As a result, for instance, Mary Magdalene, played by Paloma Baeza, is
portrayed not as a prostitute but as a woman who is, effectively, one of
Jesus’s sponsors. “There is increasing evidence that she was a wealthy widow
who supported Jesus’s campaign. As he emerged from Galilee, he needed
backing,” says Deasy.
Pontius Pilate, played by James Nesbitt, is also revealed in a new light, as a
career soldier posted to one of the most troublesome outposts of the Roman
Empire. “We see him as a man with a wife and a career and a villa in Rome to
worry about,” says Deasy. “Again I wanted his decisions to be plausible.
He’s a guy managing a career and a volatile political situation. I think
Pilate is an interesting contemporary figure. You can almost view the
current situation with the Western powers in Iraq or Afghanistan in the
things Pilate says. He is someone who is dealing with people with huge
convictions about things that mean very little to him and he is trying to
impose order,” he says.
The character who emerges from the shadows of history most strongly in this
version of the story is the high priest of Jerusalem’s temple, Caiaphas. In
most versions of the story the man who condemns Jesus to death at the hands
of the Romans is a one-dimensional figure, the most identifiable bad guy.
Through his research, however, Deasy began to see a man who was part priest,
part politician, a leader who was faced with keeping a lid on the cauldron
of intrigue and insurrection that was Jerusalem during the biggest festival
of the year, Passover. So when Jesus appears in Jerusalem, fulfilling an
ancient prophesy that the Messiah will arrive on a donkey through the city’s
eastern gate, Deasy’s Caiaphas, played by Ben Daniels, is motivated not by
bloodlust, but by the need to protect his people from the violence the
Romans routinely meted out when tensions rose within the city. “I became
more and more fascinated by Caiaphas,” Deasy says. “He is usually a cartoon
villain. But he is trying to protect his world for noble reasons. He loves
his people and his family. By going down a very human route with Caiaphas it
led me into really interesting dramatic territory.”
At the heart of the drama, of course, is Jesus himself. Like Stafford-Clark,
Deasy wanted to move away from the image of an otherwordly figure. “In so
many other treatments Jesus is pure, floating on a cloud 2ft above the
ground,” he says. “He has to emerge as a person to other living people.”
The key to this was giving him a voice that was rooted in the world, something
Deasy found in an unexpected place. “I was struggling, so I talked to a
friend of mine who is a priest. Every day he makes these concepts fresh to a
contemporary audience so I asked him how he did it. He gave me a really
simple piece of advice,” he explains. “He said to think of Jesus as coming
from Newcastle, as a working-class man from the north of Palestine who
speaks Aramaic to fishermen and peasants, who comes to London where people
speak Hebrew and are more educated. And he starts to preach the Gospel. He
has got to use words that are quite simple, clear and rough at times. He has
to explain concepts like redemption, righteousness, forgiveness, in plain,
everyday language. This idea of Jesus coming from a real place worked. After
that I found a voice for him that was easy and conversational, simple,
without being patronising.”
Perhaps the boldest decision Deasy made was the last one. The final episode of
the six-part drama depicts the resurrection of Jesus in a way that is open
to individual interpretation. In keeping with the Gospels, he reappears to
his former friends in different ways, leaving them to decide what it is they
have seen.
“A lot of accounts skip the resurrection,” Deasy says. “We have followed the
different gospel accounts faithfully. There are lengthy discussions among
the disciples about what it means. They are the conversations we would have
today in the light of an event like that. It resolves itself in that there
is a resurrection of hope among the disciples. There’s a sense of new life,
that suffering has been transformed into something meaningful. The extent of
what that means as a viewer is up to you.”
While Deasy was completing his script, Stafford-Clark was turning his
attention to filming. When he decided to shoot in Morocco during summer,
director Michael Offer thought he was crazy. “The old phrase about mad dogs
and Englishmen sprang to mind,” laughs the Australian director. “The heat
has been challenging, particularly for the actors wearing beards and robes.”
