How Bonhoeffer Film Director Battled His Own Darkness: Todd Komarnicki

Todd Komarnicki:
They call me on a Friday and they say, “We have the money. On Monday, we’re making an offer to a director unless you say finally that you’re going to do it, otherwise we got to go find somebody.” So, I didn’t say yes. I said, “I need to take the weekend to pray with my wife.” And then on Monday morning, while we were walking back from school dropping off our son, my wife told me that we were moving to Europe to make Bonhoeffer.

Gary Schneeberger:
You just heard our guest this week, Hollywood writer, producer, and director Todd Komarnicki describe how he came to bring the film Bonhoeffer to the screen last year. His true story of the German pastor and theologian who came to call his nation’s churches to stand up to the barbarism of Adolf Hitler is a profound look at the power of faith to change a life. And so is Komarnicki’s personal story, which we also discuss here of how rediscovering his own faith saved him from a darkness he almost didn’t escape from.

Warwick Fairfax:
So Todd, it’s wonderful to have you here. We actually met at a Taylor University event the last few months where you were speaking and highlighting your new movie Bonhoeffer, and we’re also were introduced by Michael Lindsay, the President of Taylor. All my kids went there. It’s a great Christian university. So, just for folks that may want to know a little bit more about Todd, Todd is a prolific writer, producer, a director of film and television, as well as an acclaimed novelist. So, you’ll remember some of Todd’s movies. He wrote the screenplay for Sully, which did exceptionally well with 2016 AFI Top 10 Film, grossed over $240 million. He also did Perfect Stranger, The Professor and the Madman, Resistance, and perennial Christmas favorite Elf, which did fabulously well. Grossed over $220 million. My family and I have watched Elf so many times. There’s occasionally somebody might’ve said, “Do we have to watch Elf again? It’s a great movie, but we’ve watched it so many times.”

Todd Komarnicki:
I’m really sorry about that.

Warwick Fairfax:
That’s how many times.

Todd Komarnicki:
It has penetrated the culture at the saturation point. It’s crazy.

Warwick Fairfax:
It’s a great movie. And so, Todd’s production company Guy Walks Into a Bar, which fabulous name, have earned over half a billion dollars. So, Todd is a very proficient at his craft and has done extremely well.

Gary Schneeberger:
Hey, can I jump in, Warwick, right here?

Warwick Fairfax:
Please.

Gary Schneeberger:
This, Todd, is a first for this show, more than 250 episodes in. You’re the first guest we’ve ever interviewed who I’ve written a book and you’re in it. That movie that Warwick talked about, Perfect Stranger, here it is right here. In the films of Bruce Willis, there it is, and your name is right at the top as the writer of Perfect Stranger.

Todd Komarnicki:
That’s crazy.

Gary Schneeberger:
So, there we are. All worlds collide.

Todd Komarnicki:
I feel like opening a high school yearbook and showing that you were voted most likely to write a book about Bruce Willis.

Gary Schneeberger:
That could have been true. That could have been true.

Warwick Fairfax:
So, we want to get to chatting about Bonhoeffer, but we’d like to hear just a bit of the backstory, Todd, just growing up and were there any keys to your interest in writing and filmmaking growing up? So, what was life like for young Todd growing up?

Todd Komarnicki:
Well, I was incredibly blessed. I won the parent lottery and I was raised in a home that was deeply rooted in faith but was also deeply rooted in the arts. So, my mother was a professional singer and my father, although he felt like he didn’t have overt artistic ability, was really kind of a working poet. He was always writing long letters to my mom and my sisters and I, sometimes 17, 18, 19 pages long when he’d be away on business, and they would often include what could only be described as sections of pure poetry. And he was an avid reader, as was my mother. So, Sinatra was always playing, Tchaikovsky was always playing, Mahler was always playing. My mom was on the piano. Both my sisters sang. I was involved in musical theater from the time I was five all the way up into college and acting, and also pursuing a life of sports. I was blessed to be able to walk both sides of those train tracks.
So, it was an amazing childhood. I just got asked by my daughter who’s 15 and she’s doing a legacy project for her sophomore end of year project. And so, she interviewed me yesterday and one of the things that she asked me was, “What is the happiest holiday memory of your life?” And this is within the context of the Crucible that you were talking about. Within this incredibly happy childhood, there was also this year, it lasted about two years, where through the collapse of the company my dad was working for, through fraud, nothing to do with my dad, we went from being upper middle class to having nothing.
And it happened very suddenly. I was nine years old, and I know later when I talked to my dad about it, what he was going through at the age of 46, certain that he’d been part of something that he wouldn’t recover from, and he would go for long runs and want to just run out of his own skin because he didn’t know how to fix what happened or how to look after his wife and three kids with this sudden terrible turn of events. But ironically, and I’m a firm believer of flowers grow in manure or another word, but really, all the beauty comes from the hard stuff. Remarkably, that Christmas is my favorite holiday memory. And if I want to have a joyous trip back into the past, I just think about that Christmas. And in that Christmas, we had no ornaments because everything was in storage from our previous house.
We were in a tiny rental house in New Jersey and we made our own ornaments, and everybody in the family got one gift. And I remember my gift, it was a large soup or coffee mug, maybe 20 ounces, with all the NFL team emblems around the cup. I kept it until my forties, until it completely fell apart. And the joy in that house while we were making those ornaments, we were given a puppy that Christmas from the litter of my aunt and uncle, little Shadow running around in this rental house. And so, I know what my dad was feeling. He was feeling hollowed out. He was feeling confused and injured. But whatever my parents did, however they portrayed what was happening, it felt like the most magical adventure in this new unusual house with hardly any furniture ,and a little backyard where I could play Wiffle ball, and we’d make our own ornaments and the family was so close, and the dog sitting up on the top of the couch waiting for us to come home through this picture window, all joy.
And that was right in the middle of one of the worst things that ever happened to my dad. So, I think about that a lot now in raising children and trying to help them understand not only is difficulty excellent, but it’s not to be run from, it’s to be investigated. It’s to be understood while it’s happening, even when it’s not understandable at all, that we need to sit with it. We need to look at scripture where again and again, the rhythm of the Psalms are, the hard Psalms are where are you? I can’t find you, have you forgotten me? And at the end, I know you love me and you love me forever. So, I honestly believe that so much of human suffering and spiritual anguish and mental anguish comes from trying to flee difficulty. And when you can’t get away from it, you add to the difficulty by experiencing the pain of feeling trapped, and there’s this great freedom in just sitting in the difficulty.

