The Inception
The movie is the fruit of an unlikely partnership between, on the one hand, Oscar-nominated British director, a self-described “wobbly agnostic”; and on the other, a Spanish member of Opus Dei, a financier married with three children.
When he first met Roland JoffĂ© in March 2008 at a hotel in Madrid, Ignacio GĂłmez-Sancha had spent six years overseeing the unification of Spain’s stock markets. He had been approached by the film’s original producer, Heriberto Schoeffer, as a potential investor. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” he said. “JoffĂ© was my favourite director. The Mission and the Killing Fields had a huge impact on me as teenager. The idea that JoffĂ© planned to direct a film about St JosemarĂa and the Spanish Civil War just bowled me over.”
Schoeffer had originally offered JoffĂ© a script about the life JosemarĂa Escrivá. JoffĂ© wasn’t interested. But after viewing a DVD of the founder of Opus Dei, he changed his mind. In that grainy film from the 1960s, a Jewish girl had told St JosemarĂa that she wanted to convert to Christianity but her parents were opposed. Escrivá told her in reply that the love of his life was Jewish, and that God valued and honoured her parents.
JoffĂ©, the adopted son of the Jewish British sculptor Jacob Epstein, was amazed at the humanity of that reply. “He put himself in her place and he put himself in her parents’ place; and he understood the full humanity of the position he was in. He recognised this was a life dilemma that will involve, as love does, sacrifice on somebody’s behalf; but that sacrifice can only be chosen. God does not ask that people come to Him treading on others.”
Touched by that scene, and the idea of a story about humanity triumphing over ideology (whether political or religious) he agreed to direct a film, but on condition he write his own script. After many months of research – reading everything available about St JosemarĂa, and the Spanish Civil War, as well as talking to people who had known him – he sat down to pen an epic drama in which in JosemarĂa was one of a number of significant characters faced with profound choices in situations of extreme stress. What interested him was the effect of holiness in a time of war.
“Instinctively I knew this movie had to happen,” says GĂłmez-Sancha. “It was a truly unique opportunity to have someone like Roland, who is an non-believer and a leftist, treat St JosemarĂa in the same way as he treated Fr Gabriel in The Mission – in other words, taking him seriously, on his own terms.”
Gómez-Sancha replaced Schoeffer as the executive producer, put his career on hold, and with and his partner Ignacio Núñez created a private equity fund, Mount Santa Fe Productions.
They quickly raised the first few million dollars from well-known Spanish investors. But then came the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the financial implosion of September 2008. Dozens of meetings with investors they had lined up on the east coast of the U.S. were cancelled. What followed were what Gómez-Sancha calls “months of pain and suffering”. The producers realised that they would need to find investors from outside the usual circles. It took more than a year and hundreds of meetings, but they raised enough to begin the shooting in 2009. From more than 100 investors (some are members of Opus Dei; most are not) they eventually raised nearly $40m, enough to ensure frontline actors and lavish war scenes, with the Argentine shrine town of Luján standing for 1930s Madrid and the Spanish town of Sepúlveda taking the part of Escrivá’s Aragonese hometown of Barbastro.
