Actor Jim Caviezel and Tim Ballard of Operation Underground Railroad - 3 Questions with Bob Evans

actor Jim Caviezel and Tim Ballard head of operation underground railroad thank you gentlemen for being part of three questions that have not so good to have you here now Tim as the head of operation Underground Railroad you've got quite a lot of things on your plate but you've partnered up with Jim Caviezel yes of all people yes what are you guys doing together well we were approached several years ago by a production company that wanted to do a feature film that tells the story of our child rescue mission from the time I was in the government to one night why I left and where we went who we rescued him and you know three years ago they said who who do you want to play you if you get the any actor in the world and I said oh that's easy Jim Caviezel if you can get him and you know three years later here we are they got him to commit to playing to playing me and this in this film and in about three weeks we're heading down to Bogota Colombia to begin filming what's currently called the sound of freedom the the story of operation underground railroad Tim what was it about Jim Caviezel that said this is the guy that has to portray me and Jim what was it about this role that said I got to do this role well I'll tell you that a couple things some things I can't articulate I guess The Count of Monte Cristo was always kind of the go-to movie for me it was so inspiring Jim was inspiring in that the way that there was a light in the message and what he portrayed and that and then of course a Passion of the Christ it's important to me it's so much of what we do and our foundation is based on our faith on our belief in God and in prayer and it was important that the person leading this project had those fundamental beliefs as well if you went back years ago when I was making the choice to be an actor I almost never became an actor I almost never never married my beautiful wife of 22 years I almost never adopted my children and I almost never played Jesus and the passion all of them were tough decisions to make but they were the right decisions to make and after the passion my wife and I adopted a little boy who had a brain tumor and we didn't know the outcome we didn't know if it would be good or bad we went back to China to get him and of course we have a friend of ours who was helping me in this adopting Jenny whole and who happens to be family friends with his family another coincidence and then we so we got Bo went through this surgery it was a miraculous surgery from seven o'clock in the morning till ten o'clock at night he had brain surgery and then we end up adopting another little girl who else who had a brain tumor our final little boy had cancer we went to chemotherapy with him and people would ask me in my industry what about unwanted children I said I have three of them and I want them and so I read this script and here are these unwanted children and it broke my heart and this story was really compelling and it and it just to me it's the second most important film I've done since the passion Jim you have said that playing Jesus Christ in The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson changed your life yep how did it change your life and how did that does that change inform how you were approaching playing Tim Ballard well first of all tim is going into places that are very dangerous just like you know some of the great Saints they martyrs of the church they put their lives on the line and I he is my ultimate respect especially saving little children I talked to Tim about it earlier about you know where's your view on slavery oh I'd have been there okay what about the Jews and gosh wit Saul I'd have been there for them what about Jesus you know I played him at no I'd have been there for them I said what do you think about children oh I don't want to hear that I said I'm sorry you wouldn't have been for the Jew or you wouldn't have been there for Jesus and several other what's going on right now this is happening everywhere and he had my profound respect I didn't know that you know I just wanted to be an actor but I didn't realize it was going to involve me getting electrocuted having open heart surgery struggling physically which is what I did after the film and I had to grow up as a human being ego was really checked you know when you think a man told me one time TNT boom he says I want you to remember this tnp take nothing personal because that's what it takes to do something playing and controversial in it it's like Jesus you represent that to the world and many people hate him but for those that love him it's worth it hmm you truly went through the valley of the shadow of death in portraying Jesus Christ and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ share with us what that did to you spiritually and what it did to you physically well my makeup times were from 2:00 in the morning till 10:00 in the morning and then from 10:30 to 4:30 I was usually freezing on a cross Mel had shot it at many different angles and then I got hypothermia I had to come back and take a two-hour shower to get all this makeup that they never had tried before it was the first time ever done after that the infection started on the skin I had to go learn the Aramaic that Hebrew in the Latin in course it's a hope for an english-speaking American it's a completely different place in the mouth and you you have to work on that and you're exhausted Mike was bedded by 11 o'clock at night and that was up at 2:00 it's the same thing and eventually the cold got