Word: jesus
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Months before its release, Gibson's movie, starring James Caviezel as Jesus, has stoked an incendiary debate on issues both fundamental and touchy: artistic freedom vs. historical accuracy, Catholic traditionalism vs. Jewish sensibilities. Often these issues clash within the combatants, as Jewish rabbis and writers, by nature defenders of the First Amendment, now call for Gibson to edit his film to their wishes--and Jewish movie people defend a project that has outraged their brethren...
From the outset, The Passion--a Jesus film that underlined the story's physical and emotional violence--was bound to start arguments. For extra realism, dialogue is in Aramaic and Latin (though some scholars say the Romans in Palestine spoke Greek). To accent the strangeness, there are no subtitles (that's being rethought). A $25 million film directed, co-scripted and self-financed by a famous Catholic conservative...
Gibson's Hollywood posse is in his corner. "The story is controversial," says Joel Silver, who has produced five Mel-odramas (four Lethal Weapons and a Conspiracy Theory). "What this man [Jesus] was doing was new; people felt threatened by it and wanted him gone. Well, Mel's taken this timeless story and made it feel contemporary, as he did with Braveheart...
Gibson is still honing the film, which may open late this year. He recently cut a conversation between Caiaphas and Pilate about the mocking sign (KING OF THE JEWS) on Jesus' cross. The edit was supposedly made not out of religious sensitivity but to trim the film's running time--though Devlin's one criticism of the film was "I wouldn't mind if it was longer." He adds, "I don't know if there will be wide appeal to go see it, but I think the vast majority of people who do see it will be moved to tears...
...agonizing over whether to join the circus now or run a few years later as he had always planned, former Governor Wilson privately offered him a piece of advice he had got from Richard Nixon back in 1966, when Wilson was wrestling with a decision on entering a race. "Jesus, Pete," Nixon told him. "If you think you can win, you got to go now." For once, Schwarzenegger knew, the question wasn't whether to seize the moment--it was whether to let the moment seize him. --With reporting by Sean Scully/Los Angeles, Matthew Cooper, John F. Dickerson, Michael Duffy...