The Atlas film studios have been a favourite location for film-makers from
David Lean to Ridley Scott, who filmed sequences for Gladiator here. Every
aspect of The Passion’s look was carefully researched. For instance,
production designer Simon Elliott and his team went to great lengths to
ensure that the last supper was an authentic meal from the Judaea of the
time. “The Passover lamb eaten during the festival would be part of the
meal, along with herbs and green vegetables,” says Elliott. “There were
dates and raisins and unleavened bread and a sausage made of honey and
dates.”
In a similar vein, Elliott and his team tried to recreate the crucifixion as
realistically as possible. Historical evidence suggests that Jesus would
have been nailed to the cross in a way that is at odds with the image that
has dominated Christian iconography for 2,000 years. “There has only ever
been one archaeological find of a crucified skeleton, in Palestine in the
Sixties,” explains Elliott. “The body was in a slightly different position
to the classic one, with the legs tucked up and under. Historians think it
shows the crucifixion was fiendishly designed. If you could bear the pain of
having the nails driven through your ankles you could take the weight and
lift up your chest. But if you were put in a position where you couldn’t
lift yourself up you died of asphyxia – you were basically suffocated.
That’s the reason they broke your legs, so you would very quickly
suffocate.”
If the burden of retelling the greatest story ever told was heavy for the
production team, however, it was greater still for the man chosen to portray
Jesus. A relatively little known actor, acclaimed for his work in the BBC2
drama Soundproof and most recently seen in the gay drama Clapham Junction,
Joseph Mawle was Stafford-Clark and Offer’s first choice for the role. He
admits he has found it hard and lonely work. “It is incredibly daunting,” he
says. “It is in some ways the biggest role you can take on. There were times
I got quite shaky about it and thought, I’m really scared, to be quite
honest with you. If we don’t like Jesus, then we are in trouble.”
The key, he says, has been to play him as flesh and blood. “He was a man. No
two ways about it. The only way I could approach him was not as a god, but
as a man,” he says. He has, he admits, been particularly wary of the
crucifixion scene. “I am pretty scared about it. I want to get it as right
as possible, to play the reality as much as possible and to tell the story
as best as possible.”
Frustratingly, however, he will not be doing it today. As word comes through
that filming has been abandoned for the day, Mawle heads off to begin
preparing to film an interior scene at the studios.
Nigel Stafford-Clark, meanwhile, is in his office, anticipating battles much
further down the line. Aware of the scrutiny that the film will get, both
here and in the US where the BBC’s co-financier, HBO, will show the drama,
he has already begun dialogue with the Christian community. “We have told
them what we are doing,” he says. “It’s very important that it doesn’t come
as a shock to people, particularly to those for whom it is the most
important story in their lives. The reaction has been very positive.”
He is too old and wise a hand to expect it to avoid controversy completely.
When he made Bleak House he had to field complaints from the Dickens Society
and, faced with a rather broader constituency this time, he is braced for
criticism again. He is unapologetic about the approach he and his team have
taken, however. “My job is telling stories. The fact that it is the backbone
of one of the world’s great religions is what, for me, has stopped it being
told properly as a story before because people back away from it. It’s not
just a story that is told in churches. It really happened,” he says.
“Our version is not remotely controversial. There is no attempt to twist
anything – you don’t see Jesus sleeping with Mary Magdalene or anything like
that. We have tried to make it feel like it is really happening. And because
you understand why people are behaving the way they are, what Jesus is doing
becomes even more extraordinary.”
“With the world the way it is at the moment,” he continues, “anything that is
about something that goes beyond your everyday existence is of value. People
are looking for something beyond their new car. Telling a story like this
quenches that thirst. It makes you feel there is something beyond your own
limited existence.”
And with that he leaves his office to head back out towards the set – checking
nervously for the arrival of another Biblical storm.
The Passion begins on BBC1 on Sunday, March 16, and continues throughout
Easter week
