|
|
|
Posted: August 31
(Culver City, California) It is ironic that when I finally got back to Los Angeles to work on a big-league Jesuit movie, my attention has become almost more focused on the unfolding disaster in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina looked threatening enough as it moved north across the Gulf, but the subsequent damage by floodwaters is devastating the city. I lived there for a year just after finishing graduate school and made many friends among the people I worked with at Loyola New Orleans University producing magazines for the Jesuit school. So of course the TV coverage of the disaster has been riveting for me. Did my friends make it out of the city safely? Did their homes survive? Initial reports said that Loyola itself managed to get through without major wind damage, and most of the Jesuits were evacuated before the hurricane to higher ground several hours west of New Orleans. But I don't know how the flood waters are affecting the campus, and it is heart-breaking to see someplace I knew so fondly suffer such destruction.
Los Angeles, by contrast, has been beautiful: sunny but not too warm, a delightful break from Rome. And it has been great being part of the big project that Loyola Productions is creating for the Jubilee 2006 celebrations of Francis Xavier, Ignatius Loyola and Pierre Favre. The final movie will be thirty minutes long, about half of which is a dramatization of the initial development of friendship and spiritual companionship among the three founding Jesuits. The other half is a documentary look at the Society of Jesus, its members and friends all over the world. My role has been to watch all the footage that Loyola has collected, and make some initial assessment of what fits together with the script and how it might be edited. I will hand over all of that to Father Eddie Siebert tomorrow, along with almost 1,000 still images that I have collected during my travels the past few years. We have a great deal of material, some shot by Loyola Productions, but most of it coming from other Jesuit production companies around the world. I am excited by the view that people will get of the Society as a truly world-wide community marked by great cultural diversity yet unified by the spiritual heritage that goes back to Ignatius, Francis and Pierre.
Today we looked at the first rough cut of the dramatizations: wonderful material. The three professional actors match the characters, the lighting is well-done, and the script really captures the key points of Father General's letter. This afternoon I met Matthew Ferraro,the composer of the sound track and one of the three hymns specially commissioned for the jubilee. He wanted to see the rough cut and some of the documentary footage, and he brought a recording of one of the hymns, which I really wanted to hear. It was written and performed by Cristóbal Fones, a Jesuit musician from Argentina with a wonderful voice. His hymnn to Francis Xavier has passion and a feel of Latin rhythm accompanied by a single guitar.
Matthew is just back from two weeks in Spain. He made a retreat at Montserrat, where Ignatius began his pilgrimage, and also visited Loyola. He said that he wanted to get in touch with Ignatius' character by spending time in the land that shaped the Pilgrim.
Father Ignacio Echaniz served as Matthew's guide at Loyola. I remember the tall Basque Jesuit fondly from my first years in Rome when he lived in the same community with me. One evening Ignacio led Matthew down to the basilica to play the organ, but they ran into Marie Carmen, the regular organist whom Ignacio was afraid would not allow a stranger from another country to touch the church's prized 16th-century organ. Not surprisingly the two musicians formed an instant friendship, and Marie Carmen shooed Ignacio out of the church so she and Matthew could make music. Matthew played some examples of what he had been writing for his hymnn. It is a stately piece that builds as it moves to the conclusion; he will record it with a 45-person choir in London. But Marie Carmen was not satisfied with the volume he was producing, since the keyboard is slightly different from a modern one. She kept running around behind him pulling out stops as he played and crying, "Grande, Grande!" (Louder, louder). Then she sat down and played some Bach. Matthew said she was as kinetic as she was tiny (not quite five feet tall, but incredibly energetic.) When she finished she threw her arms back with a fluorish, and then stared at him as if to say, "Well, what do you think?"
He thought she was pretty good. And so is Matthew, I think, and all of the people working on this project. I can't wait until its premiere this December on the feast of St. Francis.
back to previous entries