We chatted with the Kendrick Brothers, Stephen and Alex Kendrick, creators of hit films including Overcomer, War Room, Courageous, Fireproof, Facing the Giants and Flywheel, about their first documentary , the re-release of Courageous and also about fathering.
The first question we always like to ask people when we first interview them is, how did you guys become Christians? And did your father, have a big impact in guiding you to Christ?
Stephen Kendrick
Yes, Alex and I grew up in a home where our dad, his life had been transformed by Jesus and his own father was seven feet tall was an alcoholic, he had a lot of unfaithfulness and pain in his past, with his father, and his grandfather.
So, our dad grew up, very insecure, was dealing with depression and fears as a teenager, but his mother took him to a Church and he heard the Gospel of Jesus and he placed his faith in Christ and it transformed his life.
One of the things I love about Christ is that He doesn’t just, you know, He’s not giving you rules from the outside that are just behavior modification, guidelines. He transforms us from the inside and so our dad began to change, you know, the family tree.
He started saying I want to follow the Lord, I want to be faithful to my wife and my kids.
As a result of it, we grew up watching our parents seeking God, reading the scriptures, we saw incredible answers to prayer in their lives and we fell in love with the God that they know and serve.
And now, you know, He is our Lord, Alex and I have both given our lives to Christ, but it’s one of our greatest joys in life to be able to tell people what Jesus has done for us. How He is answering our prayers and revealing truth to us, you know, there’s so much light that gets turned on for you to understand reality in the world with Jesus in your life.
From that you became pastors and then you go into filmmaking. What inspired you to start making films?
Alex Kendrick
We did not have a television for much of our childhood and when we were able to see a family friendly movie at the theater, when we were young, it was very impactful. I remember thinking that we have to do this, we have to learn how to tell these stories. When we got to about 1985, our parents bought us one of those early versions of video cameras, and we ran around our neighborhood making silly little movies and developed a knack for editing between our VCR and the camcorder.
So, we learned how to tell stories that way. Did it all through school and then after Seminary and getting our bachelor’s degrees went into full-time ministry, and began making short movies first, that led into our full-length features. And we’re just very grateful to have the opportunity and we don’t just want to entertain people, we want to inspire them and inspire their faith in God as well.
On the subject of fathering, God used you to tell these incredible stories, but also to inspire or kind of father other filmmakers such as the Erwin Brothers.
Stephen Kendrick
Well, Alex and I having been in Youth Ministry for years, we had these young people coming up that we’re pouring into and spending time with them teaching them about the Lord.
So when we moved it into filmmaking, it was our desire to invest in the next generation of filmmakers as well.
Because we’re meeting these young people that are coming on our movie sets and we had met John and Andy Erwin.They were super talented at filming music videos, they had won awards filming these little short, two-minute, three-minute, you know, music videos and so we invited them to come and help us with the movie Courageous.
They worked on our second unit and we said, we want to help you with anything, we can teach you, that will help you into launching into feature films. We want to do that. So they left courageous and made their first film that fall after that and we’ve been cheering them on ever since.
We’re talking a lot about fathering, which brings us onto your first documentary, Show me the Father. What inspired you to get into, first of all, making a documentary and having fatherhood as the main theme?
Stephen Kendrick
Well, after the movie Overcomer we had spent, you know, months praying for God to give us clarity and He made it very clear, He wanted us to make a documentary which was new, but we didn’t want to do it making boring talking heads, you know, we’ve seen some boring documentaries and so we wanted it to feel like a feature film.
The issue of fatherhood was also really close to our hearts, because it holds an epic position in Scripture, that God is the first person of the Trinity, and He doesn’t just call himself Creator, He says he is our Father and Ephesians 3 says that he creates fatherhood on Earth
out of the fatherhood of God, that the seven roles, we talk about this in Show Me The Father, the seven roles that dad’s play on Earth with their children, are identical to the seven roles that God plays in our lives as our Heavenly Father. And it is the last verse of the Old Testament, He said, I want to turn the hearts of the father’s back to their children and children to their fathers.
Well, when you look at the statistics, even from a secular perspective, the number one reason, why young people are in prison, they’re on drugs, they deal with depression, teen pregnancy, gang violence, drug abuse. All is connected to fatherlessness. It’s the when you remove the dad from the home, it’s like the airplane pilot jumping out of the airplane and the people in the airplane are left to fend for themselves. You see that happening in families and throughout culture.
So, if we can help dads to reconnect with their kids, or we can help people forgive their father and learn that God is their perfect father and let God father them it can help every area of their lives.
So, we followed that lead of the Lord to make it and we didn’t even know what stories we were going to film and we didn’t even know about Jim Daly or Sherman Smith and those stories, but the Lord faithfully provided some incredible stories, and we’ve been blown away at the response.
The stories in the film are incredible and blow you away, even your story as well. Stephen about adopting your daughter. That was that was incredible. Can you share a little bit about that as well?
Stephen Kendrick
Sure. Well, when we were making the movie Courageous, I was on an airplane, and the Lord spoke to me about adoption and I didn’t realise my wife had been praying for
me, even though we had four biological children at home, that I would be open to adoption.
Well, two years later we had filled in all the paperwork and we were getting pictures of girls from China that were available for adoption. They were orphans and we ended up turning down four of those referrals. Just God would not give us a peace about them.
And on the fifth one, we had this total peace. She was born with half a heart that was working. But she was born on Valentine’s Day of 2011 and my wife said, she was born on Valentine’s Day with a broken heart and so, we made the decision to adopt her and then I went back and looked in my Bible and the day that God spoke to me on that airplane, I had written it down in my Bible and it was on to 14th February 2011, the day that she was being born in China, was the day that God spoke to me.
