[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] "On Story" is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story," a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators and filmmakers.

This week on "On Story," we're joined by Tyler Thompson and Ryan Swanson, two writers behind the historical drama "The Chosen."

A crowdfunded dramatization of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.

- What we knew was that if we made it out of the garage, our core audience would stick around for Jesus.

What we weren't sure about was will they invest in these secondary characters, even our saints.

We are portraying them as three dimensional and sometimes controversial.

A Matthew that maybe that doesn't also pop off the page.

We wanted you to see this man through their eyes.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] - These writers take us behind the scenes of the show's early conception and unexpected success.

[typewriter dings] This is the best-selling book of all time, right?

And has a pretty staggering fan base.

Bigger than "Star Wars," I think.

And you all decided to take on a project that that has that kind of chatter all over and some probably pretty distinct opinions.

And so when you first decided to do this, what was going into that whole thought about how are we even gonna start to develop it?

- Yeah, it's the greatest book ever written, most widely known, most rabid fan base as you say.

And no one's ever gonna see it, so let's just go for it, right?

Because it was never gonna get out of that basement.

And that was just how it was.

So we felt the freedom to do that.

And that really hasn't changed much.

Where were you at when we started that thing?

- No, the same place.

We didn't think anyone would see it.

Everyone has a take on Jesus, even if they don't identify as religious or everyone has a perspective, you know?

And so it was nice that we didn't have all that noise when we started writing, it was just the three of us.

- I have my own view of my favorite saints and apostles, and you are gonna now create these characters in a way that they're gonna bring them to life for us.

And so as you were breaking it out there, like who they are, which I think you do beautifully in season one, introducing people, especially Peter.

'Cause there's not a lot of documentation on those guys.

- Most people are used to seeing, as you said, saints with literal halos behind their heads.

And they're lofty, right?

They're like a little bit up high.

And so we introduce each of them in a compromised state of their character.

I mean, when we first meet, as you said, Simon Peter, he's brawling in the mud over a debt.

I mean, he's a gambling sort of rascal.

And so we've tried to take people down from this sort of stained glass image and start them out with a need, start them out with an unsatisfying status quo.

Something that they are trying to get in this life first time Simon Peter, it's freedom from his tax debts and to help his brother and to get things right with his wife.

- I lied.

- What do you mean?

- I've been fishing on Shabbat because I've had no choice.

Andrew has tax debts, I've tax debts.

We haven't been able to keep up.

I did some things I'm not proud of to fix it.

And now it's gone bad and we're in trouble.

- We?

What do you mean?

- I'm -- I'm in trouble, but we, because I need a miracle or I can be in big trouble.

- I'm not a child.

Stop speaking in riddles, tell me what's happening.

- I could go to prison.

- As you said, there's not much documentation.

Literally there's a list of the apostles and one of them says, it's listing James, John, Andrew, Matthew, Philip, Thaddeus.

And then there's one named Simon the zealot.

And he only appears one time in all four gospels and it's in a list.

And we had to, you know, invent something for him.

- In the case of Matthew, who I think we took the biggest editorial swing with, we were looking at the meta contextual aspects of his gospel.

And we saw a gospel that was extraordinarily precise and we knew he was a tax collector.

And so that's what we knew.

And then we looked around the room and Dallas, our third partner and the showrunner has a lot of experience with autism spectrum.

In thinking about what it might be to be a sort of pariah in one's neighborhood and who might be okay with or have fewer options to, you know, when forecasting one's future than what these factors might mean.

It led us to draw on what we knew personally.

And we did that to an extent with all of the characters, but nobody more so than Matthew.

The reverse engineering of these characters who exist in the margins of the gospels, but who play a really critical role to our myth arc.

- So there are a couple that I'm particularly interested in your decision on the build out, and it's Judas, but also Lazarus and John the Baptist, because, you know, they're all so distinct and John the Baptist, you know, you have almost this feral.

- So these characters and their importance to Jesus had to become important to us and no more so than John the Baptist.

Where did we start with that?

We knew he ate bugs.

- Yeah, we didn't make up the feral thing.

And that's just there in the text it says that he ate locusts and wild honey, kind of like some influencers today.

But he just sort of is out there.

And the descriptions of him wearing, you know, an animal hide and a belt, it seems like he, you know, skewed sort of the more fashionable clothing at the time.

And then we inferred things from the little details we get about the way that he would sort of speak truth to power.

