Episode 6: "This line wrecks me." (Director Reaction)

i believe matthew in this moment is not thinking about his germaphobia or his ocd tendencies he's thinking about someone's broken in front of me just like i was broken hey it's dallas and it's time for another director reaction this time my reaction is to episode six of season two if you remember in my last reaction video to episode five episode five probably our most controversial episode yet i still wonder why to some extent but it still kind of makes me laugh but there were three moments in that episode that were pretty significant caused a lot of conversation some anger from some folks so there was a lot of anticipation for episode six does this address some of our questions some of our concerns about the characters they were really nervous about mary magdalene in particular because as episode 5 ends she is leaving the group and she is in the process of backsliding and people weren't quite sure where she was going to go so does episode 6 answer some of these questions of course so let's just get right into it so right at the beginning of episode 6 people are waiting of course to see what happens with mary magdalene what do we do we take you thousands of years previous and we take you to the time of king david we don't bring david in right away because david is of course one of the top five most famous and impactful people in the entire bible and so we wanted to make sure that when he's introduced it's in kind of a cool way so we've introduced you to moses we've introduced you to joshua and now we're introducing you to david so we start with a himalayan now you can look up more detail on this story and more back story about the bread of the presence but this is actually a pretty well known story and jesus references it later in this episode and he references it in the gospels of course and this is the story of when david was so desperate and so hungry that he asked timmelec for this special bread that was reserved only for specific people when david comes into the scene he just burst right in and that's our introduction to david and we knew it was important not only to introduce him in kind of a cool way but also to have the right actor and jorge franco plays david he's fantastic you never know when we're going to use these characters again and so we wanted to make sure we got this one right of course and one of the cool things about this particular scene was when jorge first came in the first couple takes he and i had discussed the character beforehand and i think some of my initial direction was wrong we had david is really desperate david is really scared and concerned and after a couple takes i think we both felt something was a little off i for sure felt like i hadn't quite nailed it yet and so i told jorge why don't you try coming in as jack bauer jack bauer the main character of 24. instead of being like weak and for sure you're for sure you're desperate but what if that desperation comes from from a position of strength you're asking for help but you've got a little bit more strength a little bit more confidence in yourself in general when you communicate just communicate how jack bauer might communicate in this situation so that really seemed to unlock the scene for both of us and i think it helped escalate the intensity in the scene a little bit and helped end it on a high note now if you look up the story of a himalaya it's actually quite tragic he actually mentions in this scene that he's risking his life in helping david and that turned out to be true it's an awful story and it ends with ahimalek and dozens of other priests and members of his family being slaughtered in a really horrible way by saul it's quite fascinating this particular story had huge implications for generations and of course many many years later when jesus is facing off against the pharisees in the wheat field which we get to later in this episode so after the opening credits we've got simon and matthew now we know that they've been assigned by jesus to work together and this is one of those situations where simon because he's forced to do something for jesus he's got to be on his better behavior he might normally take this opportunity to really nail matthew and follow up on some of the anger that he's had in the past but in this case he needs to be a good guy he needs to be protective he needs to make sure that matthew is kept in one piece and in the process of doing that i think this is a lesson for life when we are forced into or when we force ourselves to do the right thing even if it's not necessarily for the right reasons initially behavior oftentimes changes our mindset and changes their heart now simon isn't ready to forgive matthew yet matthew hasn't apologized yet but simon isn't ready also to accept matthew as a colleague but you start to see the cracks show just a little bit partially because simon has to respect matthew a little bit because matthew has some good ideas but also because matthew starts to show a little bit some humanity and any time we are forced to realize the humanity of people that we don't like things change a little bit and you see simon see matthew's humanity when matthew reveals unintentionally of course that he might have a little bit of a crush on mary or at the very least he finds her unusually pleasant to look at which i think eventually should be unsure because i think it's such a great phrase but that's when you see simon he knows more than matthew knows in this case matthew isn't probably fully aware of his emotions and how to process them