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Methodist Man - Winston-Salem landmarks came in handy when the Rev. John Jackman was directing his latest film, Wesley.
photo courtesy of Foundery Pictures
Peter Boehler (Bill Oberst, Jr., left), a Moravian missionary, gives advice to John Wesley (Burgess Jenkins) in a scene from Wesley, which was filmed largely in Winston-Salem.
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Published: November 12, 2009
Updated: 11/11/2009 06:35 pm
Winston-Salem landmarks came in handy when the Rev. John Jackman was directing his latest film, Wesley.
"We found, in a five-mile radius, settings we could use for 18th-century London, that worked for Oxford, Savannah, the Savannah River, the English countryside…," he said. "I'm not sure where else I could have pulled this off."
Old Salem and Bethabara play prominent roles in the film, as did sites including Salem College and Academy, The Children's Home on Reynolda Road, and St. Paul's Episcopal and Centenary Methodist churches in downtown Winston-Salem.
"Those places were just tremendously helpful," Jackman said. "They bent over backwards to help us with this."
The movie tells the story of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, focusing on his life from 1736 to 1742. "For us, that was the real crisis period of Wesley's life," Jackman explained, "the turning point that had a lot of drama in it."
The film follows English-born Wesley, an Anglican priest who makes an ill-fated journey to the New World, where he tries to bring religion to the settlers in Savannah, Georgia and to American Indians as well. His faith is tested and he returns to England, dejected. There, he has an epiphany that leads to a spiritual awakening and the realization that he should focus on helping the downtrodden.
The film will have its world premiere Saturday at the Stevens Center and will go on to play a few limited-release screenings. Beyond that, Jackman is talking with distributors about getting the film into wider distribution.
Burgess Jenkins, who plays Wesley, was born in Winston-Salem, and has appeared in such mainstream movies as Remember the Titans and The Reaping. He lived in Los Angeles for a time, but returned to Winston-Salem to raise his family.
He is Presbyterian but found the story of John Wesley compelling. "The more I read it, the more I realized what an interesting character he was," Jenkins said. "All of us believe in our faith, and this is a story of conversion, a story of someone who has his faith tested on so many levels … and has an awakening to what faith really means."
When Jenkins got the part, he started studying Wesley by reading biographies about him, "but I came to stop, because every historian's perspective included a big helping of their opinion," he said. "It was confusing, and it was frustrating me to get a feeling about this man." So he went directly to Wesley's personal journals, which formed the basis for much of the movie's script.
The supporting cast includes two familiar faces. One is June Lockhart, famous as the mom on TV classics Lassie and Lost in Space, as Wesley's mother. "The audience for this movie is going to skew a little older," Jackman said, "and we needed someone who was a classic mom for everybody."
The other is Kevin McCarthy, best known for his role in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as a church elder who comes to Wesley's defense.
The rest of the cast is largely regional, many of them from the Triad. R. Keith Harris and Michael Huie play Wesley's brothers, and Carrie Anne Hunt plays Sophy, the niece of a Georgian magistrate, who is smitten with Wesley.
Wesley was privately financed through investors who were interested in the project, Jackman said. It was filmed in the summer of 2007 on a small budget -- Jackman declined to give a specific number, but said it was under $1 million -- but he said he didn't let that keep the film's ambitions low.
"I pretty much broke ever rule for doing a low-budget feature," he said. "There are children, animals; it's a period flick so everyone has to be in costume.… There are 76 speaking roles and 200 extras that come in and out, and about 100 other people were involved in the movie at some level."
He even included a sequence set on the ocean, which required the construction of a ship set in an unused gymnasium at The Children's Home and the use of computer-generated special effects in the film.
"There's more CGI (computer-generated imagery) in this movie than I hope people will notice," he said. "We had to take out telephone lines, or when there was something inappropriate in a room like emergency lighting, it had to be taken out in post-production digitally."
Rather than rely on pre-recorded music, he chose to hire composer Bruce Keisling, who created an orchestral score that is performed by performers from the Greensboro and the Winston-Salem symphonies.
Jackman is the senior pastor of Trinity Moravian Church, and at first he thought a Methodist should direct the movie, but he changed his mind. "Their history is really intertwined," he said, "and Moravians played a huge role in Wesley's conversion."
Jackman's previous movies have mostly been straight-to-DVD productions for the church market, but he was more ambitious with Wesley. "I always thought this had a shot at going theatrical," he said. "It's got a huge audience that's kind of built in," he said, citing the more than 70 million people worldwide who trace their religious beliefs to Wesley's teachings.
Beyond that, "I think the story has a wider appeal than just the church audience," he said. "Movies have to have emotion and action, even non-action flicks need something happening. This story has a storm at sea, a star-crossed love affair, mob violence, all the stuff you put in a movie."
The success of recent religious films including last summer's Fireproof have proven the viability of such films, he said.
Jenkins recently completed another faith-based film that was shot in Winston-Salem, One Good Man, about a father who tries to encourage other dads to spend more time with their kids by forming a Little League Team. He is currently in Charlotte filming The Trial, another faith-based film, this one a sequel to the 2007 thriller The List. Jenkins said he feels the growing popularity of such films is in part a backlash to the lack of family-friendly programming in cinemas and on television these days.
"People are hungry for something that is responsible, wholesome and tells a story," he said. "Something that is still entertaining, but has a purpose, and a moral purpose at that."
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