Exclusive: Journey to Bethlehem director Adam Anders on his years-long quest to make a musical about the Nativity
The Grammy-nominated music-producer-turned-director on making the first big-screen musical about the birth of Jesus and filling it with comedy, romance, and even some redemption for the villains.
Over the past couple decades, Adam Anders has made a name for himself as a music producer who specializes in movies and TV shows, particularly those with a high-school focus: among other things, he has been nominated for two Grammys for his work on Glee, and he served as a producer—and co-wrote a new song—for the Netflix adaptation of The Prom.
But Anders has a religious side too: his parents are gospel musicians, he got his start as a bass player for Christian musician Steven Curtis Chapman, and he was an executive producer on 2016’s The Passion: New Orleans, a TV special starring singers like Trisha Yearwood and Michael W. Smith that repurposed existing pop songs for a dramatization of the death of Jesus.
Thus, for much of his adult career—maybe even most of it—Anders has been itching to make a movie about the beginning of Jesus’ earthly life. And with Journey to Bethlehem—a musical about Mary, Joseph, and all the rest that is coming to theatres November 10—the Sweden-born, Los Angeles-based Anders, who makes his directorial debut on the film, finally had a chance to scratch that itch.
Anders, speaking on the phone from L.A., recalls how he got the idea for the musical a long time ago—“17 years ago is the best we can figure,” he says—while visiting his wife’s family in Iowa for Christmas.
“I was looking for something to watch, and couldn’t find anything, and of course I’m a songwriter and a music producer, so I’m like, ‘Well, is there a musical that’s Christmas-y or whatever?’” he recalls. “And it kind of hit me that nobody’s done this, nobody’s told the Christmas story as a musical, and why is that?
“So I got inspired, and it was snowing outside and very Christmas-y, and I sat down to write the initial treatment. It was eleven pages, and it took me all of Christmas, the two weeks I was there, and it drove everyone nuts, but that’s when this started.”
After noodling the idea for a decade or so, Anders finally sold a script in 2017 that he wrote with Peter Barsocchini, the writer on the original High School Musical—and then, in late 2020, it was announced that Anders would start shooting his film in Utah the following year.
And then things went silent again for a couple years.
But then, finally, things came together this year and Anders began shooting Journey to Bethlehem in Spain, with a cast that included some relatively fresh faces (Fiona Palomo as Mary, Milo Manheim as Joseph), a few well-known Christian musicians (Joel Smallbone as Herod’s son Antipater, Smallbone’s wife Moriah as Mary’s sister Deborah)—and one major Spanish star, Antonio Banderas, as King Herod.
In addition to co-writing and directing the film, Anders wrote several new songs with his wife Nikki and his fellow Swede, Peer Åström, and he says working on the script and the songs simultaneously was a very “organic” process for him.
“Usually it’s my job to figure out how to make the songs feel like they’re woven into a script,” he says. “That’s been my job for most of my career, but I got into film and TV music because I had my own stories to tell, I wanted to write my own musicals, and that”—adapting existing songs for new stories—“was the way in.”
Fun for the whole family, with comedy
From the beginning, Anders wanted Journey to Bethlehem to be a fun movie for the whole family, and to that end, it has quite a bit of comedy—starting with the very first scene, in which one of the Magi gets lost in the astronomical jargon that another uses to describe the star he has just seen.
“It was very important to me that kids enjoy this from beginning to end, and I wanted to inject comedy from the very beginning to tell you what movie you were about to watch, and to let kids know you’re going to have fun—it’s not going to be a serious schlob of a movie, you’re going to enjoy it,” says Anders.
“The maps, all the different things I did—the colours, the look and feel and tone of the movie, the music, all of it—keeps the whole family engaged, and we can’t have a family movie without some comedy. It just doesn’t work. Kids don’t want to be serious for too long when they’re watching a movie.
“So we kind of had a rule that we can’t be serious too long. We have to be reverent—and it’s certainly reverent—but we can break it up with comedy, and the Wise Men gave me that mechanism. So that’s why I peppered them throughout.”
The Magi aren’t the only ones who reach for the funny bone.
Banderas, for example, plays Herod as an incredibly vain figure, first seen posing in front of a mirror. “To me he was the rock star of the time, the most famous person in Israel—you know, what Johnny Depp is to Pirates,” says Anders with a laugh.
“So he’s very much the rock star and over-the-top and a narcissist and all those things, and he can go from being childish and playful and really fun to evil in a second—and major props to Antonio, ’cause he plays it straight and is able to make that switch, and he’s equal parts scary and evil in the movie too, he’s not just fun and goofy.”
And then there’s the angel Gabriel, who, as played by Christian rapper Lecrae, is first seen nervously rehearsing what he’s going to say to Mary at the Annunciation.
“I just wanted to make this disarming and not threatening, this large man coming into the bedroom of a young girl in the middle of the night,” says Anders.
“So how do we depict that in a way that’s wholesome and fun? Yet then it goes from that disarming beginning of that scene to being more and more serious as we go, and it slowly shifts to reverent and very powerful.
“So it’s all just designed to, you know, keep kids engaged and frame the story in a way that the whole family can digest and just have fun, and maybe they can talk and go read the actual story, go read it after they see the movie.”
And then are the parts of the film that play like a romantic comedy: the meet-cute, the flirtations, the arguments, and Joseph’s slightly bumbled response (as seen in the trailer) when the now-pregnant Mary asks him if he will still marry her.