Warwick Fairfax:
Boy, that is an incredible story and as I listen, and I’m sure you’ve probably thought of this, as you described that moment when you’re a kid, little did you know that amongst other things, you were born to make a movie about Dietrich Bonhoeffer because you’re quoting his philosophy in a sense, which we’ll get to. But it’s like you had a perspective in that Christmas when you went from having a lot to having so much less and you had this attitude, well, I don’t know about them, but attitude is not running from difficulties, but just maybe running towards them. That’s straight Bonhoeffer as we’ll get to.
But, so just talk about that Christmas. Why do you think it was so special and there was so much joy amidst, and I’m sure your dad was just feeling like, how could I have not seen this? What could I have done? Why was I here? This is unfair. He probably went through a sea of emotions. But for you, why was there so much joy? Why was that Christmas so special?

Todd Komarnicki:
I think because my parents made it an adventure, and I don’t know what they were sharing with my oldest sister who was five years older, but to a nine-year-old boy, I didn’t need to be sat down and explained like, “Here’s what fraud is and here’s what this particular individual lied to your dad about, and now we’re out of luck.” So, it wasn’t so much about explaining as it was this notion of adventure. And there’s a great book called The Adventure of Living by Paul Tournier, it was one of my dad’s favorite books. And it’s just about moving through the world with your sense of wonder, wide open. What’s next? What could it be? Could be anything. I always have said that the worst thing or the most difficult thing about life is we never know what’s going to happen next. And the best thing about life is that we never know what’s going to happen next.
And my parents just created an atmosphere in which that was okay. Whatever was next, whatever… I was a new kid in a school five consecutive years because we moved so much. And so, maybe that’s crucible that turned me into a writer because I had to figure out all the characters and how to navigate and how to hang onto who I was while having to re-explain every time who I was. But, yes, I would give the credit to my parents and obviously the Holy Spirit, that within their suffering and whatever their last conversation was in bed every night, whatever level of worry or disappointment or sorrow that they were feeling, they did not pass that on to their children.

Warwick Fairfax:
So, how do you… So, it sounds like you had this sense of wonder. How did you get into writing screenplays and making movies, and how did that journey kind of evolve?

Todd Komarnicki:
Well, this is for people who have listened to me before on podcasts, this is the one metaphor I always have to repeat. I try really hard to never tell the same story twice. It’s tricky. You don’t want to wind up sounding like a talk show guest. But this is just a fact of my life. So, the metaphor is, a mother dog taking a wandering puppy who’s gone astray by the scruff of the neck and returning them to where they’re supposed to belong. That’s my whole life. And so, me becoming a writer, never thought about it. Me winding up directing Bonhoeffer, said no to it. On and on and on. If you want to see what my life has been made out of, it’s been me drifting away, not drifting away from God, but just like, “Oh, I guess I’m supposed to be over here.” And then God, as mother dog saying, “No sweetheart, here.”
And that’s why the skin at the back of the neck is so loose on a dog because it doesn’t hurt to be carried. It’s there because God knows the puppy will go astray. And so, it’s loose skin so the mother can take because it has no hands. It’s a genius creation how God did that. So, I’m still at 59 sniffing around in the wrong gardens all the time. And then, oh, and now I notice in mid-carry, okay, all right, we’re going back over here. Okay, fine. I look forward to where you’re putting me. And that’s been the story of my whole career. Becoming a screenwriter, becoming a producer, becoming a storyteller has really just been God’s plan, an inescapable plan. I’ll tell you another story that involves my dad. One of the things that’s deeply frustrating about Hollywood and even more so now is that so little of what they purchase or hire becomes an actual movie.
So, I’ve got a giant script graveyard of movies that I’ve sold that have never gotten made. I’ve written 23 television pilots for the networks and had one show made. So, that’s 22 hired scripts, all the characters, all the work that will never see the light of day. So, at a certain point, I think it was 2007, I sort of had it and I also felt like, okay, Lord, you’re sustaining me financially in this life, but it’s very unsatisfying and nothing’s coming out, and I feel like I’m farming and I can’t bring anything to market. So, I feel like I’m ready for a change. I feel like I should do something else with my life. Not completely leave the business, but I was ready to set my pen down. And I spent a couple of days in London with my dad playing the violin, and he listened, and then at the end of our time together, he said, “Okay, I have an answer for you and you’re not going to like it.”
“Okay. What is it?” He said, “The only way that you’re going to get through this desire to no longer write is to write.” He said, “I’ve known you your whole life and I know this to be true. You are a writer. It’s how you see the world, it’s how you move through the world. It’s who you are. So, you may not want to do that today, but down the road, you’re going to find yourself writing your way out of this.” And I said, “You’re right. I don’t like your answer and you’re wrong because this time, dad, you’ve been wise for a long time, this time, big swing and a miss.” And three weeks later, I had to call him humbly and say, “You were 100% correct.”
And in fact, as a gift that God provided in addition, for the first time, and I mean this to be true, for the first time, I began to enjoy writing. The long bulk of my career I had loved having written, but I hated writing. Writing was so hard and just grinding, and the result or the finishing was deeply satisfying. That’s what motivated me further. But from the point that my dad re-guided me, I have loved writing and I love it. I love writing scenes, crafting stories, even if no one sees it. I have this beautiful relationship with the Holy Spirit and the blank page and the open hours, and it’s delicious.

