And I came back from, from
• 23:48
  Poland and I went to a, a pro-life health clinic, Catholic
• 23:53
  pro-life health health clinic that had done a bunch of
• 23:55
  different like off the wall tests.
• 23:58
  And they found this fungal infection a month later, gave me
• 24:02
  medication and it just sort of evaporated and I could sleep for
• 24:07
  the first time in, in years and years and years.
• 24:09
  So it was just kind of amazing and got the first investments
• 24:13
  for the movie and just found myself in Poland a year later
• 24:17
  shooting it. It was just sort of this
• 24:19
  amazing, like conveyor belt of grace, just like it happened
• 24:23
  immediately. So I could tell that there was
• 24:25
  something about I guess this whole process that God was like
• 24:28
  preparing, preparing me for without really giving me the
• 24:33
  full vision of what what was going to happen.
• 24:36
  But when when God moves, he got, he moves real hard, you know, So
• 24:41
  it's amazing. Anthony, what was it like to get
• 24:44
  a night of sleep for the first time in years?
• 24:48
  What was that like? It felt like having been
• 24:54
  abandoned on a desert island and or sort of being out at sea and
• 25:00
  being rescued and coming back to land for the first time after,
• 25:05
  you know, being alone in this sort of deserted island for
• 25:10
  years or something. That was what it felt like it it
• 25:13
  I slept for two months straight like I would I would be in in
• 25:16
  meetings and fall asleep mid sentence and it was like very
• 25:21
  annoying, but it was amazing. And after about two months of of
• 25:26
  that kind of constant sleep, I was like back to human
• 25:31
  functioning normal life. It's incredible.
• 25:34
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 25:35
  I think about how forms of torture are used to keep people
• 25:39
  awake to just psychologically destroy them.
• 25:41
  And you how many years total was that season of not sleeping
• 25:44
  because of the infection? It was about 8 years, yeah.
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  pro-life movement. I know you shared the incredible
• 28:45
  moment when you go to Poland in 2022 and you're at this mass and
• 28:48
  you, it's a, it's the onset for not only your healing, but the
• 28:52
  film and feeling like St. Colby told you you're going to
• 28:55
  do this film for me, that's crazy.
• 28:58
  But there was another. Was there another encounter that
• 29:00
  you had had with Maximilian Colby before that?
• 29:03
  I think there was there a dream that you had or another?
• 29:07
  There were many moments. I mean, I think when I first
• 29:13
  found this, I guess these details in that Wikipedia page,
• 29:19
  I would wake up like I shared, I would wake up out of these
• 29:24
  nightmares and sort of a panic attack, but in extreme sleep
• 29:28
  deprivation. The same way that if you've ever
• 29:30
  gone on a silent retreat for 10 days or done a very, like very
• 29:36
  rigid water fast, the veil between heaven and earth and the
• 29:41
  spiritual world and the material world becomes very blurry and
• 29:46
  very porous. You can sort of touch and feel
• 29:49
  and, and see through it. And at that time, I was not able
• 29:54
  to fully sleep, but I was not able to fully wake up either.
• 29:57
  And so the experiences of, of waking up and then meditating on
• 30:03
  the cell felt like I was sort of sitting in this dark room next
• 30:08
  to Maximilian Colby. And I had this over these, the
• 30:15
  course of this time, I had these moments where I would in the in
• 30:19
  the movie, there's all of these different characters that have
• 30:23
  all of these different perspectives on God.
• 30:25
  And one is all about like justice and one is all about
• 30:30
  sort of this atheistic kind of angry despair.
• 30:34
  And all of those voices were were my voices.
• 30:37
  All of these scenes were like moments that I had experiences
• 30:41
  or sort of visions of, of being inside of the cell and having
• 30:44
  dialogues with Maximo and Colby there.
• 30:47
  So there wasn't not there was not one particular moment of
• 30:51
  this like, you know, breakthrough.
• 30:52
  It was this overtime experiencing Colby's presence in
• 30:57
  the midst of my darkness and realizing that God's answer to
• 31:03
  suffering is not to take it away.
• 31:07
  It's to enter into it with you, to send His like His presence
• 31:13
  and His love to show you how to shoulder your cross and to move
• 31:21
  through it to find redemption and healing and, and grace even
• 31:25
  in the midst of it. And that's what Colby was doing
• 31:28
  for the other men in that cell and also for me.
• 31:31
  And so that was, I think, the the thing that really woke my
• 31:34
  heart back up. So was it almost a a daily
• 31:38
  occurrence during this time that you're thinking about Maximilian
• 31:41
  Colby? How often was he in your heart
• 31:44
  or mind or kind of in these like half waking half sleeping
• 31:47
  moments of pure exhaustion? Eventually it was every day
• 31:52
  because I began to use the the writing of the scripts to to
• 31:58
  survive the night. Like that became the way that I
• 32:01
  channelled all of that into something that was, I guess, a
• 32:04
  prayer and the way that I survived ultimately.
• 32:10
  When you were in Poland at this healing mass, had you come there
• 32:17
  to scout locations for the film? I, it was not even that close to
• 32:23
  being a reality to me. I, I think that I, I couldn't
• 32:27
  really believe in that. I knew that I was writing
• 32:30
  something that was pretty powerful at that point, but I
• 32:34
  couldn't, I didn't have the faith to believe that I could
• 32:38
  really make a movie and do it justice.
• 32:41
  But I went there with just a sense that if I was going to
• 32:47
  fully tell the story of Colby in the script, at the very least I
• 32:53
  needed to be among the people who knew him.
• 32:57
  And one of the things that I think is difficult about telling
• 33:01
  the story of the scene is that most of the documentation that
• 33:04
  you get about that person historically is sort of filtered
• 33:07
  through the canonization process when everybody is trying to put
• 33:11
  their best foot forward, you know, their hometown hero, they
• 33:13
  want them to be a St. And so they're not going to
• 33:16
  share the foibles at that point. And those foibles are the things
• 33:20
  that sort of make them relatable.
• 33:22
  If a character in a movie doesn't have a flaw, sort of
• 33:24
  like how all the girl boss movies suck, right?
• 33:28
  Like if they don't have a flaw, they're actually completely
• 33:30
  remote. And I think it's the same reason
• 33:33
  why most, hey, Ography is terrible is that we don't ask
• 33:38
  who was the human being behind and this archetypal hero, what
• 33:43
  were the things that they had to struggle with and go through to
• 33:46
  sort of reach the victory that we now know them for?
• 33:51
  And for me, I knew that I didn't fully have that locked in.
• 33:55
  And I went to live with the Friars in in Yeppukalana, which
• 34:00
  is the Friary that I founded, and then also in Ashwichem,
• 34:04
  which is the Friary that sort of was birthed next to Auschwitz,
• 34:09
  both of those. Days.
• 34:11
  Exactly right. And so as I interviewed the
• 34:15
  historians who kind of maintain the archives and and then also
• 34:20
  some of the Friars who are very closely kind of connected to
• 34:24
  the, there's just like one generation removed from Colby.
• 34:27
  They, their memory of who he was is very, very fleshy.
• 34:32
  Like the way that a family member finally remembers
• 34:36
  somebody who is very important to the family, but who also is
• 34:39
  very flawed. And I think I was able to kind
• 34:42
  of digest that. But it was while I was there
• 34:46
  that I really felt like God was saying, this is going to happen,
• 34:49
  you know, and I'm going to, I'm going to move heaven and earth
• 34:52
  to, to make this thing come together.
• 34:55
  And I had no idea what I was sort of about to embark upon,
• 34:59
  but I got a sense that it was something rather large.
• 35:04
  And so when you're hanging out with these Friars, they're
• 35:07
  people that knew Maximilian Colby or they knew the people
• 35:10
  that knew him. What was the connection?
• 35:12
  Yeah, one generation removed in that the most of the Friars who
• 35:17
  actually knew him are have now passed away.
• 35:21
  And if there were, if there are any left, they wouldn't have
• 35:25
  been people that I could actually like dialogue with an
• 35:27
  interview. So the the, the person who is in
• 35:32
  charge of, they call him the guardian, the one in next to
• 35:37
  Auschwitz Ashwich him. He knew priests who knew Colby,
• 35:43
  who are sort of contemporaries of him and were mentored by
• 35:45
  them. And so he sort of had the oral
• 35:47
  tradition of the community to to share with me when I was
• 35:52
  interviewing him. So tell me about you've become
• 35:55
  an expert. You could argue the expert on
• 35:58
  Maximilian Colby. You've spent years now studying
• 36:01
  every detail of his life so you could accurately depict him in
• 36:04
  your first film. And there were a lot of scenes
• 36:07
  in the movie that were flashbacks.
• 36:09
  You know, there was this beautiful woven tapestry between
• 36:13
  them in the cell and the ongoing events of the camp.
• 36:17
  And they're really torture. You know, again, how you did
• 36:20
  that, where you made it, you made it watchable, but real like
• 36:23
  that. Because I to be honest, I was
• 36:24
  like, do I want to watch 14 men starve to death in a cell right
• 36:27
  now? Like.
• 36:28
  No one is not. Evil in the world.
• 36:31
  But I was like, OK, I I've heard great things.
• 36:33
  I know this is going to be good so I'm going to give it a shot
• 36:36
  and it was it was beautifully watchable, which again is feet
• 36:40
  in and of itself like the nuance there.
• 36:43
  And you lived it in your sleepless deprivation, the
• 36:45
  torture you experienced. You learned how to live in a way
• 36:48
  torture, but to sanctify it and you that you brought that to the
• 36:51
  filmmaking, which was really remarkable.
• 36:54
  You know, it's hard to even explain it.
• 36:56
  You have to watch it. But you're studying the life of
• 36:59
  Maximilian Colby. You're hanging out with the
• 37:02
  Friars that knew people that knew him.
• 37:06
  Tell me about him because I read the Wikipedia myself, right?
• 37:09
  And I think, OK, you know, he, he was a writer.
• 37:13
  He was advocating for the Jewish people.
• 37:15
  He was like kind of an advocate and activist.
• 37:17
  You could say he was obviously a, a priest, a man of God, and
• 37:21
  he ends up in the camp and he gives us life for this man.
• 37:23
  And it's all very inspiring, but you're like, I could never, you
• 37:26
  know, Plus he was super talented.
• 37:28
  Like he was a phenomenal writer and everything else and media
• 37:31
  person. Like he was a very big media
• 37:32
  person, actually. He was an incredible
• 37:35
  entrepreneur and had this this mind for engineering.
• 37:38
  Really, I think that he anybody that's trying to make AAI guess
• 37:44
  a venture into media as a Catholic has to be sort of this
• 37:50
  combination of a poet and a general.
• 37:52
  And Maximilian Colby was very much that.
• 37:55
  He had this amazing brain and mind for logistics, for rallying
• 38:01
  and galvanizing people, but also a vision for how to use art and
• 38:06
  media to bring forward forward the gospel.
• 38:09
  And I think that one of the most important things about his life
• 38:14
  is that he is Polish, you know, and a lot of people you, you
• 38:18
  kind of have to go to Poland to sort of understand this.
• 38:20
  But the Polish identity as a political identity is very
• 38:24
  different from this, this sort of bifurcated American identity
• 38:28
  where you have your civic and you have your religious.
