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Features
Oh My God the Movie: An Amazing Portrayal of Our World
A Conversation with Peter Rodger
by Sydney L. Murray
Our theme this month is art and culture and I can think of no better way to meld these two concepts than the new film, Oh My God. Truly a work of art, OMG portrays Peter Rodger’s traveling odyssey that took him to 23 countries as he asked people from all walks of life, “What is God?”
Given his unique artistic background, Rodger has created a film that will appeal to everyone I can think of. Young and old will find great inspiration, as well as food for thought in the striking imagery and compelling narrative. A travelogue and a treatise on religion, this amazing documentary will make you think about your perceptions of the world and her people.
Its melodic soundtrack is outstanding and the editing is brilliant. The team that Rodger has pulled together has that combination of talent, perspective and soul.
The visual spectacle is stunning and there are so many great quotes that I know hardly where to begin. I can’t forget the Aboriginal elder who said that when the Christian missionaries came to convert his people, they broke every one of the Ten Commandments. Or when Seal the musician decided a long time ago to see God in the faces of the people he sees every day. Or as Benjamin Creme said, “The heart of God is the heart of Man.”
I believe that everyone who watches OMG will have a more open heart and mind by the film’s end. Indeed, if everyone on the planet had access to it, the world would change. Rodger has said he decided to do this film because he was tired of the way religion was tearing our world apart. His journey took him straight to the heart of the matter.
As the film explores many different religious and tribal traditions, there is a sense that we are more alike than different. And there is somewhat of a consensus that the leaders of countries start wars that their people never wanted.
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Peter Rodger about his epic quest.
Vision Magazine: What was your impetus to make this film?
Peter Rodger: The main thing was that I was frustrated with the childish mentality that permeates the world. We have grown men flying airplanes into buildings saying, “God is great.” We have the leader of the free world in 2003 telling the BBC that he invaded Iraq because God told him to. We have the constitution of a country [Iran] that dictates that its supreme leader is God’s representative on Earth. We have young women and men blowing themselves up, as well as innocent others, to buy themselves a place into heaven. I thought that was a little perverted. So I wanted to go around the world and ask people what God means to them to shed some light from an objective point of view.
I also had an intense desire to reconnect with the world and document it as it is now on a sociological and anthropological level. It was very titillating to create an opportunity or an excuse to go around the world to learn about and understand different cultures.
VM: The soundtrack is amazing. Can you talk a bit about that?
PR: I really can’t take credit for it. The only credit I will take is that my composer asked me to do the guitars on the film. I’m a closet musician so it was really nice to be able to come out of the closet and play on the film. But I give the credit to Alexander Van Bubenheim, my composer. He came with me on about a third of the shoot with a portable digital recording studio and actually sampled sound all over the world—singing, drumbeats and organic pieces of music—and then fused that together in the score later. So what you have is a very organic piece, although he kind of spun it in his own way and gave it a little umph when it needed it. My editor, John Hoyt, and I cut the film to his music, which gives it more of an energetic music video vibe and a break in the intense narrative. It was a very collaborative experience and Alex is a genius composer.
VM: How are you affected by your art? And how are you affected by our culture, as well as the cultures you encountered in this film?
PR: First of all, I was very privileged. My father was a very eminent photojournalist. In the Second World War, he worked for Life magazine as a war correspondent. He then founded Magnum Photos, which is the largest, most prestigious photojournalist agency in the world. Between him and his colleagues, I was privy to an awful lot of talk and banter about understanding the philosophy of composition. I wasn’t taught how to make a composition; I was taught how to see. It has become my art to frame the camera and tell a story. It is something I am completely addicted to. It’s like looking at a picture where there are so many subplots, stories and layers. That particular artistic approach was really important when I was making this film. If you look at the film in slow motion, you’ll see that whatever people are saying is represented compositionally by the shot. Now this doesn’t resonate on the conscious level when you see it. It resonates after the event. And sometimes when you think about it or when you hear a piece of music that reminds you, it sends you back to that image. Then the layering, the purpose or the message that was there comes out. Again, this comes from my training of learning how to see when you’re telling a story—you find some kind of link in the composition that pushes that message across in a very subliminal way. The more you see that, the more you actually understand the true essence of what the art is portraying.