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, one of the things we find at Beyond the Crucible, we’ve had so many guests that say, “What I went through was a blessing.” And these, we’ve had so many stories. I think of Stacey Kopas, who, Australian woman in her teen years became diagnosed as a quadriplegic diving into an above ground pool. She of course was angry at herself, suicidal ideation, how could I have been so dumb? But as the years went by and she speaks and coaches, she said she’s thankful for what she went through, almost as a blessing. I’ve had several guests, more than one have said this and we’ve coined a phrase, and Gary and I say it fairly often, that the crucible didn’t happen to you, it happened for you.
If you learn the lessons, there is beauty. I mean, none of us are advocating crucibles. We don’t, I don’t want to diminish the pain. We’ve had some people with some graphic crucibles, but it can transform you into something better if you let them. I think that’s what you are talking about. It reminds me of something else you said when you spoke at Taylor. You said something about 95% of scripts are turned down, and I forget the exact phrase, but of something like the blessed no or the blessing of no.

Todd Komarnicki:
Oh yeah, yeah. This is [inaudible 00:18:28].

Warwick Fairfax:
That just blew me away because I think it’s in the same vein I’m talking about.

Todd Komarnicki:
The phrase God gave me about five years ago is vitamin no.

Warwick Fairfax:
Right. That was it.

Todd Komarnicki:
And I’m a big fan. I used to take no as frustration or disappointment or delay or confusion. And no is just beautiful. No is so beautiful. And if every time you hear no, you take it as a vitamin and you know you’re getting stronger, that by the time yes comes, you now have the capacity to live out that yes. And so, I’m a big fan of vitamin no. And also, just to talk to young people because in the beginning, if you’re dreaming of being in the movie business, even just getting the first toenail across the line is wrapped in 10,000 nos from everybody back home. Why would you do that crazy thing? Why would you pursue that dream? Get a real job. And then, all the people that are standing guard in front of the invisible kingdom that don’t want you in either, it’s pretty much exclusively no for a number of years. So, if you can receive that as, “Oh my goodness, this is fantastic. Rain on me. Water my crops with all these no’s.” It’s transformative.

Warwick Fairfax:
Let’s talk about your faith journey. I think you were raised maybe in a Christian home? There’s a challenging period, maybe your refining period and you came back to faith, and just talk about maybe the arc of your faith journey because I have a feeling it informs everything you do and everything you are. You can’t understand who you are, Todd, without understanding your faith journey and that arc.

Todd Komarnicki:
100%. Yeah. I mean, I think we all know the word rescue. It’s why we can share a kindred spirit among ourselves. But 100%. I’m only alive, I am only anything because of the saving grace of Jesus Christ. There is no me here without it, and there is no way I can live my life without that being engine, oxygen, blood, thought, word, deed. Jesus is king. And the way I found that out was by rejecting him. I had grown up in a Christian home, loving home like I said. I got to college. Didn’t take very long before my faith was in tatters because I didn’t have a real faith. I had a performative faith. I knew where all the books in the Bible were. I knew how to get a pat on the back at Bible camp. I knew that I could sing the hymns without looking at the pages, but I didn’t know Jesus. And so, when college offered some other viewpoints, there was no scaffolding to hold my building up.
Now, again, we talk about this notion of the necessity of difficulty in the crucible. So, this rejection of God that I actively pursued and vocally pursued, God bless some sweet, sweet kids at Wheaton who had to suffer under my Nietzschean certainty of meaninglessness of life on long bus rides with the baseball team. And I was evangelistic about the fact that there was no God. So, it’s extraordinary. I’ll tell you a story about one of my teammates in a minute that encapsulates how God never walks away from us even when we’re in the pitch dark.
But that pursuit of darkness was vital to me to understand that when you go deeper and deeper into the dark, there’s no answer on the other side of it. It just gets darker, and it gets so dark that all you want to do is have an end. And when you think it has no meaning, you’re encouraged to want to end it. So, it’s a miracle I’m here. That’s why this baseline of childlike joy is kind of my signature. When I meet new people, or even my dad, he thought I was kidding. He was like, “You can’t actually be that happy. You can’t actually be that upbeat about everything.” But when you kiss death in the mouth and you walk away… So he… There was a rooftop.
And this is a real thing. This is not a metaphor. There was a rooftop of my dorm building. I lived on the sixth floor and it was a seven-floor building and the eighth floor was the roof. And I would go out and stand at night on the edge of the roof and close my eyes and put my arms out so I could just fall. So many nights. And years later, maybe I was 25 or 26, I started to feel a small kind of fist-like pressure against the middle of my back, sort of where a belt would go around a pair of pants, just sort of this pressure like this. And I felt it for, I don’t know, it wasn’t an injury, it was like being, like someone was pressing me from behind. And finally God said to me, “That was me holding you by the belt so you wouldn’t fall.”