There's an anecdote in the Bible that says he called out Herod's marriage as being pseudo incestuous and that's what landed him in jail.

And he wasn't afraid to sort of speak his mind in a way that's a little bit crazy.

- What of the laws of Moses will be minimized.

- All of this will be addressed.

I'm not ready to get into the specifics.

- You appear to be not ready to get into the specifics of a lot of things.

For instance-- - Stay on topic.

The romantic lives of rulers and kings has been and always will be of enormous fascination to people.

It was covered at length in Torah.

I don't see why you feel the need to focus on it now.

- It's the client king or Terara or whatever.

He's one of us and he's unlawful.

I am not afraid of him.

He may not be as bad as his father, but he's still bad.

I'm gonna march straight into his court and I'm gonna tell him to his face.

- Well, let's just start talking about Jesus since... you know, what the heck.

One of the things I think is so, your Jesus is, he's not automatically magnetic.

He sort of builds on you.

And I guess, you know, I kind of thought about Jesus as maybe the first Beatle, you know, that people were just gonna knock the doors down to get to him.

And so it was interesting the way you were presenting him to people.

And he's angry and frustrated and short of temper and sometimes really impatient.

- What we knew was that if we made it out of the garage, our core audience would stick around for Jesus.

So, what we weren't sure about was will they invest in the secondary characters.

To pay off the promise of our premise, we wanted you to see this man through their eyes.

And so that meant investing in who these characters are.

What we're trying to do is essentially this, we're introducing you to the God-sized hole that each one of these characters has.

So when they meet Jesus, that you want it because it's a moment of grace.

It's deus ex machina literally.

But what we can always do narratively is as a sleight of hand, make you want that grace for our characters as much as they do.

And so the hump is not having Simon do the right things and earn his way into salvation.

It is to see him try and fail and understand, you know, we're building off of the old adage that if you give a villain a plan, they become a hero.

In some cases, these guys, their plans are horrible.

Like Peter's plan in season one was horrible.

I'm gonna pay off my debts for two years by fishing one night on Shabbat no less.

But you want it for him.

And there's this critical moment in episode four where we see, and this was a Tyler creation.

I looked at our episode four, which is the critical moment for Simon Peter.

You might remember the miraculous catch of fish.

We shot that and we had him in the boat.

He sort of realizes the other fishermen are coming, they have a conversation, they go into shore.

And I was like, Tyler, we need, we need something here.

And Tyler came up with Peter pleading with God, right?

Like, like, like almost cursing him right on the edge of cursing his fate.

- Bring us out of Egypt, part the Red Sea, only to let us wander in the desert for 40 years.

Give us the land only to let us be exiled in Babylon.

Bring us back only to be crushed by Rome.

This is the God I've served so faithfully my entire life.

You're the God I'm supposed to thank.

You know, if I didn't know any better, I'd say you enjoy yanking us around like goats and can't decide whether we're chosen or not.

Which one is it, huh?

- But all of these things is to create a sort of vortex that Jesus fills without ever showing him.

- So that's the beauty of adapting this story is that the person of Jesus didn't deal in just teachings, morals, or abstractions, but everything that he did was sort of rooted in reality.

Usually the women are the ones who really seem to be paying the closest attention and the women seem much more perceptive about really seeing what Jesus is actually doing.

And so it's been a huge gift.

The fact, okay, it's an oversight and a tragedy that there isn't more detail about the women in the Bible.

It just gives a short list.

But then it's a gift to us as screenwriters because then we have a ton of freedom to really show them as the way that we want to.

- The humanization of this is just, I mean it's really, I imagine what is so popular to these 280 million people.

That's what I read you had, that's definitely more people than the last episode of "Game of Thrones," I just wanna point out.

Why did you decide to start with Mary Magdalene?

- We started with Mary because Mary's story, unlike somebody like Nathaniel or Philip, like there's a relatively a lot written about Mary Magdalene and we knew what an a critical companion of his she had been.

And we knew we could solve her problem and he could solve her problem in one episode.

We also knew that she was gonna be compelling enough to take us essentially through that episode.

[ominous music] - We are not afraid of you.

You have no power here teacher.

[ominous music] [Teacher] We're finished here.

- We also knew that starting with Mary Magdalene, what we knew is that it's sort of an alpha and omega situation.

We knew she's someone who's there at the end.

So when you ask who is there at the end of Jesus' life, it says that Mary Magdalene was at the cross and then Mary Magdalene's the first person that Jesus appears to in the resurrection in the garden.

