The opening scene of my new indie film depicts a harried stage manager (Marcia DeBonis) of a fictional theater company interrogating her director (Alexander Roberts) about a weird new play he has written. The director’s weird new play is, as he puts it, “a thinly disguised Christian allegory.” As they wind their way through the dressing rooms backstage, she begs him to lose the allegory part and just make an outright Christian play. “Religious stories are big sellers,” she insists. The director argues against it. Comedy ensues. (You can find a snippet of the rough cut here.)

The film is a feature comedy called “The Allegory” (Logline: “A misfit band of artists attempts to put on a Christian play, while disguising the play’s Christianity.”) We started shooting on January 6. (I know. It was the only date that worked.) We wrapped on July 21 with scenes featuring Richard Kind (“Only Murders in the Building” and practically everything else you’ve ever seen) as a father bedeviled by his over-protective daughter (Raye Levine Spielberg). The whole film took all of 16 shooting days. It is in post-production, with a run on the festival circuit planned for next year.

The second day on set, just as we were about to film the opening scene, Alexander and Marcia came to me with an issue. Something did not make sense. The script in that opening moment was “off.” 

Two years of writing and workshopping and revising and clarifying the text of the script. A year of raising money from kindergarten pals and dentists and dentist’s widows and people who know what A.M.D.G. stands for (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, I think?). Months of searching for and at last finding the film location—a marvelously ramshackle old theater with worn red carpet, cozy dressing rooms (i.e., tiny) and a high, vaulted ceiling with barnlike wooden rafters in Maplewood, N.J. 

Director Deniz Demirer works with actress Cleopatra Boudreau on the set of “The Allegory.” Credit: Matt Werner

And then casting the actors and hiring the crew and ordering Panera sandwiches that weren’t actually from Panera for the actors and crew to eat.

And just as we are about to film the first sentences of the whole script, Alexander and Marcia tell me that, essentially, what their characters were saying meant the opposite of what I intended.

And here I was, the writer. Here I was, the producer. And here were these two people, these two actors, in their costumes, questioning my towering artistic authority.

I picked up the script. I reread the opening lines. The actors were right. The lines said the opposite of what I had wanted them to say. I changed the lines. The script was funnier, it made more sense. Thank God for actors in their costumes. 

(“My” new indie film? A mere term of convenience. The director Deniz Demirer’s new film? Not quite. In Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman declares that no film is just one person’s film. So many people have such vital parts in the making of a film—the writer, the director, the cinematographer, the producer, actors, sound guys, sandwich buyers—that it is nearly everyone’s film.)

Sacrilege or just art?

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict, once wrote, “The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments: the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” I believe this is true. Art done well is one of the great and pure evangelizers of the faith. I did not write “The Allegory” to be an apologia for Christianity. I began writing the film script in my bedroom in Crown Heights in the summer of 2022 because I had never written a film script.

We shot it mostly in the deep of winter at the ramshackle theater, at a Jersey City graveyard, a seedy motel room, an Irish pub, a 12-hour overnight in a grocery store and finally a private home near the Jersey shore.

The basic plot of “The Allegory” is this: A theater director enlists his financially strapped company in producing a (vaguely) Christian play on behalf of his schoolgirl crush, a devout Catholic. Things get interesting when a mysterious stranger wanders into a rehearsal…. 

The script’s efforts to portray a couple of religious “seekers” led to a visit from the Maplewood Fire Department. One night we used incense on set that got out of control and set off the smoke alarm, which alerted the firehouse, who came in full force to inspect the whole situation. They were calm; we were calm. There was no fire, only smoke. The situation was under control. They left. We went back to filming. 

The incense was for a Eucharistic adoration scene featuring our spiritual seekers attempting to worship God in a dramatic Catholic style. In prepping the scene, we wondered whether it would be unseemly to put, for instance, a rice cake in the monstrance they were incensing. The scene was, in part, about people trying to be religious who have no idea what they are doing.