• 38:32
  Their identity as Polish people is, is very Catholic.
• 38:36
  And whether or not they actually believe in the, in the church or
• 38:40
  in the faith of the tendency of the church, that's sort of one
• 38:43
  thing. But you at least have to sort of
• 38:46
  give reverence to Mother Mary, you know, and she's your queen.
• 38:49
  She's the queen of Poland. That's, that's the Mama.
• 38:53
  That's, that's sort of the identity of Poland.
• 38:55
  And you can't take one away from the other.
• 38:58
  And so when Poland is sort of squashed between Russia, where
• 39:03
  communism is, is sort of running through it like wildfire.
• 39:08
  And as he grew up, it was Poland was actually sort of absorbed in
• 39:14
  inside Russia. It did not have its freedom.
• 39:16
  And then Germany next to it, where mass media is sort of
• 39:21
  propagating this sort of terrible, I guess, new
• 39:26
  totalitarianism, authoritarianism, atheistic sort
• 39:31
  of fascism. Colby sees that it's necessary
• 39:35
  for Poland's identity for there to be sort of a media initiative
• 39:41
  that combats both of those things with the same medium and
• 39:45
  same, I guess, the same enthusiasm and excellence that
• 39:50
  they are able to bring to bear. And so he is sort of as a Friar
• 39:55
  without any funding or any experience, just it's like I'm
• 39:59
  going to start a newspaper and ultimately grows that over the
• 40:03
  course of a few years to becoming one of the biggest
• 40:06
  media syndicates in Poland. And he even helped to engineer
• 40:10
  new innovations in printing presses at the time in order to
• 40:15
  in order to fulfill his ambition.
• 40:18
  They had a a daily syndicate of a million polls, I think by the
• 40:23
  time the war happened daily. If you think about like the
• 40:26
  logistics of that, yeah, a million printed, printed things.
• 40:30
  Newspapers for the Polish people.
• 40:32
  And he was the founder and editor in chief.
• 40:35
  Yeah, it's wild. He had the largest Friary in the
• 40:39
  world at the time. When he sort of accomplishes all
• 40:43
  of this, he has, he gets bored, as entrepreneurs do, I guess,
• 40:47
  and decides not to expand to Europe.
• 40:50
  He's not like, oh, I'm going to go to like start a new syndicate
• 40:53
  in Russia or Germany. It's like, I'm going to go to
• 40:55
  the place where in the church, historically it is absolutely
• 40:59
  the hardest to evangelize, which is Japan and starts a a new
• 41:04
  Friary with a new sort of mission newspaper in Japan.
• 41:08
  And that is, I think, one of the craziest stories of, of all
• 41:13
  time, that he was able to find somebody to help him translate
• 41:16
  Polish to Japanese. I, I just can't even imagine the
• 41:21
  complexity. Like, where do you even find
• 41:22
  that person? It's crazy.
• 41:23
  There's like no AI, no cell phone, this is all done pre
• 41:27
  Internet, you know, and he's literally traveling to Japan and
• 41:30
  doing this from scratch with very limited resources.
• 41:33
  In under a year. So obviously he's a an
• 41:37
  incredible leader, but I think that the the things that make
• 41:42
  him human. If you actually kind of peel the
• 41:45
  curtain back and look at what his life was like and what his
• 41:48
  brothers sort of said about him and sort of the conflicts there
• 41:51
  is that any person who wants to take on a sort of Goliath of the
• 41:57
  world like this. And this might be something that
• 41:59
  you can relate with. Certainly for me, is that you
• 42:02
  have to make sacrifices that are almost unimaginable to other
• 42:06
  people who are sort of doing the 9:00 to 5:00 and kind of living
• 42:08
  their normal lives. And he had to inspire people
• 42:11
  around him to to go to those lengths as well.
• 42:14
  But knowing how far to push as a leader is actually a really
• 42:20
  difficult line to walk. And I would say that if if you
• 42:25
  could sort of point out like, what is the one thing that Colby
• 42:29
  really needed to learn through the course of his life?
• 42:34
  It it actually comes to its climax when he is in Auschwitz,
• 42:39
  in that he gave everything to this paper, to this media
• 42:44
  initiative, the sacrifices that he had to make, the sort of
• 42:48
  galvanizing that he had to do, the things that he had to call
• 42:52
  out of the people around him. He even there was this joke that
• 42:58
  Colby loved the printing presses more than he loved the people in
• 43:02
  his care. Because even when he was in
• 43:06
  Japan, there was this sort of famous episode where he almost
• 43:12
  kill everybody. Like he was spending all of the
• 43:16
  money that they would raise on the maintenance of the presses,
• 43:21
  on the printing, the ink, the paper, the logistics and the the
• 43:26
  Friars were all getting sick. Of course, like the tropical,
• 43:30
  the tropical sort of thing is very different than the Polish
• 43:33
  environment. So I just imagine kind of the
• 43:36
  difficulty of like changing your diet from the Polish diet to the
• 43:40
  Japanese. Diet sausage and potatoes.
• 43:42
  Yeah, that's not, you know, raw fish, right?
• 43:45
  So everybody's sick. He's got tuberculosis, so he's
• 43:48
  bedridden for months. But he's still like, work or.
• 43:51
  Work. Yeah, exactly.
• 43:53
  And so he ultimately actually is sort of like demoted and
• 43:57
  somebody else has put, these are sort of like 2 dimensional ways
• 44:01
  of saying the story, but he's demoted because he's he's
• 44:04
  pushing too hard and everybody is, is getting sick and they
• 44:07
  need something to sort of moderate that intensity.
• 44:11
  And when he comes back to Poland, he's not really given
• 44:15
  the same sort of like leadership that he had before that
• 44:18
  eventually comes. But he, I think is very humbled
• 44:21
  by this and the tone and sort of timbre of his letters and his
• 44:25
  writings and his leadership really begins to change and
• 44:29
  change and shift towards this very tender, more personal kind
• 44:34
  of presence. And ultimately, I think that God
• 44:38
  was doing something in him that was like, OK, have birthed this
• 44:41
  massive media initiative, but now it's all going to be
• 44:46
  destroyed. God takes all of it away.
• 44:49
  He watches his beloved Poland, basically steamrolled by
• 44:54
  Germany. When they look like they're
• 44:55
  completely at the zenith of power.
• 44:58
  There's no way that anybody could do anything to about it.
• 45:02
  The Allies are not in the war yet, so it's just complete
• 45:05
  catastrophe. He loses his life's work, and
• 45:08
  ultimately what's called out of him is a single act of love.
• 45:13
  And he has that sort of famous line.
• 45:15
  A single act of love can make a return, a soul return to life.
• 45:19
  And that really became sort of prophetic for what he did in
• 45:25
  Auschwitz, that it was this one act to descend into hell with
• 45:32
  these nine other men, to love them, to lead them in prayer and
• 45:35
  songs, to sort of nurse their souls back to life.
• 45:38
  That sort of spread like a wildfire, almost became this
• 45:41
  like myth that helped to like galvanized and shock Poland
• 45:46
  spirit and soul back alive while they were has rebelling against
• 45:51
  kind of the foot and the boot of Germany.
• 45:55
  So it's an amazing reality that his legacy, I think has shaped
• 46:00
  Poland, and the legacy is more from this smaller, more
• 46:03
  invisible story that perhaps he had no idea was being was going
• 46:07
  to have this effect. And I guess the way that we see
• 46:11
  God's presence and his power exalted in that is in that
• 46:16
  weakness. I guess it's just kind of this
• 46:18
  amazing. I think it's amazing story that
• 46:20
  I really wanted to set out and try and tell in the film.
• 46:23
  So is it oversimplifying to say that he was very hard charge,
• 46:27
  hard driving, hard charging? He had this vision, he had to
• 46:29
  accomplish it. Calling, calling from God gets
• 46:32
  really sick, gets kind of humble, comes back.
• 46:34
  He's not as big the big boss as much anymore.
• 46:37
  But then he really learns. OK, I've got to just make every
• 46:40
  act of love count with the people I'm loving, even as I'm
• 46:42
  building this thing. Correct me if you think that's
• 46:44
  the I'm I'm trying. To simplify version of it, but
• 46:47
  yeah, essentially that I think is is an accurate depiction of
• 46:51
  his growth as a Christian. Of course, all of all of the
• 46:56
  love was there before too, but the priority of values shifts
• 47:00
  throughout the course of his life to the more like direct
• 47:04
  love to the person in front of me.
• 47:05
  And that was what God was really sort of directing him towards
• 47:08
  through the course of his life. One thing that's always struck
• 47:11
  me about the life of any St. is this especially the martyrs, is
• 47:14
  that the, the virtue didn't start at the martyrdom or at the
• 47:18
  moment of death. It started in these tiny, tiny,
• 47:21
  tiny, tiny little decisions and little virtue building and
• 47:25
  little prayers and offerings throughout the person's life.
• 47:29
  You know, sometimes there is a big conversion and they are on
• 47:31
  that track, but it's lots of little things.
• 47:34
  And so the when Germany invaded Poland.
• 47:37
  So just kind of I'm looking at the history here, when when
• 47:39
  Poland, the Poland falls to Germany, it's under Nazi
• 47:42
  control. What happens at this point to
• 47:44
  Maximilian Colby pre being sent to Auschwitz, he and his other
• 47:49
  Friars, because I know they are resisting ultimately the
• 47:52
  mistreatment of the Jews and and obviously Catholics are Catholic
• 47:55
  priests are being rounded up. Tell me historically what
• 47:58
  happens. Catch us up there.
• 47:59
  Yeah. So he had founded this Friary
• 48:01
  that was actually more like a town at this point called
• 48:04
  Nepakolonov. And all of the infrastructure of
• 48:08
  it is built to to facilitate the the, I guess, promulgation of
• 48:14
  the newspaper and the media that he was doing.
• 48:16
  But he had to let all of the Friars go back home.
• 48:20
  Where? Was it?
• 48:22
  Home, home for many, it was all over Poland.
• 48:24
  So they they were sort of dismissed except for like a
• 48:27
  select few. I think there's about 50 people
• 48:29
  that remained and they began to create little sort of ways for
• 48:35
  people to sort of make money or to take care of themselves or to
• 48:40
  have food or just like little sort of trades that could be
• 48:44
  done to to sort of reignite at least the economy of the area.
• 48:50
  And a part of that was accepting refugees, Jewish people into
• 48:55
  NEPA Kalanov, to take care of them, to hide them and to offer
• 48:59
  them some sort of respite while they were under attack.
• 49:03
  And so there was many things that could have been happening
• 49:07
  here as well. Like there's speculation that
• 49:10
  Colby was helping to support the sort of Polish resistance
• 49:12
  movement as well. But ultimately, there was
• 49:17
  multiple, I guess, moments of being taken by the Gestapo and
• 49:23
  put into some sort of camp, then released.
• 49:26
  And ultimately that led to, to a, a final kind of movement of,
• 49:32
  well, one of the things that happened was that he was, he's
• 49:35
  German. Actually, he has German blood in
• 49:37
  him. His dad was, was German.