It was this awesome sense of God’s leadership in that decision but us bringing her home and adopting her taught us a lot about fatherhood. Because we saw her go from being an unwanted burden in a communist country to being a loved blessing in a loving home.
If you look in Ephesians, it says that when we place our faith in Jesus, He adopts us, and then He forgives us and He blesses us and we have access to his throne in prayer and we also have a home in Heaven, waiting for us. So, God doesn’t just want us to relate to him as a Creator but as a loving Father.
Alex is there a particular story from the documentary that stands out for you?
Alex Kendrick
Well, one of my favorites in the movie is Jim Daly. Jim Daly grew up with a very poor example of a father. He [his father] often was not there for long stretches of his childhood, he was an alcoholic and eventually that killed him.
When Jim Daly was older, and a leader of a ministry, he was struggling with some tough decisions and he tells the story of going down into his basement, he had a chair down there and he was lamenting to God “why didn’t you give me a good dad that I could call? Why didn’t you give me a dad that could give me wisdom and advice?” And he said the Lord spoke to his heart, not audibly of course, but almost with a tonal quality and He [God] said haven’t I been a good father and Jim Daly wept, he fell to his knees and wept when he realised that God had filled in, walked with him, provided for him and led him all those years as a good father would and he goes on to say, “you’ve been the best father I could have ever imagined”.
God promises in scripture, He’s the father to the fatherless, now, of course, He wants us to seek him as well, He wants us to turn to Him and put our faith in Him, to walk with Him.
He wants that close relationship, He is not a distant God, He wants to be intimate in our hearts.
Jim Daly learned that firsthand, and that’s just a powerful story in the film.
The film is out, have you had any stories that have impacted people from watching the movie?
Stephen Kendrick
Sure, well, first the movie was given an A+ CinemaScore in America, which is extremely rare, which means audiences loved the film.
But we’ve also been hearing about people coming to Christ. There was a security guard in one theatre, she was hired to just be in that theatre room, and she started watching the movie and at the end, she said, I want to give my life to Jesus. She said, my Earthly, father shot me with a gun, when I was a kid and I almost died and he went to jail. I’ve hated him and struggled with depression my whole life. She said I’m hearing about the fatherhood of God, and I’m ready to give my life to Jesus.
We are hearing about children coming to faith, people even disconnected from their dads for decades are saying, after seeing this movie, I have reconnected with my father, or I have gone home and reached out to my children.
So, it is very inspirational, it’s not a documentary that beats people down, or just, you know, makes you feel guilty, it actually shows redemption, and healing, and forgiveness, and in the end, people feel loved, you know, they want to know God more and they want to love their families more.
So those are some of my favourite aspects of the film
That’s incredible to hear, and hopefully even more stories will be told as the weeks go on, now you are also re-releasing Courageous, which is 10 years old. What made you want to re-release it?
Alex Kendrick
We realised as we were coming up on the 10th anniversary of the original release of Courageous that the principles in the movie are just as applicable today as they were a
decade ago, and we have a new generation of fathers, that would watch this movie differently than they may have seen it before they had kids a decade ago.
So, we began talking to our distributor and we said also what would happen if we revisited these families a decade later, what would be going on with them? So, we got the main cast back together, we wrote and shot some new scenes for the movie.
We then went back and re-edited the original film. It flows a little bit faster, we added new colour, new score, some deleted scenes back into the film and added the new ending.
So, when people see it, if they loved it the first time, they’re really going to like it, this time.
It will feel familiar while being very fresh and I think by the end of the film, there are some surprises that we have in the new ending, we were really delighted to do that.
It comes out September 24th in theatres. You can go to Courageousthemovie.com to see the trailer and clips and get more information.
Stephen Kendrick
Yeah. I don’t know if it’s coming out in Great Britain in or how that they’re distributing it there.
Alex Kendrick
You are welcome to gather as many people take to the streets to demand that it comes there.
I’ll make some enquires and when I get some information, I will let our readers know. So, you’ve got Show Me The Father out now and Courageous out on September 24th, what else are you working on at the moment?Have you got anything in the pipeline?
Stephen Kendrick
Sure, we have multiple projects, if I showed you the white board right here in our office, you’ve got ten that we’re praying through, some of them are episodic ideas, some of them are feature film ideas and some are other documentary ideas.
We’ve learned, there’s a big difference between a good idea and a God idea and everybody has a good idea.
We have seen consistently that if we ask the Lord, you know and seek Him in prayer, He usually will give us some kind of direction and a peace and an open door to head in a certain direction.
Right now, we just filmed a movie this past spring, that we’re editing right now, that we hope to release next year and Alex is developing another feature film idea that we’re excited about that, if we filmed it anytime soon, it would probably be next summer.
But anyway, we want to keep going and the Lord, He is blessing and opening doors, and we’re very grateful for the international reach that the movies have.
Finally, how can we pray for you?
Alex Kendrick
God’s will to be done, His protection and mainly fruitfulness that the Lord would turn the hearts of the audience toward these truths, these principles, the Gospel and that the Lord would open the avenues to release these films, you know, we’re dealing with covid, a lot of people don’t want to go to the theatre because of covid, but that the Lord would make these films fruitful and of course, secondarily to that, that they would be financially fruitful because we can make them if they do well.If they don’t do well, those avenues tend to close and so we do want them to do well, but mainly, the most important thing for us is expanding the Kingdom, ministering to people, and leading them to a faith in the Lord.