Gary Schneeberger:
When you and I talked before the show, you described the way that God brought you back, back when you were still a few years younger. One of the things I tell people who are also writers, “The best compliment I can pay to you is I don’t like you very much.” And the reason why is, all the words that you use, I know the meanings of, but I just don’t think to string them together the way that you have done. So, the phrase that you used to describe how God brought you back, you used two phrases. One you said was an act of rough mercy or an act of violent grace. That’s how God got you back when you were in the darkness. That’s true for your life, but that’s true pretty much for the crucibles we face too in general, isn’t it?

Todd Komarnicki:
No, absolutely. This goes back to what we were talking about before. We’re taught to flee difficulty.

Gary Schneeberger:
Right.

Todd Komarnicki:
And this reminds me of the great poem, the Hound of Heaven. The guy is running the whole time and feeling like he’s going to be devoured, and when he finally turns around, he sees it was God chasing him the whole time just to say, “I love you.” So, I think he allows, I don’t think God said to 19-year-old me, “Fall apart.” I think he allowed me to go to the far edges of myself and to nearly disappear, but he never left me.

Warwick Fairfax:
So, Todd, talk a bit about how you bounce back because that’s, I sort of sense maybe some different undertones in your story that maybe before you didn’t need God, but afterwards, you did. Maybe there was a change in that.

Todd Komarnicki:
I think I was just a cocky kid. Things were facile for me. Sports, academics, I was quick-witted. I didn’t have a sense of grace or compassion. I didn’t see the world as anything except something for me to be entertained by or to entertain. I didn’t see need. But when you suddenly find out that you’re still here and it’s come through personal pain, that’s all you see. You see in everybody, you see Christ in them and you see what they’re going through, they’re suffering, and you want to do something about it. You want to let them know that there’s a God who loves them.

Warwick Fairfax:
So, were there any keys to you bouncing back because you’re a new man now. How did you get out of that Nietzschean black hole? I mean, that’s a black hole that many never escape from and they spend their lives in bitterness and anger and darkness.

Todd Komarnicki:
So, my sophomore year for our spring baseball trip, our assistant coach on that team was a military man. Retired military, but had been military. And so, when we went down for the southern swing in Pensacola, we stayed on an army base. And I’d been doing this standing on the building thing, I’d been walking down to the train tracks and standing next to the speeding trains with the same inability to take that last inch step to ensure that I was gone. But when we arrived at this army base, I knew that I had everything I needed because there were nothing but guns. There were guns everywhere, and not secured. Just walls of guns. It was crazy.
And so, when we arrived that night, I knew this was it. So, I was sitting in my room with my best friend, Steve Nagel. I always call him Jesus with a crew cut. He had a great crew cut back in the day. And at about 2:00 in the morning, I wrote my suicide note to my parents. And he stirred and he said, “What are you doing?” And so, I read it to him. And I said, “I’m going to do it tonight.” And he said, “You’re going to have to get through me first.” So I thought, all right, I’ll wait him out. He’ll fall asleep. It’s the middle of the night. And later, I found myself having fallen asleep. I woke up and it was maybe 6:00 in the morning.
I looked over and his bed was empty. And then, I looked to the right and he was asleep, but he was asleep up against the door, his back against the door and his legs in front of him so that I couldn’t get past him. So, that was the first thing. I went back to Wheaton after the trip and I called my parents and I, and this is the greatest act of parenting I think I’ve ever seen in my life. I read them the note, I read them my suicide note because I knew I had to do it. I couldn’t live anymore.
And their reaction, in the same way that Steve had saved my life on the night in Florida, their reaction to their son reading this letter to them saved my life, long enough for me to start to hear God. They were so calm. They didn’t say, “We’re coming to get you.” They didn’t say, “Go to a hospital.” They just poured love on me. Poured it. And they said, “We don’t know when or how, but it’s going to get better. And it might not be a lightning bolt. God might not sit on the edge of your bed and tell you it’s all okay, but it already is all okay. He has you. We love you.”
And I remember, I was experiencing such mania. You sort of can’t sleep and you just feel completely crazy. And I remember pouring all that static into the phone and receiving back all this grace. And then, it really physically tamped down this panic that I had. Wow. And then I started thinking, you can’t do that. You can’t do this to those people. You can’t. So, that kept me around long enough to one day I came home to my apartment, and I knew that when I chucked my faith, I had a living bible that I’d grown up with and that I had with me.
And when I chucked my faith, I had been super angry and had actually stood over a waste paper basket with the living Bible. So angry that it was so filled with lies. And you know those green metal sort of industrial trash cans that are in schools? So, I’m standing over one of those with the living Bible, and I’m unable to throw it away. I was like, can you throw a Bible away? Is it going to burst into flames? Literally, I couldn’t put it in the bin. So, I took it and I hid it behind all my other books on the bookshelf.
So, on this particular night, I came home and I knew it was back there sort of humming. And I reached back and I grabbed it and I sat on the edge of my bed and I held the Bible and I said to the God I didn’t believe in, hilariously, “If I open this,” this was my bargain. “If I open this, it better be true.” Or else what? I mean, it’s just so funny. And guess what? I opened it and it was true. It was true.

