Doug
Olear

I was raised Catholic — my mother's faith, practised with real devotion — and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood, surrounded by friends whose rituals and relationship with God were entirely different from my own. And yet when you stripped it back, we wanted the same things. Kindness. Meaning. Answers. Every civilization in human history has looked at the sky and reached for something beyond themselves — and yet each tradition, so certain of its own truth, so often dismisses the stories of others that could be called equally miraculous, equally beautiful.

That paradox lives in me. I am deeply spiritual and deeply practical — I have sat with science and I have sat with mystery, and I am not sure the two are as far apart as we pretend. What I am certain of is that religion has given the world its greatest acts of compassion, and has been weaponised to justify its worst. Knowledge, I believe, is the only honest response to that danger.

I want Before the Gods to work the way David McCullough's books work — the way John Adams and Truman made me realise that history is only boring when it's told badly. I want it to be a film a child can follow and an adult cannot stop thinking about. I want the audience transported — not lectured.

I trained as an actor at the Stella Adler Conservatory in New York City. Our class was the United Nations — Iranian, Israeli, Moroccan, Icelandic, Italian, Indian, German, Filipino, Australian. Later, as a cast member on The Wire — widely considered the greatest television drama of the 21st century, and a predominantly African-American ensemble — I learned the same lesson again. No matter what was happening in the world outside, no matter what colour you were, no matter what god you prayed to — we never lost our love or our dignity for each other. That classroom, that set, that experience — that is the reason I believe this film is possible. And necessary.