With The Ledge available exclusively on SundanceNOW for one more week, we sat down with writer/director Matthew Chapman to find out more about his controversial new thriller.
SundanceNOW: I’d like to hear a little bit about how you arrived at the film’s flashback structure. Was this at all a conscious nod to classic noirs that often begin at the “end,” so to speak?
Matthew Chapman: I chose a flashback structure because I thought it would enable me to set up a tense situation from the start, and that having established this tension, I could digress into issues that I care about without losing the audience’s visceral connection to the movie. I do love film noirs which when they were most popular often dealt subversively with social issues that were considered taboo.
SN: Along the same lines, can you talk about why it was important for you to frame the story, which, on its face, is the kind of doomed romantic triangle you could find in any number of classic noirs, as a battle between opposing religious belief systems?
MC: I liked the idea of combining a doomed romantic love triangle with religion because while everyone is outraged by religious violence when it’s epic, such as 9/11, there is a more personal cruelty in religion that is either overlooked or accepted. This cruelty is not confined to Islam, though there are elements in The Ledge that are clearly inspired by certain aspects of Islam. But the truth is that almost all forms of religion, including Judaism and Christianity, denigrate women and homosexuals. It’s in the texts and it seeps down into all of us. So while you can look at religion in an intellectual way, in the end the effect is personal and emotional and I wanted to capture this in the relationship between Liv Tyler’s character and Patrick Wilson’s.
After one screening I had a women come up to me and say she resented the depiction of Liv Tyler’s character, seeing it as being objectionably submissive. Of course that’s the point of the character. Far more frequently women have come up to me to say they’ve been married to men like Joe (Patrick Wilson) and related very strongly to the atmosphere of oppression that pervades his home. They too became submissive to religiously fortified domestic menace or outright violence. These women heard the intellectual arguments in the film, but what they were inspired by was a single five second close up of Liv toward the end of the movie. All Liv does – at the conclusion of a magnificent performance, by the way – is to simply tip her head back as she looks at her husband, clearly rejecting him and, by inference, rejecting submission in a wider sense. I did not expect this often very emotional reaction from abused women, but was immensely gratified by it.
SN: Is there something in the genre you chose that allows you to slip in these kinds of “added value” meanings and readings? As opposed to making just a straightforward issue drama, it would seem a thriller is great engine for attacking a number of weightier topics.
MC: I believe that the thriller and the comedy are the best forms for exploring important themes while delivering entertainment. If you’re on the edge of your seat, or laughing your pants off, you don’t feel you’re being lectured to. My film pushes the limits of this principle, but having watched it with many audiences, I think I just about get away with it!
SN: Even though Hunnam and Wilson’s characters occupy opposing positions in terms of belief, they feel somehow similar. Is there something to the idea (I think it might have been Freud’s) that opposites share more in common with each other than they do with other points on the spectrum?
MC: Both Patrick Wilson’s character and Charlie Hunnam’s have suffered great losses. They have reacted in opposite ways. One has become an evangelical fundamentalist while the other has become an atheist. What unites them is that they have both been stimulated by pain to find or construct a philosophy. They take life and death seriously. In a way, the central question of the movie is, “What would you die for and why?” As an atheist with no belief in an afterlife, will Charlie Hunnam’s character have the courage to sacrifice himself for another? I hope this question and the conflict around it will make people who might not ordinarily think about belief and non-belief give it some thought.
SN: The film ends with a pretty strong statement regarding faith. Without giving too much away, could you speak a little bit about your experiences with faith (particularly American evangelical strands) that informed the making of The Ledge?
MC: I originally got involved in religion in America through the evolution versus creationism debate. I wrote two books on the subject and met a large number of fundamentalists. In spite of overwhelming evidence for evolution, many insisted the world was only a few thousand years old and that man was put on earth in his present form. Over 40% of Americans support a creationist view. Religion forces this enormous number of people to reject evidence – reality – in favor of books written thousands of years ago by people who thought the earth was flat. This seems like a fairly harmless albeit widespread kind of eccentricity, but it’s not. When we are facing problems like climate change, only action based on evidence will save us. That and compassion. This was the second element of fundamentalism that disturbed me, the lack of compassion. To believe in a God who tosses almost all his creations into a lake of fire for eternity is to
approve of a kind of cruelty that is unimaginable to me. Compared to this, how small it must seem to be prejudiced against homosexuals, say, and wish to condemn them to lesser lives than those lived by straight people. I’ve been accused by believers of making the fundamentalist in my movie “cartoonish,” but he is not. I have met him many times. He lives between Los Angeles and New York and has a hundred million faces. He believes that faith will solve all his and our problems. When it fails to do so, he starts blaming other people for their lack of faith, or their different kind of faith. And that’s when things get nasty. The Ledge is a microcosm of this moment.
MATTHEW CHAPMAN’S GOD
Matthew,
I would like to explain what people refer to as “The Gospel” or “Good News”. In this explanation, I will discuss God’s grace, which unfortunately so many people do not understand or have never been clearly explained.