to me and I got sick then eventually a pneumonia came in and then I experienced his shoulder separation after the shoulder separation they put me back on the cross and when the winds would hit the cross because we're on a thousand-foot cliff and there the thing is going back and forth and you know the thing it could snap off you're tied up and every time that could be five knot winds and all of a sudden because you're on a thousand foot drop it's like the Grand Canyon the wind would come up and all the sudden be a thirty not win and it would snap your shoulder out I started to lose a lot of weight I got very sick and this went on for months and five and a half months of that afterwards I had problems with heart murmurs I was in afib all the time my first surgery was in 2009 they tried to correct the wood through ablation surgery and then the so I was taking Coumadin and all kinds of medication to control the heart and in 2014 my a valve completely collapsed and that was probably from the infections that I was getting from the flu and the virus that I got while I was doing the filming the the the the they can graduate as far as working after the film is the biggest film that year it was no jobs you don't you know and I know Mel didn't show the greatest behavior at that time but I just played Jesus so why are you not you know why are you avoiding me and it's just you just don't get it kind of a thing and and I get I go back to the whole thing and this is part of you know when I read the Bible and it talks about the Beatitudes you know blessed are you when you're persecuted and the fact it talks about it in the movie I never would ever go back and say that I made a mistake I would have made the worst mistake if I never made that and that was the the thing is it is a believer in Christ and a Christian faith you can't avoid the cross there is going a V a fleet has to go through suffering right a champion there's no pill I can take to get myself in shape you have to do the work and I was just so blessed as because I look at my own transgressions against God and I say gee why would you pick me but he did doesn't always choose the best but he chose you so what are you gonna do you were available and and and and I come back to this film Tim you know saw a movie I did in Monte Cristo and and I always my favorite scene in that movie is always the you know when Richard Harris has placed the priest is dying on the ground in that moment of real despair he looks up and he says Don test your final lesson do not commit the crime you now serve the sentence for remember God sayeth vengeance is mine and I looked down at him really from my own heart I said but I don't believe in God in other words God could never love a sinner like me and he says it doesn't matter he believes in you and I broke and it wasn't written that way it just wasn't he happened to see that movie and moved him and and he came around and made it to do this one and I really believe in the cause and it's worth your life Tim your operation Underground Railroad really slides against the grain in so many ways I mean truly there is nothing else out there like underground route the operation Underground Railroad how difficult is it for you to stay on task and what are some of the challenges that you face in going in to these countries yeah you're right this this is in so many ways going against the grain and people told me I was crazy to leave my my government job to go do this to privatise the rescue of children how is that even possible it's it's it's a new mold that we were trying to build about creating private public partnerships and the reason we did it was because this problem I mean this is the fastest growing criminal enterprise on the planet but the millions children are being taken and abused in the worst ways and I recognize that unless we create a movement around it it wasn't going to go away and the only way to create a movement is to create a vehicle that where you can invite people to come in that's that's what I'm not can do this what a private organization can do we can invite people in and participate and build this movement but it was new it wasn't a new concept and some of the challenges have been to convince some of our government partners that this is a good model and we can prove it you know before we could rescue five to ten kids and one in one hit well now it's up to we can do twenty thirty forty why because we can attack it together the government does what they do best we do what we do best the aftercare partners do what they do best and together it's it's explosive what what can happen and then we invite the people in all the people the world can rise up and do and then play their role and so it's it's it's been somewhat of a challenge but we've broken through a lot of those barriers we the r-utah politicians have been great senator hatch has helped us with a new bill that we got it passed in the Senate working in the house that formalizes exactly what I'm talking about creating formalizing a fusion center where it were the private and public sectors come together to attack modern-day slavery and so we have made progress and it's through you know people in the media Fox 13 has been wonderful telling our stories what what Jim's doing for us now it's about telling the story and providing the solution the light it's a light in the darkness and and and inviting people to be part of that light is that what attracted you absolutely absolutely I mean right now we celebrate evil God can bring good from evil but so much at the time now we this is not like back in the day when Chuck Heston