FD: It is a pretty extraordinary week! And when one includes the point of view of Caiaphas, the high priest who asks for Jesus to be crucified, and the point of view of Pilate it becomes a week that is filled with intrigue and suspense and political manipulation and that is very dramatic.
It is also a tumultuous week in the Jewish calendar. At the time of the Passover festival the population of Jerusalem quadruples and pilgrims flood in from Galilee and all of Judea. So that creates a very chaotic atmosphere that is visually very vivid and strong.
But of course the real suspense is the emotional journey and what became clear to me late on in the writing is that Jesus takes his disciples through this Passion - because it's not only his Passion. In a sense it is all of their Passion. And the week becomes a crucible in which the disciples are forged to become the people they became, the people who carried forward this message, and whether they can let him go, how he helps them to let him go and he also has to find in himself the ability to let them go. Those scenes to me are moving on a human level but they are also very instructive on a spiritual level.
CT: Your portrayal of Caiaphas as the family man is quite a new one. What was your motive behind that?
FD: If one's starting point is that this is going to work as a piece of drama one has to adopt the approach that one would towards any drama, that the audience learns what it needs to know at the very points at which it needs to know it. So they have to learn what are people's motives, what are the reasons why people behave the way they do? What are their goals? Why are they the people that they are? And obviously you have to portray Caiaphas and Pilate to do that.
And the more I began to see Caiaphas from his point of view as trying to protect a theological and social order the more reasonable it seemed to me to portray his family life, that he is trying to protect the people he loves, which is a very human instinct. And it became intriguing to me as a writer and Ben Daniels as an actor to explore how one's own fears and desires to protect leads Caiaphas down this - to him - convincing road. That is one reason.
But the other reason why it became even more compelling is that he acts as a tremendous counterpoint to Jesus and he really illuminates exactly what Jesus is saying. By being a strong and sympathetic opponent to Jesus, Jesus' arguments have to work harder to come across. And that is a great dramatic situation where in a sense it is right against right, rather than a very simplistic right against wrong.