Unfortunately, many people attend a Christian church regularly (or attended one in the past) but have never been clearly taught what the Bible stresses as the most important decision that one could ever make. It is only in making this decision that one actually becomes one of God’s children and is “saved” from His eternal judgment. This decision deals with what is referred to as “The Gospel”. If you have never heard “The Gospel” before, here it is. Around 33 AD, Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate, paid the price for every single person’s sin in history by dying the death of crucifixion at the hands of the Romans. He willingly died for every person’s sin that has ever lived and every will live. That includes both you and me. He willing died a death that we deserve for our moral failures in life. Jesus was brutally beaten, whipped, mocked, spit upon, nailed to a wooden cross, and then died. Three days later, He rose from the dead, as He foretold His disciples (group of followers). Jesus then ascended into heaven forty days later. He currently lives with God, His father, in heaven today. During Old Testament times (times prior to the birth of Jesus Christ – B.C.), people had a keen awareness of their moral guilt, as any honest person still does today. I know that I have wronged many people and have felt a deep-seated guilt within many areas of my life. Many people during Old Testament times sacrificed animals to God as a form of limited atonement for their immoral actions. God often accepted these sacrifices, but only in a temporary and limited way. Over time, God changed this extremely limited form of atonement, as He had planned from the very beginning of time. Moreover, God sent His one and only son Jesus Christ down to the Earth. Since Jesus was both sinless and blameless, He willingly died on the cross as an unlimited atonement. It was in God’s will for His son to die in this way. This unlimited atonement is available to any person who whole-heartedly repents of their sins (moral failures) and then asks God to personally apply Jesus’ undeserved death and resurrection as a payment for their sins. It is imperative here that one believes the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was ultimately an act of God’s grace. God did not have to offer an escape from our moral guilt and eternal punishment. However, God is gracious. He has a compassion and love for people that is indescribable. God wants to “wipe the slate” clean for us, in regards to our moral failures. Through this action, we could then enter a personal relationship with His son Jesus Christ and escape his eternal judgment. The Bible refers to moral failures as ‘sin’, or missing the mark of God’s perfect standard of morality. “Sin” is an ancient archery term for an arrow that missed the target. God is loving in the purest sense of the word and would like to grant us victory over the sins that still haunt us from our past. All we have to do is accept this gift of grace from Him. It is free.
God promises us a way to become morally blameless and gain entrance into heaven after living our physical live here on Earth. Here is what we must willingly do on our part. First off, we must truly believe that God is gracious and extended His grace by allowing His one and only son to die as a ransom for our sins on the cross. We must admit to God that we have failed morally during our lifetime and that Jesus Christ’s brutal death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could ever forgive our sins. After making this decision (accepting God’s grace), we are immediately forgiven of all past, present, and future sins. In addition, we would be guaranteed entrance into heaven after our physical death here on Earth. We would then live with both God and His son Jesus forever. We would be guaranteed to see all of our loved ones who had made this decision during his or her physical lives on Earth.
You could make this decision today. Please do not wait for the “perfect time”. You could ask God for eternal forgiveness through applying the death and resurrection of Jesus to your life within the quietness of your bedroom tonight. This is the most important decision that you will ever make.
So you might be asking, “Where in the Bible does it explain what has just been summarized?” Here are some passages clearly stating that Jesus seeks a personal relationship with us:
“that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.
– Romans 10:9-10
“Therefore repent and return, so that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord; “
- Acts 3:19
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”
– John 3:16
As long as you repent of your past sins (moral failures) from the heart, confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and apply Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection on the cross as a payment for your sins, you are guaranteed eternal life with God in heaven. You can make this decision at any time, anywhere. You can make this decision alone with God or within a group setting.
Please know that one cannot sit the fence on making this decision of accepting God’s gift of grace. If one chooses not to decide, he or she has still made a choice. This would be like receiving a check (hearing “The Gospel”) but never endorsing and cashing it in at the bank (personally applying Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection towards one’s sins).
“He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”
- John 3:18
The result of not choosing to accept Gods gift of grace, which offers eternal life with both Him and Jesus in heaven is clear. You will live the remainder of your life here on Earth apart from Jesus Christ and His empowerment. You will then follow your life plan and not His plan for you. After you physically die, you will then be brought to a dark place where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. It is a place of eternal regret. Here, you will remember this very letter and how you were told the truth but chose not to repent and begin a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Remember, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You could be diagnosed with a terminal illness tomorrow or be the recipient of a head-on collision while returning home on that all too familiar, two-lane highway this Friday night. If you are considering starting your personal relationship with Jesus Christ, please do not wait to make this decision. You never know what tomorrow will bring.
The following passage outlines the only requirements Jesus Christ has set to both gain eternal life and begin a personal relationship with Him while you are still alive here on Earth. He makes it crystal-clear in the Bible what is required…
“that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.
– Romans 10:9-10
God has a plan for your life. You can watch this plan unfold once you accept His gift of grace. This great plan involves your life experience while here on Earth and continues after your physical death on into heaven.
“For I know the plans that I have for you”, declares the Lord, “plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.”
- Jeremiah 29:11-13
Please consider what I have said here. I am not sure if you have ever made this decision before, but I needed to make sure that you had the facts. If you should decide that you want to learn more about the life of Jesus and gain a better understanding of authentic Christianity, I strongly recommend reading the book of John within the Bible (NASB or NIV translation).
In closing, here is a verse that someone once shared with me that finally brought me into a relationship with God during an extremely low point physically and emotionally. The understanding of Jesus’ desire to know me personally changed my life forever. Here it is:
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.”
- Revelation 3:20
Matthew Chapman’s 2011 movie “The Ledge” was just a relatively pricey attempt to make authentic Christians look foolish and atheists wise and compassionate.
Matthew Chapman’s “The Ledge” should not be considered a landmark movie for the atheist movement in any way. Actually, I do not think there will ever be a landmark atheist movie. This is simply because the common public understands that belief in a god ultimately is not the product of dramatic theological persuasion but of authentic faith. Trying to sway people towards atheism with a one-sided script, such as in “The Ledge”, is contrived and comes across as ridiculous to the audience.
Matthew (Chapman), just because you are the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin does not mean you have to follow in his footsteps. There is evidence for the historical Jesus Christ, including his life, death, and resurrection. I would recommend reading “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel for an initial overview of the evidence.