Warwick Fairfax:
Very well said. Well, I want talk about Bonhoeffer, and I’ve read Eric Metaxas’ book on Bonhoeffer and it was just blown away. I loved your movie and it was great telling that story. Clearly, this is a challenge to tell a story as epic, and at least in some circles, it’s well known. And so, from what I understand, and you mentioned this at Taylor, this was a movie you didn’t want to make and did everything you could possible almost not to make it. It’s like, no, not happening. So, talk about how God leading you by, to use your analogy, the scruff of your neck. It’s like you were trying to run the other way and God’s like, “No, Todd.” So, talk about why you didn’t want to make it and how you ended up making a movie you didn’t want to make?

Todd Komarnicki:
Well, I mean it’s just the great old line, how do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans. It’s exactly that. I got a call, I got sent a script to rewrite, to do a production polish on a movie that was financed and ready to go with the director, about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And I read the script and it was a redo, a start over. It wasn’t a polish. And in fact, Bonhoeffer himself was the second lead character in the story of his life. And the lead character was a completely invented non-historical character. On top of that, there were seven other major characters that were not historical, that were made up. And so, I said no.
And I said, “If you guys go make this movie, you’re going to lose $10 million because he had a spectacular life and he deserves a good movie. And also, he deserves a movie told from his perspective. He left behind so much work that said how he saw the world. You don’t need to tell it from God’s eye, you tell it from his perspective.” And the producer who had sent me the script said, “Can I… would you come say that to the financiers?” And I said no. And I said, “I told you, you tell them.” And then he, I’ve told this joke before, it’s not a joke, it’s just true. But it is funny. He said the two words that, apparently if you say these two words back to back, they’re my kryptonite. And the words were sushi lunch.

Gary Schneeberger:
That’s so very LA of you. That’s so very LA.

Todd Komarnicki:
Well, this was New York. This was all happening in New York.

Gary Schneeberger:
I know, I know. That was my LA experience though.

Todd Komarnicki:
But I’m a sucker for sushi, but I never had it for lunch. I was like, this is outrageous. They have sushi for lunch? These are fancy people. I’ll go meet with them. So, I eat my sushi and I tell them exactly what I said on the phone and they said, “Great, we’ll start over. We want you to do it.” And I said, “No, I’m too busy and I don’t do independent films. I only do studio movies.” So, it’s not… Financially, it’s such a massive lift. I mean, it’s months and months of reading all his books and I have a family to raise and I have a life in New York and I can’t do an independent film. I’m not a kid. And Mono Campores, the lead financier said to me, “Go home, talk to your wife, pick a number, send it to me and I’ll pay it.”

Warwick Fairfax:
Wow.

Todd Komarnicki:
So, I wasn’t a jerk. I didn’t ask for $2 million in unmarked bills left by a post box. But I gave him a number that was going to show that he needed to really be understand what he was doing, that he was being part of something that was serious and studio-esque. And he said yes immediately. Then I wrote the movie and they had $10 million in the bank to make it, and the budget of this movie I wrote was 22. So, they said, “We’re going to go raise the rest of this money. Would you come on to produce with us, because you obviously know how to produce and we’ve never produced anything.”
And I said, “Well, I’ll help you, I’ll guide you, but I’m not a money raiser. I’m not going to help you find money. It’s not what I do.” And then of course, I was on fundraising calls because I said no. And then, six months into that process, they said, “Well, we have all the money raised. We’ve decided that we don’t want anyone else to direct it but you. You know it the best and we’ve come to love you.” And I said no.

Gary Schneeberger:
Can I stop you just for a second and say-

Todd Komarnicki:
Sure.

Gary Schneeberger:
… because earlier you said you have a pile of scripts that are all stamped with no, right? It was like 1 out of 24. You’ve gotten a lot of no. Hollywood, I worked there for three years in the film industry. No’s come like a whirlwind. This was your chance. I mean, you were saying no to Hollywood. How did that feel to have those roles reversed?

Todd Komarnicki:
It wasn’t no to Hollywood. And I do say no a lot. I mean, there’s projects come on the regular that I say no to. So, it wasn’t new to say no, but these folks were not movie people. They were just people who loved Bonhoeffer and had money, and they were committed. They were certain. They were like, “It’s you and we’re going to just pursue you.” So, I didn’t feel an emotion about saying no. I felt certain that the answer was no. I felt [inaudible 00:39:53]. I thought I was right. And then, another six months go by, they raise the rest of the money. They call me on a Friday and they say, “We have the money. On Monday, we’re making an offer to a director unless you say finally that you’re going to do it, otherwise we got to go find somebody.”
So, I didn’t say yes. I said, “I need to take the weekend to pray with my wife.” And then on Monday morning, while we were walking back from school dropping off our son, my wife told me that we were moving to Europe to make Bonhoeffer. She told me. So, I never said yes. She just said, “Yeah, we’re getting a house, it’s going to be great. We’ll be in the countryside outside of Brussels and we’re going.” And I didn’t say yes to directing Bonhoeffer until the 10th day of shooting where we were in a cathedral in Belgium and I’m surrounded by 200 crew members taking stuff here and there, we’re setting up the shot. And I said, “Okay, okay, God, I accept. I will… Jonah in the belly of the whale. Okay, I get it. This is where you wanted me.” And I’m hoping that he had a good old chuckle at my terrible timing.