Finding the love story
Indeed, Journey to Bethlehem goes further—not much further, but further—than most films do in portraying Mary and Joseph as a romantic couple.
There’s nothing here that would give Protestant viewers a moment’s pause, but most films, out of deference to Catholic beliefs about Mary’s ever-virginity, have tended to be a bit more coy on the question of just how lovey-dovey Mary and Joseph were, particularly after the Son of God came along and changed their plans. So what kind of feedback has Anders been getting from Catholics who have seen the film?
“We’ve shown it to a lot of Catholics and Protestants, all denominations, and it’s been very embraced,” says Anders. “I think they understand that it’s not a documentary, and you know, there’s no way to make everyone happy. If you make the movie for everyone, you make it for no one, frankly.
“So I had to stay true to my vision and then hope the majority of people like that vision, because there’s no way to make everyone happy. But I think everyone who has watched it can tell what my heart is and how much I love this story.
“So, for me, Mary and Joseph, I made them human, you know,” he adds. “I just sat down thinking, Well, what would it be like to be Mary, to be given this task, this impossible task that she could be stoned for?
“You’re engaged. What would Joseph feel when he finds out that she’s pregnant? And this crazy story she’s telling about an angel? It’s like, what are you talking about? If it were me, I’d feel like she cheated on me. And just humanizing that and putting it in context, and like, wow, this is an amazing love story.
“He stayed with her when he shouldn’t have. All the world was telling him to leave her, or she should be stoned, and he stood by her and took the child as his own, took the sting upon him. It’s a pretty remarkable love story that nobody really talks about.”
Villains and the darker side of the Christmas story
Of course, potentially standing in the way of all the fun and upbeat comedy of this film is the fact that Herod slaughters the babies in Bethlehem—at least in the biblical version of this story.
While the film does include a few slight nods to that aspect of the story, Anders had no interest in going there within the movie itself, partly because he remembers how his own kids reacted to another Christmas movie—possibly 2006’s The Nativity Story—that actually started with the killing of the children in Bethlehem.
“My kids ran out of the room screaming and crying,” he says. “Well that didn’t work—merry Christmas! And that’s not the tone that I wanted. I wanted to have a positive, joyful experience for the whole family and celebrate Christmas, and that’s always been the goal. So the way we treat that, we don’t ignore it, but we definitely don’t show it. We found a very elegant way to not show it.”
And how, exactly, does the film not show it? Without getting into spoilers too much, it has something to do with the introduction of Herod’s firstborn son Antipater—a figure who has probably never been depicted in a Bible film before.
Anders says he needed a “boots-on-the-ground villain” who could serve as a sort of “proxy” for Herod, and he wanted that character to be one of Herod’s sons.
In most films, that son would be the similarly-named Antipas, who appears throughout the gospels as the ruler of Galilee during Jesus’ ministry. But Antipas is best known for stealing his brother’s wife, lusting after his stepdaughter, killing John the Baptist, and taking part in the death of Jesus—all of which made him unsuitable for a story about “hope and redemption”, says Anders.
So instead, Anders turned to the lesser-known Antipater, who is never mentioned in the gospels, and fashioned a character arc for him that would lend itself to the film’s more positive themes.
As it happens, the historical Antipater conspired against Herod right around the time that Jesus was born—so the film, without mentioning Antipater’s plot against Herod per se, hints that Antipater might have been motivated by a change of heart that came over him as he was trying to follow Herod’s orders within this story.
“I think Joel, who plays the role, really embraced it and loved the concept of this character and the journey he goes through in the movie,” says Anders. “He has the biggest transformation in the film, for better or worse.”
Creative fulfillment
And what was it like for Anders, the transition from producing music in a recording studio to directing actors and cameras on a movie set?
“Well, I’ve been making musicals for 20 years, and I’ve been on set,” he says. “I’ve produced movies, a lot of movies, and I’ve written movies, so I have a lot of experience being on set. The only role I hadn’t done was directing a movie. I had directed videos and little pieces, so I have a lot of on-set experience, so that was a very easy transition for me.
“Probably my biggest—fear is the wrong word, but hesitation—going in was, ‘Will the actors listen to me, because I’m not an actor, and I’m a first-time director?’ And I’m like, ‘Are they going to take direction from me?’
“And it turned out to be my favorite part, was working with the actors on the actual scenes. I loved it so much, and my experience working with actors in the music studio and the recording studio and in musical set-pieces translated very well and seamlessly, for me.
“I told people, all these years of doing what I’ve done, I’ve always felt like there was something more, creatively, that I wanted to do, and I finally found it directing, and that is the first time I think I’ve felt completely fulfilled creatively. So it was a really wonderful experience for me, personally.”
And does he have any ideas for his next project—which hopefully won’t take another 17 years to complete?
“I have many ideas,” he says. “I’d like to do more of this type of movie, stories that are personal to me and part of my journey. I’d love to tell more—there are some stories in the Bible that just scream ‘musical’—but also to tell some other stories. I have a couple other books that I want to turn into movies and musicals, so I’ll probably stay in the music genre, but definitely more to come.
“I love doing this,” he adds. “There will be many more musicals and inspirational family musicals that hopefully bring some joy and light to people’s lives.”
— Journey to Bethlehem comes to movie theatres November 10.