simon is an expert at that and so simon is able to look at matthew and go huh i not only find this amusing but it's also humanizing then we go into mother mary and rhema and this scene might not have necessarily been epic but i do believe it was important because rhema i believe represents the audience the audience is thinking why didn't jesus go after mary magdalene the audience is thinking why didn't jesus just make this all better why would he allow this to continue why wouldn't he come to the rescue why would he put matthew and simon together i think all of these things are causing the audience to wonder what's going on and i think rhema is speaking for them and i think that is also a reflection of life a lot of times we have questions a lot of times things don't make sense and there are multiple ways that we can respond and rhema's doing i believe the right thing she's expressing it she's venting it she's saying this bothers me this confuses me and mother mary doesn't try to say no no it shouldn't confuse you no no you should be perfectly fine with everything but she does say we do need to trust because jesus has in the past and will continue in the future work things out on his time and in his plan and that's not easy but it is something that we have to embrace and something that we have to accept we find out of course eventually anyway that jesus does have a plan and mother mary's just ahead of the game here she's seen jesus do this enough times she trusts jesus she knows that jesus is the son of god and so for her it's a little bit easier to accept and i appreciate the patience that she shows rhema in this scene because i think that's something we need to show other people too is that everyone is at different levels and everyone comes at this at different times and rheem is a little bit new to it so that scene i think just represents where the audience is coming from and this is something we do a lot in the chosen we call them audience surrogates and that's where we pick a character for a particular scene or for a particular episode for whom the audience is going to see the storyline through their eyes and that's a really important thing because if all of the characters have arrived and all the characters have figured everything out a they become way ahead of the audience which isn't always a good thing and b sometimes things can be a little bit confusing and sometimes we need characters to represent us for our emotions and also for our information and so in this case i think rama is representing our emotions now before i get into mary magdalen in the bar which of course there's a lot to unpack there i want to very quickly ask you to just hit that subscribe button hit that notification bell if you haven't done so it really does help us out and gets the channel in front of more people and the way that we're able to give you these videos totally for free and keep doing this and pay for this camera and this light and all this stuff is because of the chosen gifts dot com binge jesus is back so you can check out benji's shirts and hoodies and all of that fun stuff in the store thechosengifts.com just check it out if you get a chance the sales at thechosengifts.com are horrible to do videos like this so thank you so much all right mary magdalene in the bar yikes i told you and episode five that things probably weren't going to get better in fact they might get a little bit worse i know some people were hoping that when mary magdalene went to the bar that maybe she was there to kind of tell people about jesus and that's not the case mary magdalene has officially been triggered she is officially going back to her old life and i did a conversation on video with ryan swanson our head writer and liz tabish who plays mary magdalene in the come nc show so if you see on our youtube channel there's a video called the come and see show which is about episode six this very episode where i did some interviews we had a huge great live event it's a really fun video but in that i had a discussion with ryan and liz about this whole storyline and what would have caused mary magdalene to go down this path and ryan our head writer talks at length about his own struggles with alcoholism and how those triggers worked and liz talks about her experience playing this role it's really fascinating so make sure you check out that conversation mary magdalene has been triggered mary magdalene has now made the decision i don't want help i want to go deep into this and so when she's sitting at the table and she's gambling and she's essentially relying on all of her old tools whether that's her alcohol or her ability to gamble or her comfort in situations like this where she's surrounded by people who don't necessarily have her best interests at heart she might be actually a little bit more comfortable in that environment and that's true of a lot of people sometimes it's easier because they might struggle with intimacy or because that's how they've been living for so long she's actually more comfortable in this environment temporarily but there are triggers that get you to go back to the bad parts of your life but there are also triggers that can get you back to the good parts and can get you back to the present into the reality and to the healthy version of you in this case just as much as mary had triggers that sent her reeling and sent her into the depths there are some triggers that can get her out of it and in this case it's the memory of her father that very moment from the very beginning of episode one of season one when mary's father is