• 49:39
  So he was offered as sort of a loyalty test, German
• 49:43
  citizenship. And that would have kind of
• 49:45
  given him a, you know, like, I guess the way Paul was like
• 49:49
  giving citizenship by, by Rome. And that dignified him in a way
• 49:53
  that we would would have been helpful for him to continue his
• 49:58
  work. And I think that he could have
• 49:59
  decided at that point, if I take this and I sort of play ball
• 50:02
  publicly with the Nazis, I can sort of secretly help and keep
• 50:06
  doing the things that I'm doing. But he, being the stubborn pole
• 50:10
  that he was just, you know, said no.
• 50:13
  And I think that was like the moment where the Nazis realized,
• 50:17
  like, this guy is not going to play ball with us.
• 50:19
  And they were doing a sort of political cleansing.
• 50:23
  I think a lot of people don't realize that Auschwitz in its
• 50:25
  first infancy was specifically to destroy the will of the
• 50:30
  Polish people. So they are bringing in and kind
• 50:33
  of calling the herd of all of the people who might be
• 50:35
  leadership that would not be friendly to the Nazis.
• 50:38
  And Colby, of course, is identified as one of these
• 50:40
  leaders and brought to Auschwitz for not just extermination, but
• 50:44
  specifically dehumanization in order for that sort of
• 50:47
  propaganda arm of of the Nazis to like spread that soul
• 50:52
  crushing kind of message that Poland is destroyed, there is no
• 50:56
  identity left, that there is only the Reich.
• 50:59
  And you show that in the film. You know, there were a few
• 51:01
  heartbreaking moments where there was just like, explicit
• 51:04
  dehumanization done not so much even for physical torture as
• 51:07
  much for psychological. I think that it's, yeah, it's
• 51:14
  like the most demonic thing that I think I've gotten to, to see
• 51:18
  in such a, like, direct mode. There's this this almost comedic
• 51:26
  demonic Glee in the way that the Nazis were trying to subjugate
• 51:31
  the people around them. I mean, for instance, one of
• 51:34
  the, the things that I learned while I was there is that they
• 51:38
  on Christmas, they would put up a Christmas tree and put like
• 51:43
  the bodies of the Deadpools under the Christmas tree and
• 51:46
  they would sing Silent Night. And so there was this just, you
• 51:51
  know, like kind of demonic inversion of everything that was
• 51:54
  good and beautiful about Poland that was being done at that
• 51:57
  time. And so for Colby to sing Polish
• 52:02
  anthems and to step forward out of line, showing I guess that
• 52:07
  Polish Solidarity and love for the brother, it wasn't just this
• 52:10
  sort of individual thing, one man for one man.
• 52:14
  It was a, it was very much a, a political act as much as it was
• 52:18
  an act of love because it was going directly against what then
• 52:23
  the Nazis were trying to do and ultimately had this effect of
• 52:28
  like sort of shocking people back awake to their own
• 52:32
  humanity. I saw that in the film how you
• 52:35
  showed when they would line up the men and mock them, belittle
• 52:39
  them and torture them or, you know, line send them off to be
• 52:42
  tortured. It was to make them look like,
• 52:44
  and I think there were a few jokes in the movie, like you're
• 52:46
  LLC you, you dogs or, you know, like you're you're not really
• 52:50
  men anyways. That's why you're, you know,
• 52:52
  licking water off the ground when you're thirsting to death
• 52:54
  or that's why you're, you know, cowering from the bowl, the
• 52:57
  blows and like hoping the guy next to you gets picked and not
• 52:59
  you because you you're like less than human.
• 53:02
  I mean, it was is the message. So that scene and I think we're
• 53:06
  going to pull it up if it's OK, can we watch it?
• 53:08
  This scene was so I have to say actually before we watch the
• 53:13
  scene, the movie was really beautiful and they were very
• 53:16
  beautiful positive moments throughout the movie, which you
• 53:18
  did a really good job of. Even the opening scene was
• 53:20
  absolutely sublime of this, like very like lovely, you know,
• 53:24
  lovers opening scene frolicking through the fields.
• 53:26
  Like wow. The cinema cinematography here
• 53:28
  was fantastic. The acting was like perfect.
• 53:31
  So the whole scene isn't just like torture, you know, moments
• 53:35
  from Auschwitz. I think that's, I think that's
• 53:36
  important. Like you, you did a really
• 53:38
  beautiful job of that. And even having like a little
• 53:40
  bit of humor almost, you know, to, to lighten the the load a
• 53:43
  little bit. But let me pull up this opening
• 53:45
  scene. So moving up to this point, he's
• 53:47
  in, he's thrown into Auschwitz. And Colby is there and there's
• 53:53
  other political prisoners, but there's also Jews there too,
• 53:55
  right? It's a mix, Yeah.
• 53:57
  And tell us about the events that led up to the scene that
• 54:01
  we're about to watch. So what happens in the camp that
• 54:03
  the Nazis end up doing this torture ritual?
• 54:07
  One of the psychological like games that they played was that
• 54:11
  if somebody escaped and not just if, if they escaped, sometimes
• 54:16
  people would go missing because they would, they would die in
• 54:19
  their sort of work camps. They would be, you know, sent
• 54:23
  out to do various jobs of hard, heavy labor.
• 54:26
  And you could be cutting down trees or carrying something and
• 54:30
  and you know, fall and die and not and just not show back up
• 54:35
  for roll call. So regardless of what that was,
• 54:39
  if somebody went missing, then the entire prison block was held
• 54:43
  accountable by being made to stand for, you know, something
• 54:47
  like 24 hours until they had finished their search.
• 54:52
  And if they had not found him yet, then they would pull 10 men
• 54:55
  at random to die in a starvation bunker until that person was
• 55:00
  found or until they all, you know, died of starvation and
• 55:04
  exposure. And so in this moment where we
• 55:07
  sort of meet the beginning of the movie, all of the man from
• 55:11
  Colby's prisoner block are are standing in line waiting for the
• 55:17
  the commandant to come and pick ten people to sort of die this
• 55:21
  terrible, terrifying death. And how would they typically
• 55:24
  pick based on your research and and the and the historical?
• 55:27
  There's no, There's no rhyme or reason to it.
• 55:31
  I think it, the randomness is actually a part of the, the
• 55:35
  torture. But the way that people
• 55:38
  described it is how we tried to depict it, which was that the
• 55:43
  the commandant has a sort of a certain amount of amusement,
• 55:45
  like a a really sick, terrible game of like Duck Duck Goose,
• 55:49
  where he's standing in front of people sort of fainting, that
• 55:53
  he's going to choose them just to see how they react to play
• 55:57
  this psychological kind of soul crushing game with them.
• 56:02
  And so that's how we we kind of played it.
• 56:04
  I have to say before we watch this scene and that, we're going
• 56:07
  to watch the trailer together too.
• 56:09
  When you share about your experience of the torture of
• 56:12
  chronic sleep deprivation for 7-8 years, we're sleeping 20
• 56:16
  minutes to 2 hours a night and you wake up with panic attacks
• 56:18
  because of this infection you didn't know you had.
• 56:21
  Insane. I mean, that's insane.
• 56:22
  And that probably could kill somebody.
• 56:25
  You know, if they, I mean, I'm, I'm going to guess your immune
• 56:27
  system was so crushed with that and it just sounds insane.
• 56:32
  Anyways, the experience that you had of navigating that and
• 56:36
  suffering, you could see it. It makes sense now.
• 56:39
  But I didn't know that. I mean, I knew you had this like
• 56:41
  crazy story. You know, I knew a little bit
• 56:43
  about your back story coming into this interview.
• 56:44
  But hearing you describe it and having watched the film, I see,
• 56:49
  I see you threading that needle of torture.
• 56:52
  But then like navigating, still using your free will to invite
• 56:56
  God in. That's really a remarkable feat
• 57:00
  to to do that in a film. I've never seen that done before
• 57:03
  in a film. Yeah, I, I mean, I think that
• 57:05
  perhaps the closest thing is the passion.
• 57:11
  And I really saw in what Mel Gibson did, like AI guess a
• 57:17
  permission to go there that I think the the history of, of our
• 57:23
  art as the Catholic tradition and honestly, the the Christian
• 57:29
  tradition in general goes there, right.
• 57:32
  Like the crucifix itself is the brand of Catholicism and that is
• 57:37
  a an image of God's presence in the midst of torture.
• 57:41
  But I think that we've become a little bit desensitized to that
• 57:43
  and have forgotten that our faith ultimately has that level
• 57:47
  of like grit to it. But it is who we are.
• 57:51
  And what I really wanted to do is to, I guess, depict a modern
• 57:55
  crucifixion, a modern passion, but with the same level of, I
• 58:01
  guess, grittiness and realism that the Passion of Christ did,
• 58:04
  while also kind of presenting the beauty of what it could be
• 58:08
  like for God to enter into that and be with us in it the way
• 58:12
  that he did through Colby showing us, I think, Christ's
• 58:16
  face in that moment. With Mel Gibson, again, these
• 58:20
  are all oversimplifications, but in The Passion of the Christ,
• 58:22
  Jesus Christ is God. He's perfect.
• 58:25
  So there's not, I mean, there is tremendous character and
• 58:28
  humanity there because Jesus Christ is the most beautiful
• 58:32
  human being, because he's God, right?
• 58:34
  And the complex and just, yeah, God is endlessly complex
• 58:38
  anyways. But there's something very,
• 58:42
  there's a, there's a different challenge than what you had,
• 58:44
  which is he's a human being that's flawed and finite.
• 58:47
  He's not God. Maximilian Colby is this
• 58:49
  helpless man in a sense with these other helpless men.
• 58:53
  And he's getting the grace of Jesus in front of you on camera
• 58:56
  and how that how that worked out.
• 58:57
  So it's a it's a different portrait.
• 58:59
  Right. Yes.
• 59:01
  And in order to do that well, you have to, I think, be willing
• 59:08
  to accept the fact that that person is flawed and show the
• 59:11
  flaw. And I think it's a something
• 59:15
  that we actually try to avoid. There's a almost like
• 59:19
  controversy when I was presenting the script to some of
• 59:21
  the Friars for the first time and trying to get them to, to
• 59:24
  get on board and help me. Like, Hey, could you send me
• 59:27
  some, you know, costumes or some of the, you know, like anything
• 59:30
  that you could, could give us to help with the production?
• 59:32
  And they actually responded at first with this incredible,
• 59:37
  like, get this away from us. You know, like you're, you're
• 59:39
  showing Maximilian Colby as a, as a flawed person.
• 59:43
  And that seems like disrespectful or, you know,
• 59:46
  maybe this is true, but do we have to really tell the side of
• 59:49
  the story? And I sort of stuck my guns on
• 59:52
  it because I was like, this is actually the way that we see
• 59:55
  ourselves in the story, the way that we can believe that we also
• 1:00:01
  are called to the same level of sanctity.
• 1:00:04
  And could could be that for other people, as heroic and
• 1:00:08
  amazing as it is. That is a human being who had
• 1:00:12
  his own problems and that got sort of called beyond those
• 1:00:17
  flaws to this heroism. And so, yeah, that I think comes
• 1:00:21
  through in the film. How did you show?
