Filmmakers Say God Was Their Co-Producer

"It was so real," said Linda Kile, 59, a school bookkeeper. "If you believe in the Bible, it's just so real."

"What I liked is that it didn't seem made up," said Adam Rodriguez, 28, a sales specialist at Sherwin Williams.

"Hollywood movies are fake," said Melissa Goodwin, 42, a sales rep. "Just a lot of cussing. That was a real movie about real life."

Alex and Stephen Kendrick say they recognize that God does not always answer prayers, as happens in the film.

But they defend the plot as representative of real events they have seen around southern Georgia -- a coach did receive a car as a gift, three infertile couples had babies after concerted prayer and a team that started off with a losing season wound up at the state championships.

The filmmakers are almost scornful of those who would see such events as merely coincidental.

After the couples got pregnant, "it was very interesting to see how their doctors tried to explain that away. We thought it was hilarious," Alex said.

Likewise, one day during filming, they prayed to ward off an approaching storm. It worked, they said: The storm held off long enough for them to finish filming.

"How else do you explain that?" Alex asked. "We were not just pulling things out of thin air. If you look at the movie and ask, 'Have you ever seen God do this or this or this?' The answer is yes."

Nearly the entire cast and crew for the movie came from Sherwood Baptist Church, a suburban congregation of nearly 3,000 that senior pastor Michael Catt describes as a "contemporary church with traditional values."

For Sunday services, people sit in movie seats, not pews, and two large video screens flank the speaker. The church operates a 24/7 prayer ministry, where people pray around the clock for submitted requests, and hundreds volunteered to help in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina struck. They decry the tolerance in contemporary culture for homosexuality, abortion, drugs and pornography.

The movie, they believed, would be a modern parallel of Jesus's parables, an opportunity to produce something that Kendrick said "wouldn't trample our faith and traditional values." The church may receive a small percentage of the profits, officials say, but only after the film companies have recovered their investment.

"It is a success in that it is doing any kind of business at all," said Brandon Gray, the president and publisher of Box Office Mojo, a box office tracking service. He noted that it is rare for an independently made, non-studio movie to open at more than 100 theaters -- while "Giants" opened on 441 screens.

Yet the movie's financial outlook, like its standing with critics, seems to many involved to be beside the point.

"We didn't make this movie to make money," Alex Kendrick said. "We want people to walk out of the theater and desire a closer walk with God."