talking to her and gives her those words from isaiah 43 and when she's looking around at these men this was a key moment on the set we talk about it in that other video so you can get more details there but there was a key moment when liz actually said to me what is my motivation here like what what what you know what am i struggling with and one of the things that i said was when you look at these men who are sitting around this table these men are supposed to be your brothers they're supposed to be the disciple that man sitting there who's leering at you that's supposed to be simon and that guy who's just wanting your money or who's trying to mansplain you or trying to dominate you or intimidate you that's supposed to be thomas it's supposed to be those boys that you know that you trust and that you can be with and know that they've got your best interests at heart and that completely unlocked the scene for both of us and that causes her to escape and of course she doesn't even think about the money at this point she leaves the money behind because right now she just needs to get out these men are not for her and she knows men who are and women who are so we got these two back-to-back moments all in the same camp where you've got thomas and andrew and james and john they're observing simon zee and briefly thaddeus and little james as they are wrestling with what it is they're doing and i actually call these scenes disciples wrestling with what the heck they're doing scenes i think it's a really key human moment i think these moments are what for me connect me to these people because if i was following the messiah in person 2 000 years ago and things were always looking a little bit differently than i expected and i was also wondering how i got picked these are the kinds of scenes that speak to that for me it's also an opportunity to show allah do some more really cool moves uh now again we did actually do some research to make sure and he did some research to make sure that those moves were rooted in kind of a middle eastern historical approach to things but yeah just really cool seeing the actual actor not a stunt guy for simon z do those actual moves and now we've got simon and matthew not really finding mary that's what's kind of funny about it is that for all the work that they're doing and all the prepping that they're doing and all of the wrestling with it and the assignment that they've been given by jesus they don't actually find mary now they get close to her because matthew understood what the roman was saying about going downstairs and he connected that to jesus's bible verse about going into the depths when you think about it they ultimately find mary because she sees them maybe it's a little bit easy but i i didn't want to spend a whole lot of time on the searching that's not really the point of this whole storyline the point of this storyline is that mary has strayed mary has descended mary has backslid and the process of how she gets back to jesus and what happens when she gets back to jesus is far more important than the process of matthew and simon looking for her and all of the deep and dark things that she does while she's away from jesus the point that we really wanted to make in this scene between mary and matthew and simon is what we feel like as human beings when we have strayed in our life and jesus rescues us in some way that's one thing but when we relatively quickly do it again it's even harder to accept forgiveness and grace it becomes even more shameful and we are even more embarrassed and we wanted to capture that to its fullest extent and so this scene was not meant to be pretty i talked about this with with liz about this is not going to be a smooth scene there's going to be nothing pretty about it nothing glossed over we're going to go through what it looks like to be fully hung over and to be fully depressed and ashamed and she says one of the most beautiful lines in my opinion in the whole show he already fixed me once and they broke again on the set that wrecked me i think every take she did it wrecked me i would come up to her to give her some whether it's notes or just to discuss the scene and i had to gather myself because i've said that i've been there maybe i didn't say those words in exactly that way but that idea of i thought i was good i thought i was fixed and then i broke again and i can't face him i've been there many times you've no doubt been there many times to see that mary magdalene a hero of the faith a follower of jesus could go through that as well and i do believe as i said in episode five i do believe that the disciples of jesus did things like that maybe not this specific storyline but i do believe these kind of struggles this notion of i thought i was good i thought i was fixed i think is something that anyone can identify with the way that liz delivered it was so beautiful and we didn't want to you know when she throws up we didn't want to make a huge thing out of that oh we don't want to show it or anything like that it wasn't necessary i think the point was made but this is once again where you see matthew ridding himself unintentionally on almost unaware because of his new passion and it's this this scene this moment is not about any romance or about a crush that he may or may not have on mary this is about he has a purpose now he has a desire to help a desire to give and to share in the way that he's been given to you know jesus rescued him and so i believe matthew in this moment is not thinking about his germaphobia or his ocd tendencies he's thinking