Mary Magdalene (2018)

Garth Davis loves a challenge. The 44-year-old Australian film-maker, who made a huge splash in 2016 with his six-time Oscar-nominated debut, Lion, has gone straight for the mother lode with his latest effort. He has done a Jesus film. And not only that, he has cast the laid-back Californian method man Joaquin Phoenix as JC. And not only that, he has toned down the Bible stories, retold the miracles without Harry Potter-style magic and presented everything through the often radical feminist perspective of the “13th disciple” Mary Magdalene, played by Phoenix’s real-life partner, Rooney Mara. And, yes, not only that, the movie, which is called Mary Magdalene and is the first biblical epic of the Time’s Up era, had Harvey Weinstein as its executive producer.

OK, let’s stop right there. “Creatively I didn’t have anything to do with Harvey and never really did,” says Davis, lightly bearded, softly spoken and gentle of mien in a swish London hotel room. Weinstein, he explains, was remarkably “hands off” on their previous collaboration, Lion, and equally so on the making of Mary Magdalene. It was during the final days of post-production of the new film that the Weinstein scandal broke.

“It was an absolute tragedy what played out, and it was clear to us that we could have nothing at all to do with him, really,” says Davis. “And our movie, in fact, is the antithesis of that, it’s everything that it [the Weinstein abuse scandal] is not.”

Were there any signs, during the time Davis spent with Weinstein on the Lion awards circuit, that he was, well, bad news? “I found him incredibly passionate and at times intimidating,” says Davis. “But I was also aware that he was a man who got what he wanted. He was passionate about our film and moved mountains for us, but equally you could definitely tell that this was a very, very powerful man.”

He says that there are still some “issues” being sorted with his producers over Mary Magdalene’s connection to Weinstein. It was supposed to be released, for instance, in the US by the Weinstein Company, which has since filed for bankruptcy. When I ask Davis if the film will be released anywhere with the Weinstein Company logo before it he says, aghast, “No. You can’t put the Weinstein logo in front of this film!”


And he has a point. The movie is, in essence, the definitive anti-Weinstein project. It faces up to 2,000 years of patriarchal religious culture and simply turns it on its head. It says that Mary was one of the prime voices of Christianity, but was silenced by the followers of Jesus and that, crucially, her message — which was given to her directly from the man himself — was about dumping the nutty obsession with heaven and blissful paradise in a world beyond the grave and instead focusing on the now, trying to be less neurotic and angry and moody and just being, well, you know, a bit kind. As Mary says in the movie when reporting back to the disciples with updates from the risen Christ: “When we let go of our angst and our resentment we become like children!”

Is Davis, who is not a practising Christian, worried about offending traditional Christians by skewing everything in the direction of Mary? “But I feel offended that her story hasn’t been told,” he says. “And it’s not as if we’re inventing it. We’re working from the gospels — the gospel of Mark and the gospel of Mary. We are honouring those things and treating Mary as a spiritual figure in her own right. And maybe it will upset people, but I don’t think so. How can you be upset by a film that celebrates unconditional love?”

The film was shot in southern Italy and Sicily in late 2016 and is notable for its gorgeous “golden-hour” (sunrise and sunset) cinematography and an admirable refusal to get drawn into the traditional miraculous theatrics of the Bible genre. Phoenix’s Jesus mostly does unspectacular, but spectacularly effective, “hands-on” healing (he can treat blindness, epilepsy and death). “I felt very alert to the challenges of making the miracles connect to modern audiences,” says Davis.

The movie, naturally, is not going to be everyone’s cup of altar wine, and Phoenix in particular has been, in early reviews, castigated for his mellow, southern Californian Jesus. And yet Davis says that this was a deliberate act and the result of intense discussion. “Joaquin and I, together with the writers, really wanted to find a way for Jesus to speak that wasn’t just reading out parables,” he says. “That was a great challenge for us. But for me there was no one else on the planet who could play this role. And I just kept telling Joaquin that throughout.”

Although this version of Mary doesn’t go down the traditional relationship route previously explored by Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (Jesus enjoys the fantasy of living a normal couple’s life with Mary), or even The Da Vinci Code (Jesus and Mary get married), there is a soupçon of romantic tension between Phoenix and Mara, especially in the pre-crucifixion scenes.

“Whoever I cast in these two roles had to have chemistry, I knew that,” says Davis. “And I thought, all along, that Rooney and Joaquin would have that. They both have this beautiful mercurial quality. But they didn’t have a relationship when I originally cast them. I just felt they’d be quite special together.”

So when did they get together? “It was during the making of the film. So it was probably a bit of both [the romantic tension in the script and the extracurricular romance of the actors]. But we’ve shown the film to a lot of nuns and they love that we acknowledge there are human feelings in there. But treated quite delicately.”

Davis is, interestingly, a reluctant film-maker (the first one, I think, I’ve ever met). He always wanted to be a painter. He grew up in Brisbane, the son of an artist mum and a dad who worked in advertising and, in his early twenties, after some fruitless study in a Melbourne art college, he moved to Italy, to become a painter and a “hippy”. When he returned to Australia (“broke”), he found that some of his early student short films were suddenly in vogue and he got pulled into advertising.

Some award-winning adverts followed (his super-slow motion water balloon promo for a Schweppes campaign is mesmerising), as did the solicitous calls, first from TV (Jane Campion asked him to direct Top of the Lake), then from the movies (the King’s Speech producer Iain Canning asked him to direct Lion). Lion, the true story of an Indian-born Australian going back to the streets of Calcutta to find his birth family, was a smash hit and awards-season favourite. It catapulted Davis into a starry stratosphere for which, he says now, he wasn’t quite prepared. “I found it a very surreal experience,” he says. “To make your very first movie and then get six Oscar nominations was very rare.”

Davis is based in Melbourne with his partner, Nicola, and three children. He has not yet decided on his next project (possibly the true-life Somali kidnap drama A House in the Sky) and he is clearly aware of the central contradiction of his professional life.

“I never really wanted to be a film-maker from the start,” he says wryly. He says that he wants to take some time off and contemplate the stories that he wants to tell. Possibly a sci-fi. Maybe a low-budget relationship drama. Bottom line, he says, “I definitely know about emotionalism and human connections. Everything else I’ll learn as I go along.” 

There were so many things about her that appealed to me," says Mara. "She was vulnerable, yet she had this strength and this desire to really follow her true self.

"Her faith and her love of God were so important to her, she gave up everything in her life to follow that. I thought that was very brave."

"Mary has this otherworldliness and this spiritual calling," says Davis. "For me that was very critical in creating her as a character

"Rooney's one of the most emotionally truthful actresses I know; in the silences she opens up universes. She's so unique and I felt she would bring the most compelling Mary to life.