ARTS & CULTURE
will also go see ‘Spider-Man,’ he said.
Questions are crucial
One of directorWallace’s favorite scenes in “Heaven Is for Real” finds Todd Burpo and one of his church’s stalwarts, played by Martindale, gently facing off in a graveyard.
Wallace created Martindale’s character as a stand-in for some of the pastor’s actual parishioners. “She represents all the voices of the people who found themselves skeptical and resistant and even to an extent angry about his speaking of his son’s experience in Heaven,” saidWallace. “They found it was making their church a circus. Her journey and Todd’s journey all come down to one single moment in a graveyard.”
The scene is one of Martindale’s favorites, too.
“Well first of all I’m a Christian. And being a Christian you always have questions, you always go off the path,” she said, calling from Dallas. “So I could use myself in that character. And I love, love that she finds an answer in a way.”
ForWallace, the questions are crucial. But the answers are not always as elusive as we fear.
“It hit me that in some ways the heart of the story was expressed in the title and in the Lord’s Prayer,” he said. “‘On Earth as it is in Heaven.’ That the most beautiful creation, we already see everyday. We see it in the sky. We see it not just in the extraordinary moment like a rare sunset. We see it in the smile of a child, the first cry of a baby. Those things warm me. The filming became a living experience.”