Warwick Fairfax:
Boy, the power of no. And it’s like, well, you can say no to God. It’s like, I hear what you’re saying, Todd, but you’re doing it anyway. It’s like, what don’t you get?

Todd Komarnicki:
That’s the mother dog. It’s the mother dog. It’s so loving and so compassionate because he gave me this beautiful thing to do. It’s not like I was asked to become a coal miner and suffer in the… I got to direct a movie. I got to have this amazing thing. But he wasn’t interested in my answer. He was interested in me, and his answer was the better answer.

Warwick Fairfax:
So, let’s talk a bit about this movie. Not everybody may know the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and I think of it as a little bit like a movie about Lincoln. It’s like, but don’t give it away, well, I’m sorry, but Lincoln does get assassinated in 1865. So, this historical figure. So, talk a bit about just the overall arc of the story, and then I have a few particular scenes I want to ask you about. But just talk, for those who don’t know anything about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, why is he such an incredible person that we need to know a lot more about than we do know?

Todd Komarnicki:
Yes. He was a singular and clarion voice against evil at a time when the rest of the German church completely acquiesced to Hitler. The thing that’s front and center in this movie that is not a part of what we’re taught in American history because it doesn’t involve America and the war yet, is that the first thing Hitler did in ’33 when he took power, he only had 33% of the Politburo. He was just chancellor. He did not have the power that he wanted, and so he went after the church. And in that time, it was different from what we call the American church. There’s no real American church. And in Germany, it was like a monolithic, the Catholic Church and the Protestant church, and it was equally as powerful as the government, if not more so. And Hitler just went in there, and now you have to remember, this is not Hitler with concentration camps yet.
He’s not espousing that yet. But he’s definitely othering the Jews, making them into the villains. And he gets both the Catholic Church and the Protestant church to essentially kiss the ring. And as I say in the movie, exchange full pews for full hearts. And it’s part of a rising nationalism that happens in Germany and is fueled aggressively by the church. And here’s Dietrich, 27 years old, back from Harlem where he really met Jesus for the first time in the Abyssinian Baptist Church in his time at Union Seminary in New York. He’s watching aghast as Hitler is proclaiming himself the head of the church, and no one else will say anything. He gives a very famous sermon at Kaiser Wilhelm. The Nazis walk out on him. He essentially paints a target on his chest that never leaves his chest for the next 12 years because he made a decision that Jesus is a man for others and the Jews are being othered,, and the people on the margins are being othered and the church should be fighting for them first, not last.
And the church should not be giving power to a man. It should be giving all power, glory and honor to a loving God. And there were some people that gathered around him in the resistance. They formed what’s called the Confessing Church, and many of them did not survive the war. And he went on this journey where he went from being a pacifist to finally coming to believe that he needed to throw his hat in with an assassination attempt. And he still, he said, in German and in the German translation of the movie is clearer. In the English in the movie I have, his best friend asks, “Will God forgive us if we do this, the assassination?” And Dietrich says, “Will he forgive us if we don’t?” And actually in the German, it’s better. And in the German essentially it said, “We will need to be forgiven if we do this, but we will also need to be forgiven if we don’t.”

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, it’s such a great story. I mean, you highlight so many of the good moments. Obviously, early on in the movie, Bonhoeffer, Dietrich loses his beloved older brother Walter in the first World War in 1918, which is awful. But yeah, you highlight well just the impact that this Abyssinian Baptist church, African-American church, and they sort of ask him, “Have you met the Lord?” And the personal faith is just, he doesn’t quite, he understands theology but not, he just doesn’t have a frame of reference for that.

Todd Komarnicki:
And he was a pastor. He was actually pastoring and preaching, but the bulk of theologians at that time, they didn’t go to church. It was not relational at all. It was all academic. So, that’s why he was so blindsided by the question, “Where were you when you met the Lord?” And he actually said, “What do you mean met the Lord?” I write about the Lord. I think I know something about the Lord, but he hadn’t met him. And then, he met him in Harlem.

Warwick Fairfax:
And there’s another wonderful scene where Bonhoeffer is with a buddy of his, I want to say, is it Frank Fisher? And they’re on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s a great scene. It’s at night and he says, “Gosh, there’s so much hate and racism and it’s just awful.” And he says, “Gosh, it’s so fortunate that kind of hate doesn’t exist-

Todd Komarnicki:
In Germany.

Warwick Fairfax:
… in Germany.” And Frank says, “Well…” Kind of hate’s everywhere. I Forget the exact words.

Todd Komarnicki:
Hate comes in every color. Your eyes just haven’t been open yet.