about someone's broken in front of me just like i was broken and it's the first time that you hear matthew admit it i'm a bad person and that's a huge moment for simon we actually see simon look at matthew and go huh he's acknowledging what i believe that matthew has had his major issues again it's not an apology it's not personal yet but it is again a little bit of a crack a little bit of a in the armor for simon in his approach to matthew and his feelings about how matthew operates and so this scene like all the scenes that we do is about more than just the main thing there are other things happening in this scene and other relationships that are developing or growing in addition to the primary one which is of course mary's relationship with jesus then we've got what i consider to be a pretty fun scene we filmed this in utah in this extraordinary set uh in goshen utah the main pillars that you see when they are walking down this this long row of pillars this seemed like the perfect scene to use that set for those are all real i mean they're not stone but they're all they're they're foam but those are that tall and those are present and physical and you can touch them there are more pillars that extend further down and then there's a wall that goes along uh behind that isn't real that was created in visual effects um if you would have seen that in the original shot and the actors were actually walking in front of a blue screen because if you would have looked straight down that hallway you would have just seen empty field and so they put a wall there and so it just added some more depth and some more texture to the scene and this scene is an important scene this is yet another step in this road towards the sanhedrin ultimately as we know spoiler alert killing jesus and when you go to where they ended up and to their anger in their vitriol and what led to that it wasn't just an overnight thing it took a while for it to develop and we want to show you that we want to show you the humanity of it we want to show you that shmuel for him this is important and he's not thinking yet of jesus being killed of course but you're seeing some of these early seeds being planted and the fact that jesus is so egregiously contradicting what they believe are truly important teachings it wasn't just black and white where all of a sudden they just told every you know the sanhedrin jesus is doing these bad things and the center went yeah let's kill him it wasn't like that we want to show you that nuance we want to show you that historical context from that cultural context and you're going to be able to see over the next few episodes the differences in what we introduced in episode five is the school of hillel and the school of shema so that was just a scene that i thought was fun i thought it looked interesting the opportunity to shoot on that set was extraordinary it was visually one of my favorite moments of the show just because we got a chance to shoot down those pillars and they're so cool just my own little geeking out on that moment then we've got a moment that has nothing to do with visuals and everything to do with emotion in fact the scene ends up in a small tent where you know there's the visuals are small i mean this is not an epic scene there's no visual effects it's just three people in a small space having an extraordinarily large emotional and spiritual moment this was the scene that i believe represents the gospel more than any scene than we've done in these two seasons and it in fact has just a couple of words that reflect the gospel as much as anything that we've done and that's the phrase look up mary is ashamed she doesn't want to face jesus she's not sure how he will react she hasn't experienced this kind of situation before she hasn't experienced this kind of love before this kind of grace before the men in her life up until this point other than her father were always trying to take something from her and here's a scene where she's with someone who wants to give her something significant the most important thing and it's just a small scene but it's about something historic and that's the gospel and when she's ashamed and looking down and jesus says look up and what does she say she says i can't it says you can look up those two words look up i think in many ways the message of the show i mean if you could boil it down to something there's lots of different phrases that we use to describe this show and jesus is one of them but that has nothing to do with the content that has nothing to do with what they were actually talking about 2000 years ago this notion of look up when you are ashamed when you are low when you have reached a dark point when you are desperate look up of course there's so much more to that but those two words say so much and i think that's what is the key moment of that scene is when he says look up then of course the opportunity to be forgiven directly by jesus of nazareth is something extraordinary and i hope that you as the viewer were able to watch that scene through mary's eyes and so that when jesus says i forgive you that it can feel personal to you then we get the first big major glimpse of what is sending andrew on a path towards kind of emotional destruction you know we talked about the triggers that sent mary down a dark path this is the trigger that sends andrew down a dark path andrew actually followed john the baptist he was one of his disciples and that's from the gospels there's that moment in the gospels where john the baptist has andrew with him and says behold the lamb of god who