was doing you know Judah ben-hur you do a movie like that now I like the passion you're gonna get hit for it and we celebrate evil it seems but regardless what am I gonna do and we were just with Mike Tomlin the other day the Pittsburgh Steelers football coach and of course people are talking about the whether to kneel or stand or in the flag salute and I you know this people spilled their blood why can't we stand in union with each other and say hey you know regardless of what we agree on disagree on something we have to be together on it there were many great Americans that gave their lives for this and that we have the ability to agree or disagree on an issues but nonetheless National Football League people are talking about it now that's a big league thirteen billion dollars made last year imagine that the NFL is not even a JV team compared to sexual trafficking imagine being on the Freshman team because sex trafficking is 33 times makes three times more money if money is the god then it's three times more powerful than the NFL and yet people are doing this putting their head in the sand like an ostrich I can't live that way and this I have such respect for this guy he's such a wonderful man but he's doing a lot of things that mother Teresa did you know and I I summarized what she said that any country that kills his own children has no future if we continue to allow this to go on there will be no place to hide what are the two of you doing to prepare for this project and you portraying Tim Ballard oh well I I get to turn my hair blonde right now I get to be around him and I try to find what's common between both of us and I was telling Tim and I say you know I was given a gift to act but it's not my gift it came from above and I so respect him because he could have done something you know for himself and he's not he's doing and and it takes people like that to die on themselves Billy Graham did the same thing you know you you have to this isn't my my choice is to is choosing my father to come into my life and to come through the work that I do because I want it's not my light it's his but I ask him as a servant to say please will you help me here and play the best team that I can on the screen and make the best film and I know that we have a great filmmaker in Alejandro and his artistic sense of it because it is so hard that you know you can't just show the darkness here but you've got to find the way to pierce that darkness using light and different things with the artistry and filmmaking which is right on he's right on target with that so we'll have whether people see the film or not I you know it was kind of my idea when I made Monte Cristo I said look I know there been 19 versions of this movie there might been ones better than mine but still you're not taking God out of this movie it's gonna be in it he will be in this film so what physically are you guys doing to prepare for filming well that's one reason Jim's up here in Utah this week we've been putting them through basically a crash course trying to get his you know hit him into the heart and soul and mind of of our mission we we have all our operators that a lot of them came in from overseas to come help train him we've been going through footage we we actually planned a real rescue of mission that's coming up soon and and he'll go on I hope he'll likely go on it and go undercover and he's been training with our seals this week close-quarter combat training CQC just all the things and here course he'll be down there too to say to him what would you do in this particular situation right here and there's a lot of measuring and then at some point it finally it just starts to you start to get what this thing is and then the film when they go to edit it it just come if you do it right it's quite remarkable it starts to take a life of its own and hopefully it's better than even what we shoot mmm two plus two equals five some kind of a thing it's exactly right operation underground railroad works with various jurisdictions around the world and various agencies and I I would imagine there is sometimes a frustration level depending on where you are operating in the effectiveness of what you're doing out there absolutely I mean I'll tell you this probably 90% of the countries we work in the case that we work with them it's their first anti trafficking case they've ever done you know a lot of them have the laws on the books because of a lot of international pressure that's in the last decade that's kind of been placed upon them they have the laws but then they say well what do we do I mean how do we infiltrate these trafficking organizations and that's where we come in and say what we can teach you how to do it from the digital forensics side you know going undercover on the deep on the darknet to physical undercover what do you want and we can teach you we can bring you the tools unfortunately this is a sad commentary in our own country but the we are the demand for child sex I mean with the the highest consumer of child pornography is the United States shameful so that's why they can use our operators who are Western working American looking and they these law enforcement agencies like in Colombia for example or Mexico or wherever we're working they can place us in the right place sign us up as informants and we can get in quick and into the darkest parts of the trafficking networks and and and so it's it's you know it's a challenge to mostly on the legal side to make sure the prosecution is a good one that the right precedents are being set and and we are kind of helping them through that