• 1:00:23
  What were the flaws that you showed in the film?
• 1:00:25
  Oh, just that he didn't always know how to be with and be
• 1:00:31
  present with that. That was actually something that
• 1:00:34
  he was not good at earlier on in his life.
• 1:00:37
  And that this sort of his his war for the souls of the men in
• 1:00:43
  the cell requires him to to become vulnerable to them, to
• 1:00:48
  become a, a human being that talks about food, not just about
• 1:00:53
  hope and God and you know, all these other sort of theological
• 1:00:56
  things. And in the beginning of the
• 1:00:58
  movie, he's a little bit annoying and totally falls flat
• 1:01:01
  as he's trying to kind of evangelize and galvanized the
• 1:01:04
  other guys in the cell. And it's ultimately these steps
• 1:01:07
  of vulnerability and showing his own humanity that bring them, I
• 1:01:13
  guess, alongside him and bring them onto his team.
• 1:01:17
  Yeah, and that was so well done with him when he's first in the
• 1:01:20
  bunker and he's like, we can go to heaven, guys.
• 1:01:23
  Or like, you know, it's going to be OK.
• 1:01:24
  And they're all like, we don't believe in God, like we are so
• 1:01:29
  not where you are at right now. And they're just like entering
• 1:01:32
  this, you know, almost trance of like the demonic, you know,
• 1:01:36
  elements of what they're experiencing as opposed to
• 1:01:39
  inviting in the grace. So, all right, this is the scene
• 1:01:44
  where he's being picked for the person who's, excuse me, are
• 1:01:47
  being picked for the bunker, the the torture bunker.
• 1:01:51
  Was this filmed on site? This was not on in Auschwitz.
• 1:01:55
  It was filmed in a, a barracks like place that was very close
• 1:02:00
  to Auschwitz. You can't shoot in Auschwitz
• 1:02:02
  anymore. That's like a, you know, a big
• 1:02:04
  no no. It's very sacred space.
• 1:02:06
  And film sets are not sacred spaces generally.
• 1:02:10
  I think ours was. But you have a lot of things
• 1:02:13
  that can go wrong, a lot of noise, a lot of like, moving
• 1:02:17
  equipment. So, yeah.
• 1:02:19
  But we found a place that looks astonishingly like it.
• 1:02:21
  It looked very real shot there. Yeah.
• 1:02:24
  And then how did you find the bunker?
• 1:02:26
  So much of the movie was in this bunker.
• 1:02:27
  Yeah, it was a it was a prison cell in Poland that I mean, I
• 1:02:31
  could go into the stories behind how we found these things.
• 1:02:33
  It was kind of amazing. Like first we had to find the
• 1:02:35
  person that could help us find these locations.
• 1:02:38
  And it's sort of a needle in a haystack that you have to line
• 1:02:41
  up not just a location that looks authentic, but is
• 1:02:45
  available and that is in budget given that we had like basically
• 1:02:50
  dollars to give for it. And so, yeah, we had, we found a
• 1:02:54
  locations person who was willing to, to go all out with us the
• 1:02:59
  way that our team was willing to go all out.
• 1:03:01
  And she bought these tomes that were all of the, I guess all of
• 1:03:07
  the prisons that had been in Poland and all the historic
• 1:03:11
  prisons. And like went through page by
• 1:03:13
  page by page by page, probably like 600 pages of these
• 1:03:17
  different prisons and started calling all the finding who was
• 1:03:20
  the owners of them. And we found one that was that
• 1:03:23
  happened to be in between like renovations.
• 1:03:26
  So we could go in there and do anything that we needed to, it
• 1:03:29
  painting, kind of cleaning it up.
• 1:03:32
  And it was, it just happened to be available, particularly
• 1:03:35
  during the window that we were shooting before it was being
• 1:03:38
  renovated. So yeah.
• 1:03:40
  Was it similar to the bunker that they were actually in?
• 1:03:42
  It was similar in that it was incredibly like gritty and moldy
• 1:03:47
  and dark and gross, but it was a little bit bigger.
• 1:03:52
  When you're making a film, you have to have the ability to move
• 1:03:54
  the camera around, otherwise it would be like completely
• 1:03:58
  atrocious to watch. So that was like a bit of the
• 1:04:01
  movie sort of cinema. And similarly, the cell that
• 1:04:04
  they were in, not only was it smaller, but it was a lot
• 1:04:07
  blacker and it only had a very small, small, small window.
• 1:04:12
  And So what we like created with the light coming in was a little
• 1:04:16
  bit more like allowed for more beauty to sort of enter into the
• 1:04:20
  the image. But the experience of it when
• 1:04:23
  you're watching it, it feels claustrophobic.
• 1:04:26
  It feels very dark and gritty and gross.
• 1:04:28
  And so I think the feeling of it is is correct.
• 1:04:32
  All right, here's the scene where we first is this the first
• 1:04:37
  time we meet Colby in the movie? This is the first encounter with
• 1:04:41
  Colby. There's going to be lots of back
• 1:04:43
  story that you learn as the film progresses, but this is in
• 1:04:46
  Auschwitz and this is when the selection takes place.
• 1:04:48
  Mother. Father, Father.
• 1:04:58
  Father. Father, Father.
• 1:05:03
  We can't find him. This is a flashback, right?
• 1:05:11
  They will find him. Stop.
• 1:05:31
  Give it back to him. He needs it more.
• 1:05:35
  So I'm pausing this really quick because this was really
• 1:05:38
  beautifully done and it was the way you did it Again, I, I, I
• 1:05:41
  was very impressed because you watch a lot of movies and
• 1:05:43
  there's Martin Scorsese and he's like amazing cuts and
• 1:05:46
  everything. And this had that seamlessness
• 1:05:48
  where you were in a scene and then you'd go back-to-back story
• 1:05:52
  and you'd help that, help the viewer understand these
• 1:05:55
  different elements here for people who are listening, maybe
• 1:05:57
  not watching this right now. You just went from the scene
• 1:05:59
  where they're all lined up and they're being selected for the
• 1:06:01
  prison, the torture bunker. But now we're going back and
• 1:06:04
  we're seeing them scared that they can't find the prisoner and
• 1:06:08
  they're worried about what's coming.
• 1:06:09
  But just tell me about who the characters are that we're
• 1:06:11
  looking at right now, because they come up later.
• 1:06:13
  Yeah, So the person who just like kind of comes into the the
• 1:06:16
  scene and says father, father is Francis Francis, Guy Necek.
• 1:06:20
  And I'm, I'm still so atrocious at pronouncing Polish names.
• 1:06:24
  And there's a million continents in that.
• 1:06:26
  So we're just going to go with that.
• 1:06:27
  But he is the prisoner that Colby steps out of line to save
• 1:06:34
  the other prisoners in the cell. There's one that is sort of sick
• 1:06:38
  and who is unable to feed himself.
• 1:06:41
  This was something that would would often happen where a
• 1:06:45
  prisoner would no longer have the power to take care of
• 1:06:48
  themselves. And that was sort of the death
• 1:06:50
  sentence. They can't even eat anymore.
• 1:06:52
  But Colby sort of is insisting on taking care of even the ones
• 1:06:57
  who are lost causes and the other prisoners around him, but
• 1:07:00
  particularly the one that is sort of eyeing the soup.
• 1:07:03
  This is Albert, who is one of the, I guess he's sort of the
• 1:07:07
  main character. You could say that he's a
• 1:07:09
  protagonist alongside Kobe in the movie, But we sort of open
• 1:07:13
  on him as this youthful, dreaming young lover.
• 1:07:19
  And then we sort of cut coldly from that beautiful scene to
• 1:07:23
  him, dehumanized and destroyed in Auschwitz and this line up.
• 1:07:28
  And we see sort of how far he's fallen here where he's about to
• 1:07:33
  steal the soup from this prisoner who he thinks is a lost
• 1:07:37
  cause, ultimately saying, like, let there's no reason to try to
• 1:07:42
  save anybody at this point. It's all about kind of every man
• 1:07:46
  for himself, like this is this soup is is being wasted on this
• 1:07:52
  life. I'm going to take it and give it
• 1:07:54
  to my friend. So that's what this scene is
• 1:07:56
  sort of showing, is that the character kind of conflict
• 1:08:00
  between Colby and what is happening now, I guess, in the
• 1:08:04
  culture of Auschwitz. And that the movie obviously
• 1:08:09
  follows the life of that young man that you open the movie
• 1:08:11
  with, who's in that scene with his, you know, bride to be or
• 1:08:14
  his wife to be that beautiful scene.
• 1:08:16
  And you see his character. Remarkably, it's through the
• 1:08:19
  torture that he almost finds himself again, which is really
• 1:08:22
  incredible. But OK, let's let's finish out
• 1:08:25
  this scene. You can't save us.
• 1:08:52
  I can take place. I can take this place.
• 1:09:04
  Razvil's two pornis is fine. I can take his place.
• 1:09:18
  He has cheated. And the wife?
• 1:09:20
  I'm a Catholic priest. Very well, Sir, you have proved
• 1:09:34
  nothing. So that moment, first of all,
• 1:09:37
  the act and the Maximilian actor, he's amazing.
• 1:09:40
  Where did you find this guy? He's a, he's a Polish star,
• 1:09:43
  actually. He's amazing.
• 1:09:45
  And he, when I met him, so I was in Poland and you know, this is
• 1:09:49
  just like the body of Christ at work, right?
• 1:09:51
  I posted on Facebook and was like, does anybody know anyone
• 1:09:54
  in the Polish film industry? And of course, you know, one
• 1:09:59
  Facebook friend leads to another Facebook friend who introduces
• 1:10:03
  me to a director that is Catholic and is working in
• 1:10:07
  Poland. And he heard about what I was
• 1:10:09
  doing. He saw sort of a little bit of
• 1:10:11
  the short film that we had made is a proof of concept and
• 1:10:14
  really, really became a supporter and almost like a a
• 1:10:18
  Polish uncle, I guess for for the film.
• 1:10:21
  He eventually became an associate producer and he knew
• 1:10:25
  Martian. They had worked together in a
• 1:10:28
  small thing and he introduced me and he was like, hey, Anthony, I
• 1:10:31
  think that this guy might be your Colby and you just need to
• 1:10:37
  go and have dinner with him and just ask him about his story.
• 1:10:41
  So I, you know, in faith, just sort of drove over to this guy's
• 1:10:44
  house and immediately as soon as he opened the door, I just had
• 1:10:49
  this like very powerful experience.
• 1:10:51
  The Holy Spirit, like, I don't know, like God is here, you
• 1:10:55
  know, and I go in and I sit down and we have this amazing
• 1:10:59
  conversation about his experience, Martians experience
• 1:11:06
  losing everything through his addiction to alcohol.
• 1:11:10
  He's an alcoholic that destroyed his family, destroyed his career
• 1:11:14
  and that had to go to a A to, to rebuild his life.
• 1:11:19
  And while he was in a a he of course, you, you have to sort of
• 1:11:24
  invite God back into your life as a part of the 12 steps.