Warwick Fairfax:
Exactly, exactly. It’s so well said. And then it goes back to Germany and you point out the rise of Hitler, and people didn’t really believe, people of education and intellect, what have you, didn’t believe that he would ultimately succeed long term. But, yeah, I mean, something switched in Bonhoeffer, just as you said, speaking in front of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church and the Nazi offices, and he knew exactly what he was doing. And we, the German church are giving their hearts to another. The German church must stand on God’s word alone. And at the time, his mentor, I guess Martin Niemöller is kind of like, the pews are filling. He has an epiphany later, but not at the time. And there was some older pastor that’s kind of secretly praising him. He goes off to the US, back to US and the UK and just raises awareness of Hitler. And then, he goes off to this retreat, I think it’s on, there’s a Baltic coast. It’s northern Germany somewhere.

Todd Komarnicki:
Yes, exactly.

Warwick Fairfax:
On the coast. And I remember reading about it in the book by Eric Metaxas. And so, he meets Martin Niemöller there again, who admits he’s wrong. He didn’t see it. And, yeah, he talks about the Nazi Bible, which is just horrific, saying that Jesus is airing the now 12 commandments, one of which is-

Todd Komarnicki:
It’s a real thing. It’s a really [inaudible 00:48:59].

Warwick Fairfax:
… Honor your furor and keep the blood pure? I mean, it’s like… One of the great points in the movie, there are so many good points, it’s when Martin Niemöller gives a sermon in church. Is it the same church, the Kaiser Wilhelm Church?

Todd Komarnicki:
No, it’s Dalin. It’s where he was the pastor in Berlin.

Warwick Fairfax:
Okay. And he just gives one of the great sermons probably of the time. He says that when the Nazis came for the socialists, he did not speak up because he wasn’t a socialist. When they came for the trade unions, he didn’t speak up because he was not a unionist. When they came for the Jews, he didn’t speak up soon enough because he wasn’t a Jew. So, when they come to my door, will there be anyone left to speak out for me? I mean, that is just, both of these men had huge courage. There’s another amazing moment when Bonhoeffer, he is back in New York, he’s talking to this pastor, African-American pastor, the Abyssinian Baptist, and he says, “Will you follow him all the way to the cross?” And Bonhoeffer says he’s running towards, not running away from the cross. And it’s incredibly moving moment because he could have stayed in safety in the US or in Britain. But he knows, going back to Germany at this point, is certain death. I mean, he’s accused [inaudible 00:50:33].

Todd Komarnicki:
It’s the return to Jerusalem, really.

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah.

Todd Komarnicki:
I mean, if you want to connect it to the Christ story, absolutely he could have stayed and lived a long life and preached and written, and there’s no question about it. But he went back to Jerusalem. He went back where he felt called to be.

Warwick Fairfax:
And that’s, and there’s a, towards the end of his life, he died, gosh, a few weeks, a couple of weeks before the Allies rescued Bonhoeffer’s fellow prisoners and maybe three weeks or so before Hitler committed suicide and the war was over. But in the movie, he is in this, in a small building with some other prisoners, and the guard there basically gives him a way out. It’s like…

Todd Komarnicki:
Which is 100% true. He was offered escape. The guard that oversaw him in Tegel prison, watched him for a period of weeks and months, interact with family visitors, talk to other prisoners, and became completely enamored with the quality of the soul of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and risked his own life to offer escape for Dietrich. And Dietrich said no. There was another no.

Warwick Fairfax:
And not only that, which is incredible, that they had communion shortly before Bonhoeffer died. And he invited this guy in and his fellow prisoners are saying, “This is a German. These are Nazi soldiers.” And he said, “Well, communion is for everybody.” I mean, that is the gospel. It’s for sinners, it’s for everybody. It’s not just an us against them. It’s we. We all are sinners. I mean, talk about faith and action. And as he dies, he really, just before he dies, he talks about, from the Sermon on the Mount, he says, “Blessed are those that mourn for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure and heart for they shall receive Go.” He’s smiling as he is metaphorically going to the cross. I mean, that is faith.

Gary Schneeberger:
There’s no shortage of crucible experiences that Dietrich Bonhoeffer goes through in the film, not the least of which is the persecution by the Nazis. But is there one particular, either one crucible or several crucibles or a kind of crucible that can be helpful to us as we go through our own difficult experiences, our own crucibles, our own efforts to move from trial to triumph that Bonhoeffer walked out? Can we learn something from him that we can apply to our own lives when it comes to facing down crucibles?

Todd Komarnicki:
Yes, I would highly recommend that everybody read his poem Who Am I? And the best way to experience it is that the BBC did a beautiful Sunday program in April in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s death, where Tom Hanks reads Bonhoeffer’s poem Who Am I? And you feel, because of Tom’s skill, the full depth and layering of what Bonhoeffer’s saying about his walk through the crucible, because the question he keeps asking himself in that poem Who Am I? is, am I the person that everybody celebrates and thinks is great? Am I the person that I think I am, self-recriminating, wracked by doubts? Am I the person who wants to be in love? Am I the person that feels like I should not receive anything?
Essentially, he asks, like the Psalmists, am I human? Yes, you’re human. And the end of the poem is so beautiful. It’s simply ends, “No matter who I am, Lord, I know I am thine.” That is a great entry into the life of Bonhoeffer and to how similar he is to us because he’s not a hero with a cape. He’s a regular guy, and he had doubts and he had loneliness and he had frustration, and he traded his entire life of privilege just to speak the truth in love. It’s very relatable, this guy.
I remember my colleague who’s 31. He said before he saw the movie, he was terrified that it was going to be a movie about someone that he could never be like. And when he walked out, he said, “Oh my goodness, I can be like Dietrich.” Those are the heroes we really want. The people that have done, on paper seemingly impossible things, but when you see the actual practical application of what love looks like in courage, you feel like, I can do that.