we have a full-time prosecutor on our staff who goes down and helps them see how they can apply their laws so it's not just about the action and finding that's actually the easy part of the whole thing is finding the bad guys and the kids it's so prevalent the hard part is the political side the prosecutorial side the legal side to make sure it's done right to convince them to the our partners to have the courage to go for this and be the first to jump into this dark world I just want to say something it's quite remarkable I was sitting in the in the operation room and the the great care of planning the operation but once it's done it's not as if they just leave because the kids I mean they could be taken out and there you go again and and what's going to happen to them probably suffer a lot worse but they're you know when we take the children out let's not bring them down to the jail cell you know you have some eight year old child that's in a come from them to traumatize their their the care that they say is like no let's get him away from the facility let's put him in a place it's not a jail and it's a you know some beautiful area where they can relax and start to D thaw we were talking about the syndrome the stockholm stockholm zone syndrome did you know that these kids have their terror terrorized and what is that guy going to come back the sexual abuse for anyone is a traumatic experience leaves horrific scars especially on children what happens to the children after you've rescued them and can they ever really heal yeah yeah the answer is yes they can and and it's the most important part of our planning you know Jim was there the other day with you the first question we asked we had to plead with the police up from this particular country that we're working in the first question what isn't where we can do the sting operation how many bad guys are we gonna the first question is how many kids do you think are gonna be rescued on this operation and what is the plan to heal them permanently and that's where we come in we have our aftercare department and we start planning that first because if we can't figure that out we're not gonna do the rescue operation and when you take these kids in it's not just a short time this is a lifetime put em to work we're prepared to take these kids and put them in a place where they can heal for years and years until they're ready to stand on their own we can't assume that there's parents waiting to receive them because generally that's not gonna happen because there was no family that's why they got into this and so that part is planned as delicately and as passionately if not more so than the actual sting operation one of the things that has made Operation Underground Railroad so successful is that it operates relatively obscurely now you're gonna make a movie are you worried about whether that's gonna affect your effectiveness and the safety of the jump teams that go in in the future yeah no I'm not because it's a great question and something we have to consider we're careful what we reveal in media and in this film we will depict the techniques that we use that are things that are happening regardless of which we exist or not for example a sex party with children that's every weekend in every major city in the entire world so if we depict that technique as creating this you know environment where the bad guys can show up and present who they are and they're the evil in their hearts well they whether they see it the movie or me talking about it right now or not isn't gonna isn't gonna give us away because they're doing that anyway now there's certain things that we do particularly on the on the cyber crimes of things where we would never talk about because they are things that there's direct countermeasures for and and and if by chance someone does see this interview or sees the film and they're about to set up a sex party and in Thailand or in or India or wherever and they think what if this was underground railroad gadget well let's not do this well good hallelujah I mean we won that one they're thinking now there's a deterrent there's there's a potential consequence and we have them somewhat on the run so we're very careful with what we put out the script is very carefully read by all of our executives even the US government people that I trust and we're very careful with our messaging all the time and then if you come out like I'm doing right now in this interviewer if I select other people from my team they don't no longer can do undercover work because they can't be recognized but we have so many teams out that you'll never see their faces so we're very we're very cognizant of the of the danger of what we can say in public and we're and we only say those things that will help us and not hurt us what I loved about the screenplay and believe me I'm very picky when it comes to screenplays I've been doing this for thirty years and this is a fine screenplay and and I was lucky to be chosen that Tim came to me for this but know that it's going to be one hell of a challenge and I never get the easy ones this is going to be but I love it and and what's different about this one is there's not great hope in it it has such a redemption in it and the good guys win Jim you are no stranger to his physical exertion and danger in the roles that you have played I'm thinking of your portrayal of Jesus Christ and Mel Gibson's the passing The Passion of the Christ are you worried about your safety in this role oh I've got Jesus with me I'm fine I've got a great team around I've worried about my safety this is this is what I