To answer the second part of the question in terms of going around the world, it’s incredible to see the intensity of man’s subconscious come out in his art. It’s the way that the Maasai grunt in their dance in Shompole [Kenya]. It’s the intense attention to detail that the Hindus have when they’re portraying Ganesha or Vishnu or Shiva. It’s the wonderful sense of composition style and the architecture of the temples. It’s the calligraphy in mosques. It’s the incredible tile work in Islamic culture. It’s reflected everywhere and it’s a true indication of man’s getting into contact with his subconscious. It’s meditative. When you’re an artist, you go into a different level. I’m a musician and if I think about the notes I play, they don’t come out right, but if I let myself go, out comes the music. It’s the same with making a film and it’s the same with the artists that associate their art and culture together with their particular religion or belief system. To experience seeing that and actually photographing it with my camera was fantastic.
VM: How did you find the people that you interviewed in the film, both the known and the obscure?
PR: Luck, circumstance and trying—all mixed together. When I went off to a country, I’d have anchor points and people I knew I’d be interviewing. Then I’d let myself go and let the journey of being there dictate who I would see. Somebody would say, you’ve got to meet this person when you’re there. If I’d jam-packed the time with research and four interviews a day, it just wouldn’t have happened. In that respect, I basically allowed circumstance to channel, which became organic.
On the celebrities, I pursued many of them. Some couldn’t meet because I was on one side of the world and they were on another. Friends of celebrities helped enormously and got me Hugh Jackman, for example. Ringo Starr basically came to me through a friend who said, “Peter’s doing a film on asking people what is God; do you want to be in it?” And he called me up and said, “Would you like to come over to talk about God?” It was the same thing with David Copperfield. I was in Idaho driving and he called me and said, “This is really deep to my heart; I would love to be in your film.” I remember exactly where it was—I just stopped the car to make sure I didn’t get disconnected. David had a really interesting take on God because he’s an illusionist and that’s quite a poignant statement in the film.
This is a film about the people. There are not very many professional God-people in this film. I realized that I didn’t want political or religious leaders. It’s about what the people think and that would have distorted the true objectivity of it because they make their living from being God-people. That’s not what I want—I want to hear from the people.
VM: What other projects do you have on the horizon?
PR: I have several actually. I wrote a narrative film script. In fact, that’s another reason I made OMG—a film that I’d written fell through. Now that actually looks as if it’s going to go next year, which I’m very happy about. I’ve been opting to write some scripts as well. In addition, I have been offered to direct another film. In fact, I’m toying with the idea of doing a film called What the Hell? which would be a follow up to Oh My God. I’m a little bit scared about that. The very fact that I’m scared about doing it is perhaps an incentive to do it, because then it really will expose the reality of what it is or what it isn’t. For instance, should we be scared of the dark side? You bring on what you seek. And I’ve actually been warned by a lot of people not to do it. Maybe I will; I don’t know. But in the immediate future, I’m going to concentrate on narrative film, because it’s a real sidestep from OMG and it’s something I love.
VM: Where can people see OMG?
PR: It’s coming out in myriad places theatrically. We’re platform releasing it, which means that like a lot of independent movies, we’re opening in L.A and New York for a couple of weeks. Then it comes out across the country on November 27 in Atlanta, San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, Philadelphia, Denver, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Boston. It comes out in St. Louis and Chicago in December and depending upon the results of that, we will hopefully open it wider from there.
It’s very easy to find out where the film is playing. Just go to OMGmovie.com, which is our hub of how to see it and where to get it. Then of course we will have it on DVD, downloads and the whole nine yards in 2010. And if more people like you are talking to me about it and getting the word out, then it’s more likely that we will be able to get the film out to more places because people will be interested in seeing it, which warrants us to invest the money to print the film, advertise more, and get it into the theaters.
VM: After traveling to 23 countries, what was the most important lesson you learned?
PR: The world is a very small place. Human beings are extremely similar. We are totally united. We’re one really. Lawrence Blair, who is one of my subjects in the film, enlightened me when he said that we’re basically primitive little organisms existing on a rock in a scary vacuum. And I would take that a step further to say that we’re desperately trying to hold onto something and we’re sometimes paralyzed by fear. In that paralysis, we have been conditioned to push others away, rather than realize that there’s plenty of room for all of us. If humanity embraced itself and other cultures, the world would be a much better place.
I had great faith in humanity on this journey. I think that God is actually a word; it’s a reference for a lot of different things. If you really want to see what God is, look at the light, the energy and the wonderful sense of being in a child’s eyes—it’s untainted by man and it seems so pure to me. When children play in a schoolyard, they don’t differentiate because that person’s wearing a veil, this person is disabled, that person speaks a different language, or this person has a different skin color. They just accept human beings naturally for what they are. Unfortunately, as we grow up, that seems to diminish. One of the reasons I wanted to make this film was to find that light of humanity on Earth.
Oh My God is a brilliant film you do not want to miss. It opens in LA and New York City November 13, and in addiional cities November 27. For more information about screening times and locations, visit OMGmovie.com.