takes away the sins of the world and that sends andrew off to simon that begins that whole process and so when the guy that you followed and was kind of your first rabbi in many ways were literally actually your first rabbi and he's arrested but this time for good this time life imprisonment this time it feels different for many other times that may or may not have happened and for andrew it takes him to a dark place he's new to this and we've had a lot of you who were upset by how andrew behaved in episode 7 which we'll get to in my reaction coming up in a little bit but this is where the seed plant is planted it didn't happen overnight for andrew he's not used to facing this kind of stress this kind of weight and he doesn't necessarily have all the tools yet salvation may happen in a moment sanctification takes time and andrew's not quite there yet and i think that's true of all of us i mean we're never fully there yet as jesus says to mary magdalene not now someday when when we're on we're on another side of eternity we will get to the point where we are living in our perfected selves but now we still struggle and this is the beginning of andrew's struggle and you're seeing him start to descend we also get a chance to see philip as a leader we also get a chance to see multiple disciples including simon zee wrestling with their old selves the old versus the new and you ever actually see this moment when philip is even tempted to be like i would like to see a fight then he says no no we're not doing that we are now on a new path and that's the old you simon philip was actually saying that to himself as well maybe the old philip would have liked to see something like that or even participated in something like that but now he's new and hopefully we're like phillip hopefully when we are tempted to go back to our old selves that we have those moments we take those moments to recover andrew's not recovering quickly mary didn't recover quickly philip's been doing this a little bit longer and so maybe philip's able to kind of more quickly recover and get on that new path and we've got the wheat field scene the first part of the scene they're just walking through it this was so cool because this wheat field existed just outside of our set in goshen the jerusalem set that's in goshen just across the street was a wheat field and so when we were trying to figure out how are we going to do a wheat field you know like is this going to all be visual effects are we going to have to find chunks of wheat and plant them and turns out thank you lord there's a wheat field just across the street and so we were able to film it there and because they were about to be knocking down a lot of it anyway they let us do whatever we wanted so we were able to actually create a path in this wheat field and they were so cool and gracious to let us do that so that was really cool and now we've got the miracle of the hand the miracle of the withered hand a story that i was looking forward to telling and this is one of those miracles where in the course of the chosen you see multiple miracles and we come at them from different directions sometimes sometimes we tell you all the backstory of the person who's being healed because we think that we really want it to be an emotional moment other times the miracle is about something different and so for example in season one when jesus heals the man who's lowered through the roof that miracle is about the faith of this man's friends and it was also for us about the relationship that he was having with the pharisees well this is somewhat similar we don't get to know much about the man with the withered hand in this scene because this scene is about more than that it's not about necessarily the backstory of the man and this scene wasn't actually very emotional it was more intense and this is more about the relationship again that jesus is building with these pharisees and with religious leaders in multiple locations and so you're starting to see jesus taking a show on the road and some of this is impacting multiple people and so from different directions the anger and the resistance to jesus is developing which is why when we ultimately get to future seasons it's all going to culminate in jerusalem and it's not going to be quite as long of a journey to get to that point because of what we're setting up now in this moment we see jesus facing off against the pharisees in some way he wants to do something beautiful he wants to do something important he wants to in many ways save someone's life now it's not literally life or death but it's a significant health issue and the pharisees are only concerned about the law we also got a chance for our visual effects team to show off just a little bit obviously this hand wasn't real we didn't actually heal a withered hand on the set everything about that hand was created from scratch what's interesting is we were rushing this episode just like we did for all the episodes we wanted to get these episodes out to you as fast as possible in the first version of this episode that we did on our live stream we tried some things with the hand that i thought were realistic and i actually still do but where you see some of the the fingers popping back into place our visual effects artist who did this will he had the same thought in fact i think he had the thought even before i did which was after a hand that's been atrophied for so long when it's coming back to into play the bones are going to be popping back into place and so he did that and i thought it looked really cool but i think