And so we thought, well, she's gonna end the story.

Let's have her start this story.

She's the through line.

[dramatic music] - For I have redeemed you.

♪ ♪ I have called you by name.

♪ ♪ You... are mine.

♪ ♪ [Mary weeping] ♪ ♪ - So regarding antagonists, you've got Romans and rabbis.

- We set out to try to tell this story in a non antisemitic way as possible.

Maybe in, in, in some ways try to blame Italy a little bit more than is historically common.

But you know, we have some bad guys from within and our intention is always to portray people who understand and who don't.

And there are people who start out bad guys who start to understand and that is a stark line sometimes.

But like, I mean, it's always been a challenge is whom do we portray?

Because the real devastating tragedy is that none of these people thought they were putting God to death.

- No, we've been highly conscious of blood libel and it's painful history.

And when you mentioned that there are rabbis who are emerging as antagonists, what we've been really careful to do is make sure that their motivations are really clear and that their motivations are actually love.

They love their tradition and their faith in their people, and they're trying to protect it from what they perceive to be a threat.

And so instead of just, I'm not gonna throw other portrayals under the bus, but sometimes when there is a movie or a limited series or something about Jesus, it does seem that the high priests are mustache twirling villains and we don't know anything about them or their families.

We've taken great care in season five to show that Caiaphas has a wife and kids and he loves his family, he loves his brother.

He believes he's received a message from God.

I mean, how many people have we encountered in the culture who are convinced they've received a message from God?

- I think Caiaphas is somebody that I'm interested in.

I know that this Roman exists in the Bible somehow.

It's not in the Bible, it's actually in somebody's, right?

- Yes, there's a mention in the text about a centurion, who believed that his daughter could be healed against all odds because he considered himself that he just stay out of Jesus' way.

'Cause you know, Jew gentile separation, all of that, that is mentioned.

And then there are, we don't wanna give any spoilers, but there are other Roman soldiers mentioned in the Bible who seem to have a dramatic turn.

And we're very, as you said, you mentioned these people are sent to do a dirty job a long way from home.

While trying to weight some of the blame on Rome, as you said, it's Wall Street, when Jesus turns over the tables in the temple, in the market, they're not upset about the tables being overturned.

They're upset about the lost tax revenue.

They were taxing all of that business.

And so it's threatening their bottom line.

- So you mentioned that scene about Jesus and overturning the tables and his really fiery speech.

And that's one that I was particularly interested in hearing about, because that's really an angry Jesus.

What was the discussion around a scene like that?

- Well, that whole holy week we sort of took it apart as if looking at a heist, how did Jesus accomplish this?

Knowing that this was his goal going in, what structures did he have to sort of break down?

What alliances did he have to fracture?

Who did he have to pit against him?

Maybe unlikely people.

But you know, the first domino to fall was to sever that alliance that had been for many years this tenuous balance between Roman occupation and the high priesthood.

This was what allowed commerce to flow.

And in fact, for the entire region, their annual revenue, about 25% of it came from currency exchange on Passover.

So this would've been a critical moment for Rome to be collecting.

And any breaks in the flow of income would've been really disastrous for anybody in leadership.

So he goes in, flips the tables and severs the relationship between Caiaphas and Pontius.

Now he's got to turn the... Sort of give this Socratic dilemma to the priesthood.

And say, I'm gonna call you out on your hypocrisy and force you to do something about it.

You're either gonna let me free or you're gonna put me to death.

You know, which was, I think that that the hemlock dilemma that he put the Council of elders to.

So we wanted it to be offensive.

We wanted it to be strategically upsetting.

[dramatic music] [Jesus yells] - What are you doing?

- Get out!

All of you.

[crowd clamoring] [whip cracks] [crowd clamoring] Move!

[crowd clamoring] [whip cracks] [crowd clamoring] [tables crash] [crowd clamoring] All of you move.

[crowd clamoring] Stop proclaiming my Father's house.

[crowd clamoring] - Those different places of understanding are also such a window into how Jesus might really be feeling at any given time, you know, and about it, which was to me really sometimes just heartbreaking.

- The Bible does leave us with a lot of moments where Jesus tells his disciples something directly and they don't seem to get it.

We had to confront that and we had to confront it with fealty to the Bible.

The midpoint in a movie is really important to me structurally.

I've always advocated this, that, you know, that's the moment you get to the top of what you think is the mountain, only to realize there's 26 more peaks.

