The prospect of interviewing the co-screenwriter of NOAH, Ari Handel, made me feel like this kid who sent a questionnaire to all his favorite novelists asking if they “unconsciously included symbolism” in their work, that is, a little sheepish. So much virtual ink has been spilled about this movie (some of it by me) that when I heard that The Bible App was reporting a 300% increase in numbers of people reading Genesis 6, I figured it was all due to pundits like myself doing last-minute exegesis. But who was I kidding, I still had questions about this unique Genesis interpretation. So why not go directly to the source?
I enjoyed the interview you and Aronofsky did with Paul Raushenbush at the Huffington Post where you talked about your process of interpreting the Bible for this movie as a “midrash.” It struck me that in all this hubbub about the movie being “Christian” or “anti-Christian,” nobody’s talking much about the fact that it’s also Jewish. Did you want to add to that idea at all?
Yeah well, I think when you take the religious labels away, culturally the way the two groups approach a Bible story is very different. In Christianity—and I can’t really reify that word because of course there are so many denominations—there is a value of literalism, an exactness, word for word. In Judaism, we interpret, engage, ask questions of the text. The emphasis is on “an interpretation” rather than “the interpretation”. The text is a living thing. It’s a culture of grappling with the text, it’s dynamic. Darren and I come from this world, so that’s how we approached it. But it’s also more freeing as an artist.
One thing that you definitely got out of the text was this “environmentalism” angle, which I’d heard about before seeing the movie, but was surprised how present it was in the film. [Noah and his family don’t eat animals, see themselves as protecting “the creation,” and the villains the opposite.] How did that aspect of the film come about for you?
Well different pieces of it came about at different times. When we first sat down with the text, you known God asks Noah to get two of every animal onto the Ark, and we said, well that’s a conservationist notion. He didn’t say every cute animal, or anything, but every single animal has value. To God. And that was appealing to us, because we believe that. There’s a line in the movie, “if any of this is destroyed, then a little piece of creation would be lost forever.” It’s a deep value created explicitly in the text.
You know we didn’t make Noah a vegetarian because we wanted to add that “message.” It says in Genesis that you are allowed to eat green plants, and that’s it, and then after the flood suddenly now you are allowed to eat meat.
A real reading of Genesis is toward stewardship. In the Garden of Eden, God says he gives man the earth to “tend and keep it,” so to not have those ideas in there…it’s like a weird editing job. We believe those things and we are oriented that way, but it’s not like it’s artificially grafted onto the story.
But it’s funny, the same people who say, “Hey, how come you’re not biblically accurate?” are also the ones who say “Hey, why are you such an eco-wacko?”
That is funny.
I mean, what was the sin that caused God to flood the world? That’s a question that’s been asked a lot. There’s a couple things the Bible says: hearts full of wickedness—and we certainly have that it in the movie; how easy it is to fall into temptation, to hubris, envy, anger. Filling the world with violence. And then, corrupting the earth!
So, the conservationist notion, the vegetarian thing, the sin of corrupting the earth, that’s all biblical stuff.
But it is odd that people don’t respond to it that way.
I think the really sad thing is that somewhere along the line, and I’m not enough of a sociologist to say where this happened although I would like to be enlightened on it at some point, is that good stewardship of the earth got politicized as anti-religious somehow. I don’t know why.
You mentioned “stewardship,” taking care of the Earth, which is a concept that’s often contrasted with “dominion,” the idea that people can do whatever they want with the earth’s resources. That “dominion” idea gets talked about a lot in the movie, often through [the villain] Tubal-Cain.
Yes, I’ve been thinking a lot about that dominion vs. stewardship idea, and how to reconcile them, and I think I came up with the reconciliation. It’s so simple. God gave humans dominion over the earth, and we have it. Look around. Who runs the earth? Who’s going to decide if the coral will go extinct? We will. We have dominion. And the other thing we have been given is the responsibility to take care of it. And are we? So one is a gift and the other is a responsibility.
Have you gotten any support from environmentalists after the fact?
There are some who actually don’t like it because it shows just one man can save the world…some who say the world’s not going to end in a flood…anyone can get upset about anything!
