Emily Graves spoke with Tony Watkins about the Damaris resources

Tony Watkins

Reaching 18-30 year olds is the greatest challenge that church leaders face, according to recent research. To enable churches to respond to this need, Viewfinder Services have created resources around Hollywood films. Shaped around a current DVD, with recent offerings including Snow White and the Huntsman, they are fast-paced and full of multimedia. Emily Graves spoke with Tony Watkins, who wrote some of the resources to find out more.

Emily: So what is in these resources? Do you pick a topic within the film and then discuss it?

Tony: Yes that's right. So what this film is about, I mean obviously you can tell by the title if you haven't seen it, it's taking the old Snow White fairy tale and putting that on to a bigger canvas. It turns into a heroic fantasy story rather than a small scale fairy tale; but like all of those stories it's really a story about good and evil. There's this evil queen Ravenna who rules the land. She takes over the land, kills the king and becomes Snow White's stepmother. She is so evil; the whole land suffers as a consequence, because she's completely focused on herself and her beauty and maintaining her youth. Snow White gets locked away in a castle, but Snow White is the good-hearted person. She remains pure and noble. When a series of extraordinary magical things enable her to escape and eventually reach a group who are fighting against the queen, (a group of rebels, in particular some dwarfs), she then is in a position, (eventually having died and come back to life as Snow White always does), she's in a position to lead a fight against queen Ravenna. You've got this very strong, very good versus very evil dynamic and that good and evil thing is right at the heart of every fairy tale of every fantasy story.

Emily: So why fairy tales?

Tony: Because the fairy tale is so much part of our psyche. We've been told these stories for hundreds of years. The first version of the Snow White story was written down by the brothers Grimm back in the 1700s, but it's almost certain that all of the Grimm stories have been around for much longer. We always keep coming back to these fairy tales again and again. We tell them to our children and we think that they're children's stories, but Tolkien and C S Lewis both said very strongly that fairy tales are not children's stories. They're only in the preserve of children in our day, because adults have forgotten how important they are with this good and evil dynamic. Also something very important is the idea of some magical intervention coming from outside; grace effectively in Christian terms. Grace is God's goodness to people who don't deserve it and it comes from nowhere and you see this coming again and again in fairy tales. That is so much part of our psyche that it taps into some of these fundamental concerns of human existence, in a world where there is extraordinary evil; these two policewomen who were killed tragically recently and the little girl who goes missing in Wales, April James. These kinds of things are so tragic and when we hear those kinds of things we think whoever is responsible for those things, there's something fundamentally wrong. You can't relativise that and say there's no such thing as good or evil. Somebody who does things like that we instinctively say that's wrong and that shouldn't happen. So how do we deal with that whole good and evil thing? Where is the answer to those kinds of things going to come from? Is there some good that could come from elsewhere and actually rescue us from these kinds of things? That's the sort of question we're dealing with.

Emily: So how does all this fit together?

Tony: It's part of the film. We give timings for a number of clips to use, then we film our own material as well, so there's some video material, some vox pops, some people talking about their favourite fairy tales and why they're important and there's a reflective video we always include. Whichever church puts it on we'd always say do an interview with somebody in your area who may be part of the church, but may not be, but just part of the general community, who have got some understanding of these issues who's had some experience of something like that and be able to talk about the issues. Then there are always suggestions for Q&A panels so that whoever is putting it on can tailor it for the kind of people that are going to come together. Sometimes people who are using this material will show the whole film first and then have another follow up evening and talk about the issues in it using our material.

Emily: So it's a real opportunity to get in depth on a subject as well?

Tony: Yes absolutely and bring in some scholarly ideas as well from some of the people who have written about fairy tales and their importance and what they show us.

Emily: So how did you choose which films you were going to include? Did you go and watch them beforehand?

Tony: Yes we've always watched them beforehand. Some of the other ones we've done include In Time, which I wrote. We've done the Hunger Games; X-Men: First Class and a couple of others.

Emily: I remember Hugo being one of them.

Tony: Hugo, yes of course, how could I forget Hugo, it's absolutely wonderful. They're all films that we've seen and films that we felt would raise issues in an interesting enough way that it's worth us doing something like this around. It's got to be a film that has good clips that are worth somebody showing. It's got to deal with big enough ideas that it's worth us getting stuck into. It doesn't necessarily have to be a fantastic film like Hugo is, but a good enough film that people will enjoy, raising big enough issues that it's worth us doing something with.

Emily: So how have you got involved in this? You mentioned you were involved in writing and putting this together.

Tony: The organisation Damaris has been around for 16 years and my main work for it is looking after a website called culturewatch.org, which is articles and discussion guides on films, television programmes, music books and we've got around 2,000 articles and guides on mainstream films. We've been writing many of these things for a long time, so this is just a development of that. It's doing it in a slightly different way. We also work a lot with the film industry, so we're working on a number of films at the moment for the film distributors like Nativity 2 and Danger in the Manger and one or two others that are coming up soon. We're producing resources on behalf of the film distributors for use by church and by community groups. University of the Third Age are particularly keen on some of our resources. We're just beginning to talk to scouts and various others about how they might be able to use the material on Nativity 2 for instance.

Emily: So the idea is basically to make it as accessible to everybody as possible and to enjoy doing it?

Tony: Yes, absolutely right.

Emily: If people want to find out any more information where can they go?

Tony: The viewfinder material is available from viewfinderservices.org. Then the other website I was mentioning, which is the one I'm responsible for, is www.culturewatch.org. Those are the two main places, but the main website for Damaris as a whole is www.damaris.org and there you will find some of the information of other things we do including the work with the film companies.