CT: This story has been told many times, and there are many film versions. Did you find it a challenge to write something fresh?
FD: I did find it a challenge to write something fresh. If you look at it purely as a text, the more time one spends with the text the more rewarding it becomes. There is such a wealth in the text that it became fresh for me and new to me and I felt a trust that that would come through in the telling.
One of the things that surprised me to be truthful was how a lot of Jesus’ message has become – and I don’t mean this in a controversial sense at all – but I would say it has become a vaguely virtuous ideal or a set of strict moral codes that at times can seem quite unforgiving.
The more I went into the Gospel texts the more I found a Jesus who was intensely spiritual and for whom there was a very clearly outlined path of sacrifice itself, of one’s own vanity, of one’s own ego, of acceptance and sacrifice and unconditional love, that outward giving generosity as a response to the dangers and pain and suffering of this world. I suppose that became a sort of touchstone for me to try and find a way of dramatising it. It is a challenge to dramatise unconditional love because it is not something that one tends to see a great deal of unfortunately.
CT: Did you find it difficult to create suspense in re-telling a story in which everyone knows what happens next?
FD: It is a pretty extraordinary week! And when one includes the point of view of Caiaphas, the high priest who asks for Jesus to be crucified, and the point of view of Pilate it becomes a week that is filled with intrigue and suspense and political manipulation and that is very dramatic.
It is also a tumultuous week in the Jewish calendar. At the time of the Passover festival the population of Jerusalem quadruples and pilgrims flood in from Galilee and all of Judea. So that creates a very chaotic atmosphere that is visually very vivid and strong.
But of course the real suspense is the emotional journey and what became clear to me late on in the writing is that Jesus takes his disciples through this Passion - because it’s not only his Passion. In a sense it is all of their Passion. And the week becomes a crucible in which the disciples are forged to become the people they became, the people who carried forward this message, and whether they can let him go, how he helps them to let him go and he also has to find in himself the ability to let them go. Those scenes to me are moving on a human level but they are also very instructive on a spiritual level.
CT: Your portrayal of Caiaphas as the family man is quite a new one. What was your motive behind that?
FD: If one’s starting point is that this is going to work as a piece of drama one has to adopt the approach that one would towards any drama, that the audience learns what it needs to know at the very points at which it needs to know it. So they have to learn what are people’s motives, what are the reasons why people behave the way they do? What are their goals? Why are they the people that they are? And obviously you have to portray Caiaphas and Pilate to do that.
