FROM ELF TO ENLIGHTENMENT

With a career that spans producing the 2003 Christmas favourite Elf to writing the 2016 Tom Hanks-led true-life drama Sully, Todd Komarnicki has enjoyed much success over the past 20 years.

And yet, his biggest hit might just be finding God, his devotion on full display in Bonhoeffer, a film about the German pastor who spoke out against Hitler and the Nazis.

“This topic chose me, 100%,” Komarnicki told The Jewish Journal last year. “I started writing the screenplay about six years ago, it was finished in 2019, and we made the film in 2023.

“I keep talking about this amazing poem called The Hound of Heaven. The story is a man is being chased through the woods and he is terrified. At the end of the poem, he turns around and it was God chasing him just to tell him he loved him. Dietrich’s story did the same to me. It chased me down until I saw what it was. It was so cinematic, it had to be told.”

It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s move to New York in 1930 to study theology that opened his eyes to what was happening back in his native Germany.

“When he saw racism in Harlem, or outside of Harlem, he was shocked alive. That and the fact that his conscious was awoken by a sort of living faith, caused him to stand up right away. The rise of the Reich was impossible to fathom. He went to New York and came back to a Germany he didn’t recognise.”

The first film that Komarnicki has written, produced and directed, Bonhoeffer has Jonas Dassler as the pastor, spy, assassin of the film’s subtitle, his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship and the genocidal persecution of Jews seeing him become an enemy of Hitler. It wasn’t long before the Gestapo were at his door, but in the meantime, there was the matter of a plot to kill Der Fuhrer.

That this new biopic should be seen as a tool of the far right is something that the director naturally rejects.

“The amount of lazy journalism out there is extraordinary,” says Komarnicki. “These people keep misunderstanding the movie. They think it’s tied to the far right. It’s my movie. It’s not based on anyone else’s book. It’s based on my experience of Bonhoeffer’s texts and history. It’s a work of art. It’s not a documentary.

“I think his family got upset in the marketing when a gun got put in his hand in the poster. I empathise with that. You feel like the image of your hero got co-opted by movie marketing. I was against that move but was unable to win that argument.”

As to his own belief in God, the director puts his Road To Damascus many years before the making of his first faith film.

“I grew up going to church, but it never really landed for me,” he offers. “I was an atheist. When I went to college, I chose otherwise and went all into the dark. Multiple things turned me around, including the love of my parents. I went back to this Bible that I had as a kid, I put it on my lap, this book I didn’t believe in, and a God I didn’t believe in. I shouted to the sky, ‘if I open up this book, you better be in here.’ He was.

“That was the beginning of everything. I was 22.”

Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. is at The Whale on Thursday, February 27th at 8pm – tickets here: https://whaletheatre.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873652071