• 1:11:27
  I'm a I'm also a 12 step guy and I've gone through my own kind of
• 1:11:30
  journey with this. So I kind of spoke the language,
• 1:11:33
  but ultimately he met Maximilian Colby and found him as the
• 1:11:40
  patron St. of addicts who became a part of his return to
• 1:11:45
  sobriety. And of course, like the the
• 1:11:49
  withdrawal process and sort of the torture of allowing God to
• 1:11:53
  to take everything in your life and kind of rebuild you from the
• 1:11:55
  ground up. Colby was kind of his partner in
• 1:11:58
  that. And so he knew Colby as
• 1:12:02
  intimately as I did. And I just felt like this
• 1:12:05
  amazing sense that God had been preparing both of us, like in
• 1:12:10
  converging kind of life stories and our suffering to be able to
• 1:12:14
  come together and partner in the telling of this story.
• 1:12:17
  And we couldn't have done it without him.
• 1:12:18
  It it I could not have just hired an actor off the street to
• 1:12:22
  tell this story like somebody had whoever played him had to
• 1:12:26
  understand from a very deep, personal kind of intimate
• 1:12:31
  journey of his own, what it meant to be inside of a like a
• 1:12:35
  completely completely hopeless situation and to be loved
• 1:12:41
  through that. And Colby and sort of Martian
• 1:12:44
  absolutely knew that it was like meeting someone who we had a
• 1:12:47
  mutual breath. Best friend, you know, if you've
• 1:12:49
  ever experienced that, that was what it felt like.
• 1:12:52
  And and I didn't even audition and it was just an immediate
• 1:12:55
  sense like God has ordained this.
• 1:12:57
  So let's just say yes and see how this goes, you know, and he
• 1:13:00
  showed up and, and was it's just perfect from day one.
• 1:13:03
  He was flawless. I mean, truly there was like the
• 1:13:07
  ACT again with a low budget first time filmmaker films the
• 1:13:12
  usually, you know, you get a little, the acting's a little
• 1:13:15
  scrubby or you know, there's some like, you know, flawless.
• 1:13:17
  I totally believe that, Yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:18
  Yeah, but he was fantastic. And I I was blown away by his
• 1:13:23
  performance by everyone. I mean, everybody did a
• 1:13:25
  phenomenal job. So all the actors did a
• 1:13:28
  tremendous job. But he, I mean, and you saw like
• 1:13:31
  the Maximal and Colby, he was like so zealous.
• 1:13:33
  You know, you saw this zealous Maximilian Colby, who was just
• 1:13:36
  like, God first, God first, I'm going to do everything for God.
• 1:13:39
  And then he would kind of get down and have to be, like you
• 1:13:42
  said, like really human, even in his own suffering, and then help
• 1:13:45
  these men. And you watch that happen in the
• 1:13:46
  cell as you also saw the flashbacks.
• 1:13:49
  And yeah, it was amazing. A lot of the film is
• 1:13:52
  conversations between the prisoners as well as their
• 1:13:55
  backstories and the way Colby basically helped them have
• 1:13:58
  breakthroughs and his own breakthroughs in a way in their
• 1:14:01
  own suffering. How did you create, How did you
• 1:14:05
  create those backstories? What do what did you learn about
• 1:14:08
  the actual prisoners, the men who died with him?
• 1:14:10
  Do we know all of their names? And how did you design all of
• 1:14:13
  that? Yeah.
• 1:14:14
  So we don't have records of who died in the cell with Colby.
• 1:14:18
  The only records that we have are the records of who was in
• 1:14:22
  Auschwitz at the time. We know who died that month,
• 1:14:24
  actually. And So what I composed as the
• 1:14:28
  backstories of these people who are in the cell were basically
• 1:14:32
  composites of stories of people who were in Auschwitz at the
• 1:14:35
  time. And specifically like the
• 1:14:38
  composition, the types of people who were there.
• 1:14:41
  I think it was you, of course, you have Jews, but you also have
• 1:14:46
  people who are part of various opposing parties who are all
• 1:14:50
  leaders in their own rights. And I think that kind of
• 1:14:55
  understanding when you are somebody who is at the Colby was
• 1:14:59
  a celebrity, like there's no doubt about that.
• 1:15:01
  He's there's all these pictures and images of the president of
• 1:15:05
  Poland and various like dignitaries all coming and
• 1:15:08
  visiting him. You know, if you're a politician
• 1:15:11
  and you want to gain some sort of political traction, of
• 1:15:15
  course, you're going to want to cozy up with the people who have
• 1:15:17
  the keys to the media. And so he was, he was sort of
• 1:15:20
  thrust into the public square very quickly.
• 1:15:24
  And anybody that kind of has experienced or taste a little
• 1:15:28
  bit of that, all of the people who have that type of leadership
• 1:15:31
  that the circles become smaller and smaller and smaller and
• 1:15:33
  smaller and they overlap. People know about who even if
• 1:15:38
  they don't know each other, their decisions throughout their
• 1:15:41
  life, their allegiances, all of those become a part of the
• 1:15:43
  reputation and they affect each other.
• 1:15:45
  So you have people in Auschwitz who would have been rivals at
• 1:15:49
  the time, who would have been opposing and in political
• 1:15:54
  parties, but who are now sort of there with this common enemy and
• 1:15:59
  this common humanity. And I really wanted to show
• 1:16:02
  that. So you have a person from the
• 1:16:04
  Communist Party, you have somebody who is a part of the
• 1:16:07
  the Conservative government. You have somebody who is a like
• 1:16:12
  a gypsy. You have a few Jews just sort of
• 1:16:16
  this, you have a POW and his, one of his I guess soldier
• 1:16:22
  friends. This was the the composition of
• 1:16:24
  the types of people who were in Auschwitz at the time, mainly
• 1:16:27
  political prisoners who also who had some sort of threat to pose
• 1:16:32
  to the the Nazi Party. How did you write or imagine and
• 1:16:37
  then write and direct the experience of starving to death?
• 1:16:43
  Who? Yeah, That's a that's a hard
• 1:16:47
  thing to explain. We all, all of the actors and
• 1:16:52
  everybody that was on set had to be willing to enter into the
• 1:16:56
  hell that Colby and these men experienced in some way.
• 1:17:00
  We had to become vulnerable to each other to be able to make
• 1:17:04
  those performances be what they were, because they're so
• 1:17:08
  tremendously painful to reveal. I mean, you can't tell a story
• 1:17:13
  like this and do it justice without the performances coming
• 1:17:16
  from some real experience of personal suffering.
• 1:17:21
  And to do that, like I said, it requires vulnerability.
• 1:17:24
  And so we spent a lot of time before we actually went into the
• 1:17:28
  cell and began shooting, not just rehearsing, but actually
• 1:17:31
  sharing our own personal stories with each other.
• 1:17:35
  We slept in these common areas where everybody was on cots, 10
• 1:17:41
  beds per room. We were living on soup at night
• 1:17:47
  with the men who were on the starvation diets to like lose
• 1:17:51
  weight. We had these we like lived off
• 1:17:55
  of chocolate bars and you know, soup and the the crew had more
• 1:18:01
  substantial meals that the guys who were acting were were on 600
• 1:18:05
  calorie because. You wanted them to also get to.
• 1:18:09
  Be I didn't tell them to do this.
• 1:18:10
  All right, let's just sort of be clear that that I was not asking
• 1:18:14
  them to go to that level of of extreme, but all of the actors
• 1:18:19
  wanted to be there and they wanted to look if they're going
• 1:18:23
  to if we're going to do this story, you know that the feeling
• 1:18:25
  was like if we're going to do this, we got to take the gloves
• 1:18:28
  off and go all the way. There's no like doing this
• 1:18:30
  halfway. So that means we all go on
• 1:18:33
  starvation diets. We all have to shave our heads.
• 1:18:35
  So we made a sort of ritual out of that to like shaving each
• 1:18:38
  other's heads together. We created this brotherhood that
• 1:18:41
  was a real brotherhood, a real community that allowed us to
• 1:18:45
  have that level of vulnerability for what was going to happen in
• 1:18:49
  these scenes. And the starvation was a part of
• 1:18:52
  that. Like we just spent one day, a
• 1:18:54
  whole day just embodying and meditating on what it would be
• 1:18:59
  like to starve and to feel that pain and to embody that together
• 1:19:03
  and going from sort of like we're hungry to all the way to
• 1:19:06
  we're dying, just sort of mentally kind of locking that
• 1:19:10
  in. And yeah, I think those sorts of
• 1:19:13
  practices that were more meditative, these are things
• 1:19:16
  that many method actors do and many actors do.
• 1:19:19
  But we we shared that and we even like brought some of the
• 1:19:22
  cast and we're sorry, brought some of the crew into the the
• 1:19:25
  experiences of of that type of meditation in order to create
• 1:19:29
  that sense of sacredness and vulnerability across the entire
• 1:19:33
  set. Was there sort of some
• 1:19:36
  scientific literature on what starvation does to the psyche or
• 1:19:40
  to the, you know, the brain to the mind that you were?
• 1:19:44
  There's plenty of that and everybody, all of us like read
• 1:19:47
  things as we were preparing for this.
• 1:19:50
  You even even to the the the vocal cords like the dryness of
• 1:19:55
  the performance of the voice has to become like cracking and kind
• 1:19:59
  of dry. And we one of the hard things
• 1:20:05
  about this when you're making a movie is you don't get to shoot
• 1:20:07
  in order. Sometimes, you know, if you have
• 1:20:10
  all of the Nazi guards and they're all coming into the cell
• 1:20:13
  and you don't want to spend a lot of money to have all of them
• 1:20:16
  for their day rates the whole time.
• 1:20:17
  You have to do all of that, all of those scenes.
• 1:20:20
  On like 2 days, which means if they come in every day, then you
• 1:20:24
  have to shoot every day where they are there and so you have
• 1:20:28
  to lock in like OK, day one, this is what we feel like.
• 1:20:31
  Now we're going to shoot the next scene, which is day 2, and
• 1:20:34
  we're going to shoot day 6. Now we're going to shoot day 8.
• 1:20:38
  And it's like our shots of each one, you have to put them all
• 1:20:41
  through hair and makeup as you're sort of progressing all
• 1:20:44
  of these things. So each one of those times we're
• 1:20:47
  transitioning hair and makeup into the next kind of day or a
• 1:20:52
  different moment. We had like a very clear what we
• 1:20:56
  feel like on day 9. This is the feeling of that of
• 1:21:00
  that moment. I actually had all of them make
• 1:21:03
  sounds like what does it feel like?
• 1:21:05
  Make the sound of what that feels like day nine.
• 1:21:07
  And they would all sort of it collectively make this sort of
• 1:21:11
  groaning, moaning sound so that they could have it in their
• 1:21:14
  vocal cords. And then we would like go ahead
• 1:21:16
  and perform the scene. So these are sort of things that
• 1:21:18
  we were doing to try and experience and embody it as much
• 1:21:22
  as possible so that when we went into the the scene, it would be
• 1:21:25
  very authentic. Is there a kind, I mean, as the,
• 1:21:28
  as the film progresses and you're, you know, watching
• 1:21:31
  backstories and all these, you know, other things happen and
• 1:21:35
  then you have the anchoring scenes of the cell.