was born to do it's like some people enjoy climbing Mount Everest and this is kind of the Mount Everest of filmmaking and it's it's worth dying for mmm are you afraid you might die could happen because I mean you were struck by lightning during the filming of The Passion of the Christ that film has to be finished before I can die I'll be good okay are you worried about his physical safety at home you know we're used to we're used to taking on those those threats and and we have a plan for him like we do for the rest of our team take to protect ourselves and and and like Jim we're a praying group and we believe in that power that's the ultimate power of protection who's paying for this movie to come about I think Jim's a great group of people have come together to invest in this in this production some of them the Carlos Slim family is involved we're not from mixing with JP John Paul DeJoria Fox's help distributing in Fox Century Fox and m4 the folks who don't know who Carlos Slim is tell them Hui he's one of the wealthiest men in the world he telecommunications in Mexico Latin America his son Patrick is the kind of the rule the the point of contact for that he's very passionate about what about what we're doing and fighting trafficking and then there's there's several other groups that have come in to invest in us in this picture and it's a it's the people that have invested in our true believers and in what we're doing and they are they this is not just a movie it's a movement and they want to continue pushing that movement forward who is funding operation Underground Railroad though we we know about the movie but whose because you guys are only expanding yes you're in your operations yeah it's we're a non-profit we're 501c3 nonprofit and we our machine is fueled by by the kindness and the charity of of people who will help today yeah don't tera for example yeah utah-based otehr they're probably our biggest corporate sponsor which is there all afternoon we're doing amazing things with with their help we're building aftercare shelters we're providing amazing tools to law enforcement throughout the world mobile crime labs detection dogs that can detect digital media that contain child pornography just cutting edge technology that doTERRA is an example of one of our great help subsist again they're here they're here in Utah and we just couldn't be happier with with them and their and their kindness and their hearts to help us and and then the people you know about half of our operations are funded by people who give five dollars you know around five to 20 dollars a month that's I mean so people think like I'm just giving $5 a month what's that that is funding half of our rescue operations so well so what is the schedule like I mean you're gonna start shooting here in the next couple of weeks when do you anticipate the film being ready to release and what do you hope it accomplishes well from what I understand they'll be done into the summer and sometime next year is when they explan to release so they don't have an exact date yet and everyone has the same vision it's a shared vision from the producers to the director to the writers to the actors and that is this is just the beginning we have to get these stories out people don't believe you go back to the original abolitionists of the 19th century there are heroes how did they strike the end that beginning at the end of slavery it was telling stories it was it was Harriet Beecher Stowe writing Uncle Tom's Cabin it was Frederick Douglas getting out and telling his story Harriet Tubman taking action and in telling the stories about what happened in that action that's what people woke up to and then they got so loud and they rose up so powerfully that it shook the government and they had to act and that was the beginning of the end it was the people that rose and so our hope is that that's what this movie will do just like maybe a modern-day version of Uncle Tom's Cabin you know where it tells a story that that awakens the world and and it's brilliant the strategy because really they're thinking about this right now these are true believers from that I said the producers the writers so they picked an American star they have a Mexican movie star Eduardo for a stogie who has a major role to have a Colombian star they have a star from Spain and they were doing this on purpose because they want this this film to be distributed throughout the world so that way we see look we have to come together all these nations of the world need to come together and the legislation we're working on with senator hatch and and Congressman Mia love that is gonna do the same thing it's gonna go along with the film creating kind of the vehicle whereby we can all jump in and so it has to be the beginning of the end of modern-day slavery that's what this film is to do Jim from where you said what do you hope to accomplish through this film Oh abolitionists that it ends I mean but regardless I tried to do something no I don't want to be a guy that sits in the middle and makes a choice to do nothing that is a choice I'm blessed to know this guy and you know my job right now is to be great and with God's help I'll be phenomenal actor Jim Caviezel from The Passion of the Christ he and Tim Ballard from operation Underground Railroad gentlemen thank you so much for being part of three questions

Channel: FOX 13 News Utah

Views: 1,525,810

Rating: 4.9394321 out of 5

Keywords: Jim Caviezel, Operation Underground Railrod, human trafficking, Tim Ballard, Utah

Id: 94hChHDLrTo

Length: 31min 5sec (1865 seconds)

Published: Sun May 27 2018