We weren’t entirely sure if, in portraying these people being (unwittingly) sacreligious, we weren’t risking being sacreligious ourselves. Where do you draw the line in depicting something religiously offensive within a fictional world that steers free of being religiously offensive in real life? 

In the end we thought better of the rice cake and left them worshipping an empty monstrance. It worked better anyway. 

At an early fundraiser, the long-time widow of my dad’s old dental partner handed me an envelope. It had a card with her name scrawled on it, small and childlike, and a 20-dollar bill. I held that $20 like a wounded bird in my palm. I was terrified of using any part of it frivolously. It should only go toward something utterly critical to the making of the film, right? I thought of that $20 all the time as we moved forward with the film. Are we making every dollar count? (I later realized even buying, say, a lush and complicated coffee for the line producer and talking about…lush and complicated coffee can yield great things down the road for the making of a film.)

Whenever I share the film’s logline with anyone—artists put on a Christian play while disguising its Christianity—it always intrigues them. They say, “I love the concept.” I am tempted to say people “loving the concept” of the logline reflects a deep hunger for interesting Christian stories in a culture that has been more and more denuded of all things religious.

But I don’t know if this reflects any kind of deep hunger. Maybe people just like the idea of a story about people doing one thing, while telling the world they are doing something else. The audience may be drawn not so much to the “faith,” as to the deception. (Granted, the film’s theme of people trying to be Christian without being too Christian, without being that kind of Christian, is also, I think, resonating out there.)

We shot Richard Kind’s scenes at the home of a co-worker in Fairhaven, N.J. We would roll: Richard as a father absently going through mail while telling his adult daughter she had received a call from a guy selling Trapper Keepers. He would stop himself midway through a sentence and bark out, with charm, “No, no, no that was terrible. Let’s do it again!” Watching him act, you wouldn’t think he was “terrible” at all. We shot it again, he was miles from terrible again. In all his takes, he was so completely grounded and real, he was not an actor; he was just a real guy doing a real thing. 

A picture of Richard Kind and Raye Levine Spielberg sitting on a couch
Richard Kind and Raye Levine Spielberg

These actors. The pleasure of watching world-class actors bring a script to life. Melanie Brook playing a young novice in Doc Martens with a bevy of vocation crises; storming into the shot, boots clomping, whirling around, calling out the heartless world for not supporting her religious path. Sahra Mellesse as an amateur actress trying and failing through the whole film to “stage smoke,” choking out her lines through a storm of paroxysmal coughing. Ted Koch (currently playing Sheriff Hopper in Broadway’s “Stranger Things: The First Shadow”) as the mysterious, well, stranger. Delivering his lines—some of them funny in my book—with a grave contour I had not counted on; the shadow of his character’s tragic history running through every scene, and riveting in every moment.

But who else will watch and adore these actors doing their craft besides me? Filmmakers are always exhorted to know who their “target audience” is. But, in the final equation, the audience is anyone who watches. You cannot necessarily predict who is going to be into any given work of art and who is not. Which takes us back to the opening day on set, where I gathered the cast and crew and said a prayer as we kicked things off. I stood there in my character’s sky blue coveralls (in the film I played a less-than-swift stagehand) and asked God to be with us and let us be O.K. being imperfect and so forth and so on. Then the prayer ended and we started filming. 

I do not know whether that prayer will make “The Allegory” a “good film” or not. Whether it will help our movie get into festivals or not. Whether it will move the atoms of the filmgoing public to come see our film and love it and laud it through the universe. Or if the prayer merely endows us with “spiritual freedom” to be cool with the film being good or not good, seen or not seen, lauded or not lauded.

But I do know that praying before and through and after the making of art matters. It matters a lot. It is, in fact, everything. Why? Because, in the end, the film does not belong to me or the directors or writers or actors or investors. The film, like anything, is just, I guess, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. 

Joe Hoover, S.J., is America’s poetry editor and producer of a new film, “The Allegory.”