• 1:21:37
  You see the men get slower and slower and slower because
• 1:21:40
  they're losing energy. I mean, they're they're, they're
• 1:21:42
  losing, they're dying, right? But then there's almost this
• 1:21:45
  like lightness that comes with it too on a spiritual level
• 1:21:49
  because they bond, they're sort of this other forms of healing
• 1:21:52
  that starts to happen. And then at the very end,
• 1:21:54
  they're sort of like in this huddle basically on on the
• 1:21:58
  ground. And so that sort of trajectory
• 1:22:02
  and then all of the men having their individual journeys in
• 1:22:05
  that and then they're doing it collectively.
• 1:22:08
  You mentioned you guys did like rituals together to kind of like
• 1:22:11
  Bond and things like that, but were there what were some of the
• 1:22:14
  most, I guess, unexpected things that might have happened as
• 1:22:17
  they're trying to pull that off as actors or maybe the biggest
• 1:22:21
  challenges associated with it too I.
• 1:22:23
  Mean I think that the biggest things that were the most
• 1:22:26
  surprising things were just how much we all came to love each
• 1:22:31
  other. Like from the very moment that
• 1:22:35
  we cast everyone, I put them all in a group chat and we're all
• 1:22:38
  bonding around the fact that you if you're on a starvation diet,
• 1:22:43
  you have to radically change your relationship with not just
• 1:22:48
  food, but with everybody else around you.
• 1:22:50
  And so you kind of become limited to the other people who
• 1:22:53
  are going through that experience with you.
• 1:22:54
  So we're all taking pictures of broccoli and like tuna fish and
• 1:22:58
  sending it to each other like this is lunch today or this is
• 1:23:01
  my, my big meal, like sitting down with like the can and be
• 1:23:04
  like eating out of a tuna fish can.
• 1:23:06
  So we start this kind of bonding and it ends up being becoming
• 1:23:10
  like we're spending days and days just sort of holding on to
• 1:23:13
  each other, right? Like the, the many of these
• 1:23:16
  scenes require them to be. It's so physical.
• 1:23:19
  They're holding on to each other like pulling each other out of
• 1:23:23
  like these terrifying panic attacks and things like that.
• 1:23:26
  So we're just kind of getting used to being in that level of
• 1:23:30
  like complete community, total vulnerability in a way that men
• 1:23:34
  usually are not able to, I guess, experience together, at
• 1:23:38
  least nowadays. And I think watching what was
• 1:23:43
  able to be done when we gave each other that, I guess freedom
• 1:23:48
  to allow God to completely take over and move through us in into
• 1:23:54
  the most like vulnerable places. It allowed for improvisations
• 1:23:58
  that were completely unexpected. That became some of the most
• 1:24:03
  iconic moments in the movie. Many of these that you see were
• 1:24:08
  just sort of, we let the camera play out like all the scenes
• 1:24:12
  where the men are dying and holding on to each other and
• 1:24:14
  sort of grieving each other's passing.
• 1:24:16
  All of those were done in one single take, one single shot
• 1:24:21
  that that lasted for two hours and nobody knew.
• 1:24:28
  Like when we couldn't say stop, there was no saying cut.
• 1:24:31
  It was just like the cameras following this one person and
• 1:24:34
  then it moves over to this other person and the, the, but if you
• 1:24:39
  were there inside of the cellar, kind of watching it on, on the
• 1:24:42
  monitor, it literally felt like being next to a loved one's
• 1:24:46
  bedside as they're passing, like all of the ugliness and pain and
• 1:24:50
  yet all of the beauty of, of somebody's life kind of reaching
• 1:24:54
  its crescendo and being offered to God.
• 1:24:56
  And I think that there's a poetry in the movie of following
• 1:25:00
  St. Maximo and Colby in the
• 1:25:02
  community of these men as they as they lose their flesh, you
• 1:25:06
  know, and they lose all of the, I guess the burdens that weighed
• 1:25:11
  them down in the past. They're coming together in this
• 1:25:14
  kind of singularity of peace and love, while at the same time the
• 1:25:18
  Nazis, as they are gaining power and grasping for more and more
• 1:25:22
  of that like strength of will, their relationships begin to
• 1:25:26
  fray. And specifically Fritch, his
• 1:25:30
  family life decays and he kind of is driven mad by the loss of
• 1:25:34
  his family. And because particularly because
• 1:25:38
  of this, his same response to to suffering is, is to be selfish,
• 1:25:44
  to be isolated, to be powerful, to be invulnerable.
• 1:25:47
  And you see them become heavier and heavier and heavier until
• 1:25:50
  kind of the final scene. So there's this kind of amazing
• 1:25:53
  poetry of like what the strength of of the world, if you grasp
• 1:25:57
  for that, like what the wages are versus the gift of like
• 1:26:01
  suffering with God and what that can allow.
• 1:26:06
  Let's take a look at this singing scene.
• 1:26:08
  There are multiple of these, but this one was absolutely
• 1:26:11
  beautiful. So.
• 1:26:22
  The men are starting to fight. You spend more water than you
• 1:26:27
  gain. Please.
• 1:26:29
  This could be the last sleep of my life.
• 1:26:31
  Can we have me there? Is this going to give us water?
• 1:26:40
  Aren't they? Hey holy Queen Mother of Mercy,
• 1:27:14
  what is this horrible noise lullaby?
• 1:27:18
  My mother sent it to us. I wish your mother had passed on
• 1:27:21
  her singing voice thing. I tell.
• 1:27:29
  Our sweetness and our hope. What?
• 1:27:37
  My grandmother sing it to me too.
• 1:27:41
  Don't judge a book by its cover. I sing first chant Cathedral
• 1:27:45
  boys choir sang like an Angel too.
• 1:27:50
  To you do Then we get the flashback and
• 1:28:24
  this is actually, this was my moment.
• 1:28:29
  So we just saw the Black Madonna come on screen because I, you
• 1:28:32
  know, Maxwell and Colby has this incredible relationship with the
• 1:28:34
  Blessed Mother. And this is one of my biggest
• 1:28:38
  professional woes to this to this day, Anthony, because you
• 1:28:41
  guys sent me an e-mail two years ago now, I don't know, saying,
• 1:28:44
  do you want to come to Poland and be our Black Madonna?
• 1:28:47
  And my husband and I were like, what is this?
• 1:28:49
  And I said, I would love to do this, but I think I was about to
• 1:28:52
  give birth or I don't, I don't know what I was.
• 1:28:54
  So anyways, she did a phenomenal job, whoever you got to do it,
• 1:28:58
  but it was, it's very beautiful because that relationship
• 1:29:01
  between mom and Mary and Maximilian Colby, he did have a
• 1:29:05
  really special experience with her that foreshadowed what he
• 1:29:10
  would endure later. And so you you'd tease that
• 1:29:12
  throughout the movie, too. Yeah, he has this well, every
• 1:29:17
  every Pole really has a devotion to Mama Mary because to be
• 1:29:22
  Polish is to also have Our Lady of Chestajova sort of this
• 1:29:26
  national icon. And what we see here, the
• 1:29:29
  scarred Madonna who's been, I guess, bares the wounds of her
• 1:29:34
  children, is a part of their like devotion.
• 1:29:37
  So Colby himself, even as a child, would go and visit this
• 1:29:42
  icon and would be would have these mystical experiences in
• 1:29:46
  front of it. And one of the experiences that
• 1:29:48
  he had was a image of Mary offering him two crowns, a crown
• 1:29:54
  of a red crown, which was a crown of martyrdom and a white
• 1:29:58
  crown, a crown of purity. And he famously as a sort of one
• 1:30:04
  of these children that just will not behave and very stubborn.
• 1:30:08
  He's like, I, I want both of them.
• 1:30:10
  And that is ultimately, I guess, a, a prophetic image of where
• 1:30:14
  his life ended up kind of going. But I think we wanted to show
• 1:30:19
  this devotion as a part of the subconscious of his life that
• 1:30:23
  let him have the power to do what he ultimately accomplished.
• 1:30:28
  What is the thing that you think is most surprising for people
• 1:30:30
  when they learn it about Maximal and Colby?
• 1:30:33
  I think this is something that I've, I guess, shared often, but
• 1:30:37
  just his humanity that even the fact that he Can't Sing, you
• 1:30:42
  know that he's a a bad singer. Like famously, he was actually
• 1:30:46
  both a bad preacher and a bad singer.
• 1:30:47
  He was not he was not somebody that was great on on the pulpit.
• 1:30:53
  He. Even though he's a great writer.
• 1:30:55
  Incredibly talented writer, not great at delivering arousing
• 1:31:00
  rhetorical speech. Is very like dry and kind of
• 1:31:02
  militaristic and sort of like intellectual in the way that he
• 1:31:05
  approached it. So people and he kind of knew
• 1:31:09
  this about himself and usually like gave that the platform to
• 1:31:12
  other Friars that had a little bit better, but like a gifting
• 1:31:15
  for that. But I just love that there's
• 1:31:17
  these as you get to know him, there's just these details about
• 1:31:20
  his life that make him so adorably human and and flawed
• 1:31:25
  and also, I guess amazing as a as a leader and as a as a lover
• 1:31:30
  of his fellow man. So, yeah, I would say that
• 1:31:33
  that's that's all kind of a part of it all this one thread.
• 1:31:37
  That's just how human he is, is what people are, I think
• 1:31:39
  astonished by. If you first meet him through
• 1:31:42
  this iconic moment of him just sort of giving his life for so a
• 1:31:46
  man, you think I could never do that?
• 1:31:48
  Like that seems superhuman. But yeah, that's that's just
• 1:31:53
  that's the end of the story. And that it took a whole
• 1:31:55
  lifetime kind of to develop that.
• 1:31:57
  The film just came out. It was just premiered here in
• 1:32:00
  the US yesterday. That's right, premiered in
• 1:32:02
  Poland a month ago. I've heard rave reviews.
• 1:32:06
  You know, folks at The Daily Wire like Matt Walsh say it's
• 1:32:09
  just phenomenal. I mean, I got to see it,
• 1:32:12
  obviously. And I think it's it's truly a
• 1:32:14
  work of art. How has the reception been?
• 1:32:18
  It's been amazing. I think when people experience
• 1:32:24
  it, especially together in a theater, there's something
• 1:32:26
  really, I think profound about the way that as a community,
• 1:32:31
  when we sort of come together and meditate on the story,
• 1:32:35
  there's this like ripple effect of people kind of having
• 1:32:40
  encounters with God as they're watching the film and emoting
• 1:32:46
  that, you know, beginning to cry or sniffle or whatever the, the
• 1:32:50
  emotion is or even laugh that begins to ripple throughout the,
• 1:32:54
  the audience and allows everybody to sort of get a taste
• 1:32:57
  of that experience themselves. And the the effect is that at
• 1:33:03
  the end of a, a, a screening, there's almost always like
• 1:33:09
  audible sobbing and even laughter in the last scene.
• 1:33:16
  When we were in Poland and and at the same thing happened when
• 1:33:20
  we were at the premiere last night in Dallas with over 1200
• 1:33:24
  people, we the standing ovation lasted the entire credits
• 1:33:31
  meaning like and we have A and it's a long credit sequence
• 1:33:35
  because like. You give a lot.
• 1:33:36
  Of people you pay people, you have to give them credit that.
