Award-winning filmmaker Cyrus Nowrasteh appeared on Friday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily, broadcast live from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the National Harbor on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125, to discuss his upcoming film The Young Messiah.
The film is told from the childhood perspective of Jesus Christ, and follows as he and his family depart Egypt to return home to Nazareth.
Nowrasteh (The Path to 9/11, The Stoning of Soraya M.) will debut The Young Messiah at CPAC on Friday night before a nationwide 1,700 screen release next Friday.
Speaking about “culture being upriver from politics,” and describing Nowrasteh as “one of the few real conservative filmmakers,” Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon asked the director to explain what went into making the film, which is based on former fiction and erotica author Anne Rice’s book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.
“It took five years to get this up after I did The Stoning of Soraya M. It started with Anne Rice writing a rave review of Soraya, and then sending us her book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, which is a story of Jesus at age seven,” Nowrasteh told Bannon. “The whole movie is about him at age seven, which I thought was an amazing and original and fresh idea for a Jesus story, and it’s about this child, very special child, coming to the full comprehension of who he is.”
Bannon then commented that Rice (Interview with the Vampire) “got put into the penalty box for writing this book,” referring to Rice’s body of work and fanbase.
Nowrasteh explained Rice “had a rebirth,” and said she was eviscerated before the book came out. He added her book was eventually widely supported by the Christian community.
Nowrasteh further described the story, which tells of seven-year-old Jesus finding his religious identity, as “the greatest story never told.”
“Why is age seven important?” asked Bannon.
“Dawn of rationality, sense of mortality, this is a child starting to ask questions. He kind of has an idea, but he’s not completely sure. We’re dealing with the human side of young Jesus, and I thought it was a fascinating premise. We take them from Egypt and back to Nazareth and we end up in Jerusalem in the temple during passover,” said Nowrasteh.
Watch the trailer below:
The big budget film is being distributed by Focus Features, which is a subsidiary of Universal Pictures. Praising the studio, Nowrasteh said “you gotta find people like that, you were talking about affecting the culture, but you need help to do that.”
Breitbart News Daily airs from 6 am to 9 am EST weekdays on SiriusXM Patriot 125.
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