And I've gotta relearn how to do this if I'm going to succeed.

Jesus, who we are portraying as fully man and fully God at once.

We don't often have him wearing the God glasses where he knows what everybody in this room is thinking and what you're gonna do next.

But he is God and can access that information.

He's had as a man's experience.

And at this point in the story we imagined that he is with his friends.

He's doing exactly what he was built to do.

And this is the moment when the people who are closest to him in all his teachings, everything they've seen in all their travels, they still don't get it.

He knows I have to die on the cross.

And we imagined him proceeding through the week like that as his apostles are, you know, the Bible is really frustrating when you've spent five years or six years building up these people as three dimensional to then portray them as being told a thing directly multiple times.

And they're like, I think I know what you mean, but I don't have any, you know what I mean?

And so the key keeps saying, I'm gonna go away.

I'm gonna be taken, I'm gonna be killed.

You're gonna be chased and exiled.

And they're like, do you mean as a metaphor?

And you know, we had to play that line.

So Jesus was on his own path and it was up to the disciples to figure it out what he was doing.

- And that brings us to season five, which I am just amazed by season five.

So when you're taking the Last Supper and you're weaving it entirely through this, which I thought while I was watching it, in fact the first episode that I watched, and then the next day I watched another one and I thought, oh, did I just watch this over again?

Oh no, no, I haven't seen this And I then I realized what you were doing, it was brilliant.

I thought it was really a piece of brilliance, season structure.

- So, first of all, we realized that the Last Supper is the last thing that happens in Holy Week before the arrest.

And so if we had not chopped it up this way, what would've happened is we would've gone through all the episodes in chronological order and then we would've ended with this 45, 50 minute dinner.

That's kind of slow.

There are dramatic moments, but it was just gonna be like a bottle episode at the end.

So we wrote it as one chronological thing, almost like it's, they called it the ninth episode for a while because we were just like, let's just write the entire Last Supper.

And then we chopped it up and arranged it backwards and aligned events within like the Last Supper openings.

They're the teasers for each episode that would connect with something that was in the episode.

But you're right that when you're watching it, I guess it's kind of a success story for us that you watched the first one we're like, okay, there was that.

Then you watched the second episode and it destabilized you.

Like, did I already see this?

We've always said "The Chosen" is not lean back entertainment, it's lean In.

We always wanted people to sort of squint and be like, what am I looking at?

And there's actually been a lot of conspiracy theories online about like what we were doing and why, but everyone was freaked out by it.

You know, like why is it backwards and why is it out of order and why is it first and not last?

I love that.

- And we really felt like when we realized we can tell it backwards and it actually lines up with things that are happening in that week.

And then episode seven will lead us up into that room and we can sort of have the dinner happen chronologically between episodes.

And then episode eight begins as they are, you know, sort of dismounting and going to the garden.

That that felt like we all breathed this sigh of relief because we knew we were doing something artistically innovative.

Because when you get into Holy Week, that is a section of the Bible, particularly in Luke that is written almost hour for hour.

And so it wasn't a new way of telling an old story.

We were back to the felt board in people's Sunday schools, if we're just telling the same story from exactly the same perspectives they've always heard it.

So I don't know when we figured that out, that felt like... we got it.

- But I think, you know, if you get to season five, if you get lucky enough to make this many seasons and you're not taking risks and scaring yourself, I think you should question that.

Like, we didn't wanna coast.

Just because we've made it to season five, which so few shows do.

Great, great shows that you all love, get canceled after season three.

And if you're gonna make it this far, you better be taking real risks and challenging yourself.

- Talk a little bit about your use of liberal humor in the show.

- Humor feels loving, you know?

Because you are sort of making light and you are, you know, you're bringing people closer together.

It's the opposite of shock, right?

Which is unexpected information that pushes us further away from understanding.

This is an unexpected moment that brings us closer.

Because we started in the garage band, we felt we had to and we wanted to, and that's the only reason we wanted to do this was to make it personal and make it kind of an act of worship to do the writing.

And so it was infused with a lot of ourselves and we crack each other up.

We actually really like each other, the three of us.

And so, you know, those writing sessions are filled with humor.

We also, you know, again, to get back to its dramatic purpose, we have to release some tension sometimes because we're really dealing with some heavy stuff.

[typewriter dings] [Narrator] You've been watching Inside the Writer's Room, "The Chosen" on "On Story."

"On Story" is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story Project, that also includes the On Story radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive, accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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