• 1:33:39
  Is funny. And so like people's hands are
• 1:33:43
  hurting. It's like they're clapping until
• 1:33:45
  they, they, their hands bleed. And it's not a clapping for us.
• 1:33:50
  I think. I think it's this, this desire
• 1:33:54
  to applaud what we saw Colby do, like applauding him.
• 1:33:59
  You know, there's like, we go to the title of the movie and then
• 1:34:01
  we say in honor of Max annoying Colby.
• 1:34:04
  And people are just they just kind of lose it.
• 1:34:05
  Like, yeah, you know, this is this is somebody that we can be
• 1:34:10
  proud of. We can cheer him on with like
• 1:34:13
  every enthusiastic bone in our body because what he did was so
• 1:34:16
  amazing. And I think, yeah, I think it
• 1:34:20
  just allows us to fully encounter that with our our
• 1:34:23
  hearts sort of wide open by the end of the movie.
• 1:34:26
  So it's been an amazing thing to watch and to sort of like,
• 1:34:30
  afterwards, people come up to me and, like, share some of the
• 1:34:34
  most, like, profound experiences that I could imagine.
• 1:34:38
  You know, a woman came up to me last night who had lost her
• 1:34:42
  husband to cancer and who had been just given her own kind of
• 1:34:46
  terminal diagnosis a couple of months earlier.
• 1:34:49
  And who said, like, this movie is the first time since my
• 1:34:56
  husband's passing that I've had hope and that I could, like,
• 1:35:01
  trust God again with my own death.
• 1:35:04
  And like, yeah, people who just sort of come up to me in tears
• 1:35:09
  and they can't get words out because they don't know how to
• 1:35:12
  describe what they've gone through.
• 1:35:14
  And we just sort of like cry together, you know?
• 1:35:16
  Because I know, you know, I've been there where they were.
• 1:35:20
  I can tell that like what they're going through that the
• 1:35:23
  movie has evoked something that was similar to my own suffering.
• 1:35:27
  And that in the moment kind of in front of me, that like I'm
• 1:35:31
  getting to see like the the way God came in and helped me to, to
• 1:35:40
  believe in, in life, to believe in, in hope, to believe in his
• 1:35:45
  own love for me. That that that power has been
• 1:35:49
  like unleashed and has been like given to someone else.
• 1:35:53
  Like first directly almost this like from my heart to their
• 1:35:57
  heart. The same way that Colby's song
• 1:36:00
  was sort of like the chain reaction through Auschwitz.
• 1:36:02
  That like the gift of healing that I've been given is now kind
• 1:36:06
  of through the art becoming a like a movement in front of me
• 1:36:11
  in other people's lives. And yeah, there's nothing,
• 1:36:16
  there's nothing quite like it. There's nothing quite like it
• 1:36:19
  that I could talk about. That I get to see the fruit of
• 1:36:29
  all of those invisible moments of me choosing God, you know,
• 1:36:32
  choosing life that no one could could cheer me on.
• 1:36:35
  Nobody knew how difficult it was to stay alive to just like do
• 1:36:39
  one more day. All of that has been like
• 1:36:44
  redeemed and turned into something that's a gift for the
• 1:36:47
  world and for other people who perhaps are in that kind of dark
• 1:36:52
  night and you need that accompaniment and that hope.
• 1:36:56
  So I'm just so grateful and humbled to get to be kind of a
• 1:36:59
  part of that work of God. It's.
• 1:37:03
  It's amazing how God used what you went through, Anthony, and
• 1:37:07
  made a work of art out of it. Truly a masterpiece.
• 1:37:10
  And now millions of people get to see that, and then they will
• 1:37:14
  feel the solace and the hope of God's love in their own trials.
• 1:37:19
  Yeah, I think it's kind of an amazing thing that like Colby is
• 1:37:22
  a he's a patron of the pro-life movement.
• 1:37:27
  And I originally kind of wanted to to go into that work in some
• 1:37:32
  way. And I think ultimately, like
• 1:37:34
  what I learned through all of this is that these all of these
• 1:37:39
  sort of end of life, beginning of life, these edge case issues
• 1:37:42
  that are like the biggest kind of political hot button topics.
• 1:37:45
  They all are a fork from the the same thing, which is like, is
• 1:37:52
  suffering valuable? Like is it worth bearing a child
• 1:38:00
  into this like painful and lonely world?
• 1:38:02
  Is it worth living through debilitating suffering where
• 1:38:08
  there's no hope of a like healing like these questions, I
• 1:38:12
  think drive down to the very core of the human spirit of who
• 1:38:17
  am I in in my position to the universe, who is God?
• 1:38:21
  Is their purpose ultimately to the lives that we live even when
• 1:38:25
  we don't have power to sort of shape the world around us to be
• 1:38:28
  the way that we think it should be.
• 1:38:30
  And I think our answer is Christians is the answer that
• 1:38:36
  the world needs. Like we are in a crisis of hope
• 1:38:39
  right now. And we see that crisis happening
• 1:38:42
  in all of these sort of political issues, all of the
• 1:38:45
  identity issues, the confusion that is rampant in our culture
• 1:38:49
  right now. All of that stems from the same
• 1:38:52
  core question of who am I and who is God?
• 1:38:56
  And is there meaning? Is there any sort of value in me
• 1:39:00
  living a life that has and is characterized by suffering?
• 1:39:04
  I think that the Polish people in some way have a very
• 1:39:07
  beautiful answer to offer that to us because they've been a
• 1:39:11
  culture that has had to suffer deeply for the sake of their
• 1:39:14
  faith. And I think that's why in some
• 1:39:17
  ways that Colby and his story is so relevant to us and why I
• 1:39:21
  think this movie is so important for this particular moment right
• 1:39:24
  now. Because it's not an answer that
• 1:39:27
  says, hey, all of these other things that you're doing are
• 1:39:29
  wrong. It's an answer that says if you
• 1:39:32
  choose to, to carry your cross, if you take on that child and
• 1:39:40
  you have no idea how you're going to do it, how you could
• 1:39:42
  possibly possibly do this, like there is hope for you.
• 1:39:48
  There is a unbelievable love and beauty in that choice.
• 1:39:54
  And if you open that door to God to let him be with you in that
• 1:40:01
  like there is. Like a seismic shock of life and
• 1:40:05
  love that can can be opened up for the rest of of the world
• 1:40:09
  through that. Like if God could bring about
• 1:40:11
  redemption and beauty and hope in Auschwitz, in this like
• 1:40:17
  darkest part of the world, he can do that in your own life, in
• 1:40:20
  anything that you choose, in any cross that comes your way.
• 1:40:23
  And certainly has been true of my own life.
• 1:40:26
  And the lesson that I've learned as I have kind of turned to God
• 1:40:30
  and allowed him to like, I guess to come and and to carry my
• 1:40:36
  cross with me. So.
• 1:40:39
  I hope that people too will be moved or have the I think, I
• 1:40:43
  think it will help these people. I don't know exactly how they'll
• 1:40:45
  see it or it'll just be the overflow from this film, but we
• 1:40:49
  are such a throwaway culture today.
• 1:40:51
  Like you're talking about unborn babies and you know, I daily I
• 1:40:54
  got Instagram messages from people and you know, emails and
• 1:40:58
  things like that. And they talk about the friend
• 1:41:00
  or it's sometimes it's themselves, but they have a
• 1:41:03
  diagnosis that's really tough for themselves or their baby and
• 1:41:07
  they're being told terminate, terminate, terminate.
• 1:41:10
  And they're, you know, sometimes things be to God, they choose
• 1:41:13
  life or I just got a message yesterday and she said they,
• 1:41:17
  they'd killed their 15, the 15 week old baby boy.
• 1:41:20
  He's dead because the doctor said, well, you might get this,
• 1:41:23
  you know, health issue to the mother and she was scared.
• 1:41:26
  And so they killed this baby and it's, it's devastating.
• 1:41:31
  But then when there's that little movement of the heart
• 1:41:33
  towards love, like where there's where there's hope, where
• 1:41:36
  there's life, there's a way. And we had Alex Gooding on the
• 1:41:39
  show and she was given all these terminal diagnosis.
• 1:41:41
  Baby's going to have a disability, you're going to die.
• 1:41:43
  She had an ectopic scar pregnancy at one point.
• 1:41:46
  She said no, no, no to abortion time and time again.
• 1:41:49
  And her little girl came on the show that the doctors insisted
• 1:41:52
  that she abort. And you just see like this, it's
• 1:41:55
  like the incredible color and beauty and glory of saying yes
• 1:42:00
  to life and yes to love and you just and the risks that come
• 1:42:03
  with it. And yes to the I mean, love is
• 1:42:07
  ultimately the choice to be willing to suffer for the sake
• 1:42:11
  of another person. And I think that you when you
• 1:42:15
  choose to whatever it is like to have a child, any decision to
• 1:42:23
  have a child, like not even abortion specifically, like
• 1:42:28
  we're living in sort of a crisis of childlessness right now.
• 1:42:31
  I think partly because we don't have a underlying, I guess,
• 1:42:37
  worldview that allows for suffering to be meaningful.
• 1:42:41
  And everybody I think is aware, like marriage, the commitment to
• 1:42:45
  marriage, the commitment to a child, all of these things are
• 1:42:48
  commitments to emptying ourselves and giving up our
• 1:42:52
  lives for someone else. And I think if the math equation
• 1:42:57
  is like this life is the only life we have.
• 1:43:00
  There is no sort of tomorrow beyond this life.
• 1:43:05
  There's no transcendent purpose. There is no God.
• 1:43:08
  The math equation to suffer, which is necessary for the sake
• 1:43:12
  of human survival doesn't make any sense like that.
• 1:43:15
  Just it, there's no reason. And I think that ultimately in
• 1:43:21
  order for us as a species to like survive to, to grow, I
• 1:43:27
  think that we have to find a higher power.
• 1:43:30
  We have to recover that. It's necessary to recover sort
• 1:43:35
  of a theory of suffering that is meaningful and that can be
• 1:43:38
  redemptive. I think that's what I've learned
• 1:43:42
  through the meditation on this story, is that that life and the
• 1:43:47
  choice to life, the choice, the choice to love is itself a a way
• 1:43:53
  of bringing God's presence to the world right in front of you,
• 1:43:58
  being God's face, his hands and his feet.
• 1:44:02
  And that there's a richness that it opens up for you in your life
• 1:44:08
  that you then have to extend beyond yourself to power that
• 1:44:13
  you do not have. And that power is given it it, I
• 1:44:20
  think in our film you see all of these men and their lives in
• 1:44:25
  peace and in love with each other.
• 1:44:28
  Like there's this poverty that allows them to unburden
• 1:44:33
  themselves and have intimacy, which I think is the core, most
• 1:44:38
  beautiful point of life. Like intimacy, love, to be
• 1:44:42
  known, to know. And you cannot have that when
• 1:44:46
  you are afraid to suffer. And you had at the end, I know
• 1:44:51
  you teased it a little bit earlier, but I'll just I hope
• 1:44:54
  it's not killing it forever. But he goes to heaven, guys.
• 1:44:57
  Same maximal intelligence. Gosh, spoilers.
