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Underdogs and the power of faith: director Alejandro Monteverde on Little Boy

Underdogs and the power of faith: director Alejandro Monteverde on Little Boy

Last updated on: April 23, 2015 at 8:04 am by Andrew Collins

Underdogs and the power of faith: director Alejandro Monteverde on Little Boy 2015-04-23T08:04:47-06:00 Andrew Collins

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Based on Interview with Alejandro Monteverde, Director of Little Boy

The “faith-based” box

When it comes to telling stories, director Alejandro Monteverde doesn’t believe in a sacred-secular dichotomy.

“I’m constantly being put in a box, he says, “constantly.”

At first blush, it’s not hard to see why. His new film Little Boy tells the story of a young boy in a sleepy California coastal town during World War II whose father leaves to fight in the Pacific Theater. Pepper Flynt Busbee (Jakob Salvati; hereafter referred to as Little Boy, per the film’s title), upon hearing a sermon at church about the power of faith like a mustard seed, determines to bring his father back through the power of belief – that distinctly Christian type of faith that’s said to move mountains and which acts out of love and charity.

But as the good Lord said, “judge not lest ye be judged,” and Monteverde insists that the Little Boy has something for everyone. He wants the faith-based community to enjoy his films, of course, but movies about faith needn’t be limited to those who already share those views.

“A lot of the times unfortunately we are put in a box and limited to only one type of audience,” he says. “If you’re only inspiring and showing positive films to a group of people that – in my opinion – are already positive and inspired, we’re missing out on a huge group of other audiences.”

One could, perhaps, call Little Boy a “faith-based film,” but to do so is to miss the point – to put it in a box, as Montverde might say. He crafted the story so that it would spend more time wrestling with the nature of faith in all of its slippery ambiguity than preaching answers.

In his quest to bring his father back, for example, Little Boy turns to two different guides: Father Oliver (Tom Wilkinson) from the local Catholic church, and Mr. Hashimoto (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), a secularist Japanese man distrusted by the local populace. The two are good friends, and so when Little Boy turns to Fr. Oliver after missing the metaphor from the sermon and literally buying mustard seed, Fr. Oliver gives him a list of good works, the last of which is “befriend Mr. Hashimoto.” So begins an unlikely, character-building friendship between a boy with childlike faith and an oppressed, older man who believes any sort of supernatural faith is misplaced.

“In the end, I am not a preacher,” says Monteverde. “I don’t like to preach. I like to tell stories that inspire, and that evoke, dialogue and converse.”

Evoke and dialogue are fitting terms for the film. Through the development of Little Boy and the skeptical Hashimoto in tandem, it asks probing questions of both the believer and the skeptic. In the end it doesn’t intend to say whether Little Boy’s faith literally moved a mountain, as he appears to do in one of the film’s most poignant scenes (the skeptic’s counterargument: California gets a lot of earthquakes).

Image Source: Little Boy Press Kit

“My goal as a filmmaker is to propose a theme,” Monteverde says, emphasizing the word propose. “I don’t like to impose.” He believes that when you propose a theme, viewers are more likely to open their hearts and listen. If you can get them to meditating on new experiences and ideas that perhaps they had never considered before, then you’ve done your job as a story teller.

“I like my films to really begin when you leave the theater,” he says. “If you’re not a believer, maybe it makes you start thinking.”

David and Goliath

When Monteverde first began exploring the themes that led to the story of Little Boy, he did not intend to make a film about faith. Rather, he wanted to tell the story of the ultimate underdog – a classic David-and-Goliath-style tale.

“I’ve been an underdog my whole life, and I’m always facing big giants. I have these ambitious goals but am always hearing ‘it’s impossible,’” he says. From the starting point of the underdog, the locus of many a great drama, the story organically started to grow into more explicitly spiritual matters.

“One of the main underdogs is children, because they depend 100 percent on adults. They can’t drive. They can’t sustain themselves,” Monteverde says. “So if they have a challenge in their life, they don’t have many weapons or tools to defeat that barrier.”

With a child settled upon as a protagonist, he decided to stack the deck against him as much as possible. As AM studied different time periods, he gravitated toward World War II, highlighting the boy’s helpless position in a small town, an ocean away from his father, suffering as a bullied runt with no friends outside of his nuclear family.

“I was like… what if the war takes his only friend, which is his father. What can that boy do?” says Monteverde. “And the first instinct of a boy is to bring his father back from World War II. That’s how the story began.”

At this point, there were a number of different directions Monteverde could have pursued, so he continued to ask himself questions. What kind of tools can a kid have? How can an 8-year-old boy bring his father back from World War II?

At that point, there’s nothing left but to appeal to the divine through the power of faith – the “weapons of the spirit.”

Faith like a mustard seed

One of the posters for the film says “believe the impossible.” The tagline is the product of questions Monteverde grappled with as he wrote the story: What is it to believe the impossible? What does it require? And if faith is a power, then how does it work? This is where the human volition enters the picture – and with it drama and narrative. To make a story about faith work, Monteverde says, he needed to explore the will of man. Even in spiritual matters, after all, you need to have a strong will in order to achieve anything.

Monteverde illustrates the idea with a common joke in Spanish about a man who asks God if he can win the lottery. After three years the man comes back and tells God, “I haven’t won the lottery, what’s going on?” And God tells him, “You have to buy a ticket first.”

You cannot make a case from the Bible for the old truism that God only helps those who help themselves, but He does appear as a relational God who delights to work in and through the prayers and deeds of man. When Little Boy first goes to Fr. Oliver, the priest asks him to replicate a magic trick that Little Boy performed as a volunteer at a magician’s show, where he seemingly moved a bottle across a table by sheer force of will. Little Boy tries to do it on Fr. Oliver’s desk, but try as he might, he can’t move the bottle. On his third try, Fr. Oliver leans forward and slides the bottle across the table. “But I didn’t actually move it,” Little Boy protests. “No,” Fr. Oliver replies, “but you moved me to move it.”

“What is faith?” asks Monteverde. “It’s the power to do something to God. As Fr. Oliver explains to (Little Boy), ‘Remember, He’s the mover,’ and then he says ‘only if it’s God’s will, will he bring your father back.’ Little Boy says ‘Why would God not want to bring my father back.’ And Fr. Oliver responds very honestly, ‘I don’t know that.’ It’s a mystery. It’s always His will. He’s the mover.”

In perhaps the most theological poignant moment of the film, Hashimoto asks Fr. Oliver the great unsaid question haunting the story: “What if his father dies, what’s going to happen?” Fr. Oliver responds simply: “In that case, God will help him through it.”

“This is a big theme, because if you have faith it doesn’t mean everything’s going to go great. That’s not faith,” says Monteverde. “I don’t want to put faith in a box, but having a relationship with God is not that everything’s going to be great, it is when things are not going great, you’re not alone.”

It sounds cliché, but the story gives it substance, making Little Boy something of a parable. It shows us how children, though naïve, are capable of a reckless bravery on behalf of what they believe in, counting everything else as nothing. Little Boy’s childlike faith grows from a “cosmic vending machine” mentality – literally checking off a list of good deeds to get something from God – to a courageous labor of love that takes risks out of a deep and desperate affection for his father.

“Little Boy knew he was going to become the clown of the town,” says Monteverde. “He was going to do whatever it took to bring his father back. And if that was to put himself on the line, he wasn’t going to care because he believed. He believed.”

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