it ultimately ended up not looking realistic i mean who knows exactly what it would look like for a withered hand to go from withered for years and years to all of a sudden perfectly healed who knows what that would look like it would be kind of funky but i think it ended up looking too funky i think it threw a few people off and so we decided to redo it make it a little bit smoother so on the app i don't know if it's happened yet at the time of this recording but on the app we're putting we're doing that scene just a little bit differently smoothing the hand motions out a little bit more so that maybe i don't know if it's more realistic or not who knows maybe it's not quite as distracting that was an opportunity we had to make things a little bit better but i do think that that scene overall was really extraordinary uh the in terms of the visual effects i was so proud of our team for pulling that off because i think it really looked cool and i don't want you to watch these scenes thinking the whole time about the visual effects that's why i don't love to do scenes that are too supernatural because i i don't want you watching it going oh i wonder how they did that and then you're completely taken out of the scene excuse me what are you doing what is your name the water is getting stirred up whenever the water is getting stirred up you might hear a little bit of a shaker things are about to go down and that's one of the things i love about this music and i think it just helps us keep these miracle scenes feeling a little different we don't want every miracle scene to have the exact same music and the same style and the same approach to it we wanted to mix things up a little bit that's what we were allowed to do with this scene to anyone who is wondering whether or not we believe jesus is god uh he asserts it maybe in a subtle way but right here in this scene when the man says if he was supposed to be god he would have done it himself and jesus says interesting point and of course that means jesus is god god did do it so just want to make that clear in case you are wondering about that or you know someone who is we do assert that jesus is god we did in episode 1 of this season when jesus says to john i am who i am that's a assertion that he is god and then again in this moment so and that takes us outside and that takes us to a pretty well-known story in the bible the one that calls back to what david experienced because jesus references it and that's when jesus allows his disciples to eat on the sabbath that wasn't necessarily a biblical rule that was more of a traditional rule what jesus was allowing them to break but he was reminding them of what david did and that we don't put rules over life and sometimes rules are meant to protect life and sometimes we are meant to protect life at the expense of rules and this was not at the expense of a biblical rule this was at the expense of some of something traditional but either way it completely sends the pharisees into a dark place and it sends them ultimately to the final scene of the episode and magically i changed outfits actually we found out we had a little technical difficulty lost some footage at this point so i'm re-recording it uh just the ending here so decided i'd mix things up a little bit a day later and uh you know nice binge jesus had i think so anyway we've taken the two pharisees now into their office and we get a chance to see a little bit behind the scenes again of this build up towards the future and here with these two guys you see it from a multi from multiple angles and so now we're seeing that these two pharisees feel like this is an opportunity for them to be taken seriously they've been part of this small town they have not been taken seriously by the larger establishment they say it there's a moment in the scene where they realize gosh this is a big deal someone claiming to be the son of man comes into our synagogue now we don't believe it we think he's dangerous but this could be an opportunity for us to have a hand in making some really key decisions and so they're going to go to jatapeda which is a place where there's a lot of religious extremism where it's a hotbed of protests a hotbed of anti-roman sentiment and they know that there are going to be some key leaders there these guys know that this is their chance to be taken seriously and we close the episode with that sentiment we close the episode with him saying we need to pray for justice and it's not only justice for what jesus has done in general but it's justice to what he did to their synagogue and as you saw from the older pharisee he says you've made a mockery of our synagogue and they take it personally so we're going to start to see from multiple angles and from multiple locations this build of resentment and intensity and anger and hurt towards jesus and these are the steps that are taken towards the ultimate devastating climactic moment of the show which is coming in a few seasons but we're seeing these grumblings start here so there you have it episode six hope you enjoyed that deep dive we will be doing it again in episode seven coming soon hope you'll check that out in the meantime remember it's not your job to feed the 5000 it's only provide the loaves and fish and i will see you soon

Channel: The Chosen

Views: 139,122

Keywords: the chosen, the chosen tv series, bingeJesus, GetUsedtoDifferent, Faith-based, Bible show, Bible study, Christianity, church, Jesus show, what to watch, tv show, filmmaking

Id: y8-jL15MC28

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021