• 1:45:00
  But you had heaven scenes at the end.
• 1:45:02
  And I thought they were really awesome because you don't
• 1:45:05
  usually see heaven depicted the way you depicted heaven.
• 1:45:08
  And I was like, this is heaven. And only I think a good, you
• 1:45:12
  know, Catholic boy who's like you've been through the the
• 1:45:15
  ringer and kind of really feels it in his bones.
• 1:45:17
  What's heaven going to be like? Could depict it the way you
• 1:45:19
  depicted it. Well, I think it's also just
• 1:45:21
  that this is how Jesus talks about it, right?
• 1:45:23
  Like he talks about heaven as a wedding banquet and, you know,
• 1:45:27
  the whole sort of angels with harps and stuff.
• 1:45:30
  That's not actually an image that Christ uses or is biblical
• 1:45:34
  at all, right? What we are told by the Bible
• 1:45:38
  and by sacred art and sacred imagery and tradition is that
• 1:45:41
  it's going to be like a wedding feast, big party, a big party.
• 1:45:44
  And so, yeah, if Polby was Polish, his vision of that and
• 1:45:50
  what he would have known and sort of mapped onto that sacred
• 1:45:53
  image is a Polish wedding. And so we just depicted, you
• 1:45:57
  know, as best as we could, what a Polish wedding would look like
• 1:46:01
  as the icon of heaven. And it's just delightful.
• 1:46:03
  So spoiler alert, that's what you get to see.
• 1:46:06
  That's where they go in the end, guys, I know we're taking a lot
• 1:46:10
  of time and you are on effectively your press tour now.
• 1:46:13
  The movie just came out. But I, I do need to ask, I meant
• 1:46:16
  to ask this earlier. I kind of got to it a little
• 1:46:18
  bit. But again, the quality, you
• 1:46:20
  know, this is your debut as a director, Anthony.
• 1:46:23
  And then, you know, I don't know who you had behind all the
• 1:46:25
  cameras besides yourself and the casting.
• 1:46:28
  You talked about the kind of miracles happening with casting.
• 1:46:30
  You had a half $1,000,000 budget to shoot a film over in Poland,
• 1:46:34
  which is, I mean, even the travel costs alone and just
• 1:46:38
  getting people fed and housed for as long as it took to film,
• 1:46:41
  I'm sure that ate at most of that budget.
• 1:46:43
  So how did you pull it off? Honestly, it was all it was all
• 1:46:48
  gifts. Like I think that the Catholic
• 1:46:52
  world is almost like the serendipity generator for people
• 1:46:56
  who are doing something that God has really kind of inspired and
• 1:47:00
  call them to do. Like this is one of the piece of
• 1:47:02
  advice that I think I'm, I'm really trying to tell people as
• 1:47:06
  something that I've learned. I did not have any sense of my
• 1:47:11
  faith was so small for what God could actually accomplish.
• 1:47:15
  And what I kept finding time and time again was that there was
• 1:47:20
  other people out there who had been wait, waiting for the
• 1:47:25
  chance to support the making and telling of this story.
• 1:47:30
  A like, a wealth of people, like, you know, a stunt person
• 1:47:35
  who worked on all of Tom Cruise's movies, that's Polish,
• 1:47:39
  that has a devotion to Maximo and Colby that was just waiting
• 1:47:42
  for the chance to tell the story.
• 1:47:44
  He was the stunt coordinator for all the Auschwitz stuff.
• 1:47:46
  Wait, wait, what were the stunt like?
• 1:47:47
  The stunts of like the the. Prison guard beating yeah
• 1:47:50
  anything. So if you if you think about
• 1:47:52
  like. Yeah, the beatings were really,
• 1:47:53
  the beatings were really well done, guys, right?
• 1:47:55
  No, seriously, it looked, looked real.
• 1:47:58
  It looked real without being traumatic to the point where I
• 1:48:00
  couldn't. Like, that's the thing.
• 1:48:01
  To be honest, I was like, I don't know if I'm gonna have to
• 1:48:03
  turn this thing off. I didn't turn it off.
• 1:48:04
  I did cover my eyes at 1.1 of the guys got shot but overall it
• 1:48:09
  was watchable. Right.
• 1:48:10
  Yeah, it wasn't too brutal, but it was it was realistic enough
• 1:48:13
  to feel like it was honoring the the the truth.
• 1:48:17
  That's so amazing. In order to accomplish that it
• 1:48:20
  it actually is very, very difficult to do and to just do
• 1:48:23
  safely. So we needed somebody that was
• 1:48:25
  like very talented at working with big, big sets of lots of
• 1:48:30
  extras to create these sorts of environments.
• 1:48:35
  And so, yeah, that was one person that we just sort of in
• 1:48:37
  the course of three days, we were like, we're we're way over
• 1:48:40
  our skis with this. We need somebody to come and
• 1:48:42
  save us. Anybody knows somebody and turns
• 1:48:44
  out like this is what like God had prepared to sort of drop.
• 1:48:48
  Her. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:48:49
  To save the day, yeah. And.
• 1:48:51
  How did you learn how to direct? That honestly came from the work
• 1:48:57
  of youth ministry, the creation of a retreat or of a spiritual
• 1:49:04
  environment where people are all experiencing the same story in
• 1:49:07
  the same theme together and going through AI guess a moving
• 1:49:11
  meditation through the course of perhaps if you're meditating on
• 1:49:15
  like the story of Saint Peter and his calling, you're you're
• 1:49:19
  creating almost like this artistic experience that
• 1:49:21
  everybody goes through together. But it's an event.
• 1:49:23
  There's logistics, there's volunteers, there's budgets.
• 1:49:27
  And so all of that is this almost wax on, wax off for being
• 1:49:32
  able to do some pretty impressive and amazing things.
• 1:49:35
  And I keep telling people like, what we did was only made
• 1:49:39
  possible because all of us that were working on it all came out
• 1:49:43
  of the youth ministry circuit because we realized and learned
• 1:49:47
  how to do these things without, without budgets, without like
• 1:49:51
  the normal industry processes for how these things got done.
• 1:49:54
  I mean, when we wanted to go to Poland and we needed people to
• 1:49:57
  get there, we just threw it up on Facebook.
• 1:49:59
  Anybody got Miles, anybody. We're working on this movie
• 1:50:01
  about Maximo and Colby. Does anybody want to help us?
• 1:50:04
  And so over the course of the last five years, if we've made
• 1:50:07
  this movie, we've collected this like cohort of people who've
• 1:50:11
  given some small thing to help in this kind of crucial moment
• 1:50:16
  to help make this movie a reality.
• 1:50:18
  And I think because of that, it feels very crowdsourced and
• 1:50:21
  crowdfunded. And it feels very much like
• 1:50:25
  we've birthed this. We made this.
• 1:50:27
  This isn't Hollywood coming to us saying we told your story.
• 1:50:31
  It's us going to Hollywood with one of our stories being like,
• 1:50:34
  hey, let's, let's do this thing, you know?
• 1:50:36
  What are you doing for distribution?
• 1:50:38
  We're doing a a limited theatrical release right now.
• 1:50:41
  We're, we're fighting tooth and nail to get screens, but that
• 1:50:47
  theatrical release is happening on, on September 12th.
• 1:50:50
  So the best way to look and see if it's coming to your city near
• 1:50:53
  you is just to, you know, go to our, our website,
• 1:50:57
  triumphtheheart.com. You can go to Fandango or to
• 1:51:00
  Adam or any of the other places where you can just sort of
• 1:51:02
  aggregate all the different showtimes and see if there's
• 1:51:05
  something in your area. And if not, you can call your
• 1:51:08
  local theater or their cororate office if you want to go further
• 1:51:12
  U and ask them to to take our movie and bring it to to your
• 1:51:16
  city. That was my next question.
• 1:51:18
  How can people support the film? Yeah, I mean, that's the best
• 1:51:20
  way to to tell people. Got it.
• 1:51:22
  Buy a ticket. It's so important to, if it's if
• 1:51:26
  you have a showing in your area, to show up on opening weekend
• 1:51:30
  because this is sort of what determines the future of the
• 1:51:33
  film. So this is opening weekend.
• 1:51:35
  Yes, this weekend is opening weekend.
• 1:51:37
  We're just hitting theaters September 12th.
• 1:51:39
  This was a calling. Maximilian Colby's Saint Colby's
• 1:51:42
  fingertips are all over this. The fact that you came out with
• 1:51:45
  such an you, you were able to create a masterpiece.
• 1:51:48
  Truly, Anthony, I think is a sign of God working here.
• 1:51:51
  This is this is the Holy Spirit working in this and St.
• 1:51:54
  Colby's intercession. The story needed to be told.
• 1:51:58
  It's going to be a wild drive with distribution.
• 1:52:00
  That's exciting. I'm excited for you guys.
• 1:52:02
  You've got to go watch this film.
• 1:52:04
  If it's not in their local theater, what should they do?
• 1:52:07
  The best thing to do is to put your e-mail in our website and
• 1:52:10
  we will each kind of window, like opening weekend is the most
• 1:52:15
  important just to sort of break ground.
• 1:52:17
  But if we do well, then we get another weekend and it'll go to
• 1:52:20
  more screens and all of that. So sharing about it on social,
• 1:52:25
  telling people about it. Oh, I can't wait to see this.
• 1:52:27
  Calling theaters, being like, hey, bring this to to our
• 1:52:30
  theater. I really want to have this.
• 1:52:32
  They'll reach out to our Booker and you know, if there's enough
• 1:52:35
  demand and they're seeing it, they'll bring it for the next
• 1:52:37
  weekend. And then if not, it'll come to
• 1:52:39
  streaming very quickly after this, so just stay tuned.
• 1:52:44
  Anthony, thank you. Thanks for making time and this
• 1:52:46
  busy week, for sitting down with me and getting the sneak peek
• 1:52:49
  behind the scenes. It's very fascinating stuff.
• 1:52:52
  I'm really excited to see what a change this makes in the world
• 1:52:56
  and all the work they have in front of you.
• 1:52:58
  I'm so grateful. I've been so inspired by your
• 1:53:01
  ministry for like a decade now. So to be here and to sort of get
• 1:53:07
  to to celebrate it and talk about the movie with you, it's
• 1:53:10
  just like a complete honor. And I'm very humbled to be here.
• 1:53:13
  So thank you so much for having me.
• 1:53:14
  Thank you and everybody go watch it this weekend
• 1:53:17
  triumphoftheheart.com. Bring a friend, bring your
• 1:53:19
  family and be changed and inspired.
• 1:53:22
  Thanks Anthony. Thanks so much for listening to
• 1:53:24
  this episode of The Lila Rose Show.
• 1:53:26
  Go to triumphoftheheart.com today.
• 1:53:28
  Get your ticket, support this independent film and help spread
• 1:53:31
  the incredible story of Saint Maximilian Colby.
• 1:53:34
  Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel.
• 1:53:36
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• 1:53:37
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• 1:53:39
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• 1:53:43
  broadcaster in the entire world. EWTN is reaching millions of
• 1:53:46
  people every single day with the beautiful truth of the gospel.
• 1:53:49
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• 1:53:53
  before they hit podcast app over at ewtn.com On demand.