Gary Schneeberger:
I was going to say, Warwick, we’ve covered a lot of the stuff that we said we wanted to cover. As I say all the time, it sounds, you heard folks, captain turned on the fasten seatbelt sign, indicating we’ve begun our descent to end the conversation, but we’re not there yet. Before I turn it back to you, Warwick, and give you the chance to ask Todd a couple questions more, let me point out folks, if you want to see Bonhoeffer right now, it’s available on Amazon Prime and it’s available on Apple TV. So, you can check this movie out that we’ve been talking about from the man who we’ve been talking to. You can check that out. Amazon Prime, Apple TV. Warwick, any final question or questions for Todd?

Warwick Fairfax:
So, Todd, there may be somebody here who, maybe for them, today is the black night of the soul. They may not be on the edge of a rooftop, but they may be just feeling like life is meaningless. It’s just there is no God, there is no purpose. What would a word of hope be for somebody that was where you were, at least in some sense, some word of hope that would help them take baby steps beyond that sort of dark night of the soul, if you will?

Todd Komarnicki:
The place that you’re in is a trampoline. It’s not quicksand. That you will bounce back. It may be just an inch a day. It may be sudden, six feet and you see daylight, but you will bounce back. You are not disappearing. You are becoming the more beautiful, brave, strong, pure, true human that Jesus is calling you to be.

Gary Schneeberger:
Folks, I’ve been in the communications business long enough to know when the last word on the subject’s been spoken, and our guest today, Todd Komarnicki, has indeed spoken that last word.
So, Warwick, we just got done with a very interesting, very emotional moving conversation with Todd Komarnicki, who is a Hollywood hyphenate, writer, director, producer. And he produced, and we talked about this too, the movie Bonhoeffer. So, there’s a lot of stuff to talk about. But if you could pick, well, not if you could pick, let’s pick one or two really high points that folks can look for in this episode. Good takeaways from this episode from Todd’s story and from the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer that he tells in his movie.

Warwick Fairfax:
What I love about Todd is he was so authentic and so vulnerable. We talked a lot about faith and darkness, and he really did have a couple of years or so of a dark night of the soul. He grew up in a family of faith, but I guess it really, in his words, wasn’t anchored. When he talks about times when he could have ended his life, and there were people that basically stood up for him and loved him enough, including a friend in college and his parents that showed him such love, it is incredible. And when I think about his story, he talks about something that’s very counterintuitive, and we hear that from some guests we’ve had on the podcast. It’s almost the blessing of crucibles. You don’t run away from them, you run towards them, and that as we’ll discuss, is really the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose movie he made. But just that notion that often running away from crucibles and pain just causes more pain.
But what are the lessons? What can I learn? And I think the person he is with so much great compassion and love and wisdom came of the lessons he learned from his crucible. I love how he talks about God, about being like the mother dog picking up the puppy by the scruff of its neck, and how the puppies have just more folds in their fur. And so, you might think, I want to go a different way, but from his perspective, that God Kind of takes you kind of where he wants to. And I think he was always meant to write, direct and produce a movie about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Listen to the podcast and watch it for the fuller story, but a man who grew up in Germany and was a Lutheran pastor in the ’30s as Adolf Hitler was rising to power. And really, he spoke truth to power when a lot of the Lutheran churches sold out the Hitler and it became the Reich’s church.
And ultimately, he died for his faith. It’s just his courage. This was not cheap grace. There’s a book that Bonhoeffer wrote, The Craft of Discipleship. This was really dying for his belief. So, just the message of the Bonhoeffer movie and life story is standing up for what you believe in, not running away from what you feel God’s call or some higher powers call on your life. Not running away from your crucible, but running towards it. Both Todd and Bonhoeffer, they ran towards their crucible. And we talk a lot on this podcast about the crucibles don’t happen to you, they happen for you. What are the lessons we can learn from our worst day? How can that equip us to really inspire, love and help others? And I think that’s what Todd does in his movies, and that’s what Dietrich Bonhoeffer did in his life.

Gary Schneeberger:
Before we go, Warwick and I have a couple of favors to ask you. One, if you’ve enjoyed this on your favorite podcast app, this discussion, we ask you to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. We do them every week. Same thing, if you’re watching us on YouTube, leave a comment, subscribe to the YouTube channel for Beyond the Crucible. And again, you will not miss any episodes because they come on video every week as well. So, until the next time we’re together, remember this, and if it didn’t come through in this conversation, I don’t know where it’s going to come through in any conversation. We know your crucibles are hard. We know crucible experiences can rattle your world. But we also know this. We know it’s not the end of your story. What’s happened to you didn’t really happen to you. If you dive into it, it happened for you and you can turn it around, and it can help you guide yourself down a path to a vision that will lead to the most rewarding destination you can arrive at. And that destination is a life of significance.
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