Name: The Gospel of Us
Director: Dave McKean
Genre: Drama
Released: 2012-04-13
Duration: 115 min
Cast: Michael Sheen, Nigel Barrett, Hywel Simons, Di Botcher, David Rees Talbot

Key art made for this site, not the film’s poster. Photograph: Grubb, public domain.

Synopsis

Easter in Port Talbot. The town is in thrall to ICU, a corporation draining it of its resources with scant regard for the people who live there.

When a confrontation on the beach threatens to end in catastrophe, it is stopped by a softly spoken man who disappeared forty days earlier and has come back with no memory of who he is. He is the Teacher.

He gathers followers. There is a last supper in a seaside social club, a garden of Gethsemane on a patch of estate grass, a father who is a roofer and knows that sometimes one slate must be sacrificed to save the whole house. As the Teacher becomes a focus for the town’s resistance, ICU decides he has to be removed.

Over three days the oldest story plays out again in the streets of a Welsh steel town, with its people as the cast, the crowd and the heroes.

Directed by: Dave McKean
Written by: Owen Sheers
Starring: Michael Sheen
Running time: 115 minutes
Certificate: 12A (cinema), 12 (DVD)
Country: United Kingdom (Wales)
Language: English
World premiere: Easter Sunday, 8 April 2012, Apollo Cinema, Port Talbot
UK release: 13 April 2012
Production company: Rondo Media
UK distributor: Soda Pictures

Where it came from

The Passion of Port Talbot

Port Talbot used to stage a Passion play every year, a tradition that lasted until 1998. Michael Sheen first saw it when he was about twelve. Years later he brought it home again, as the finale of National Theatre Wales’s first season.

The Passion ran from Good Friday 22 April to Easter Sunday 24 April 2011, the finale of that first season, made by National Theatre Wales with WildWorks. Owen Sheers wrote it. Sheen co-directed it with Bill Mitchell, the founder of WildWorks and former artistic director of Kneehigh, and played the Teacher. Alongside a company of professional Welsh actors, more than a thousand local volunteers took part.

It was not a play you sat down to watch. Some scenes ran once, at a set time and place, and between them the story kept going on its own, all over town. Thousands came, and many more followed it live online.

72: hours, from Good Friday afternoon to Easter Sunday evening
1,000+: local volunteers alongside the professional company
300: people saw the opening baptism, by McKean’s count
14: hours of drama filmed, cut to a film of about two

Sources: WhatsOnStage, Dave McKean to Unseen Films.

“I first saw the Passion Play in Port Talbot when I was about 12. It was a story I knew coming to life in front of me. A ritual taking place before me. A town remembering itself through a story.”

Michael Sheen, quoted by WhatsOnStage, 14 February 2011

From the beach to the screen

The film

The whole weekend was filmed. Dave McKean, the artist and director behind MirrorMask, took that footage, the audience’s own phone footage and scenes shot separately, and edited it into a feature: part drama, part record, part collage, with a score he wrote with Ashley Slater.

It had its world premiere where it was made, at the Apollo Cinema in Port Talbot on Easter Sunday 2012. Demand was such that the cinema opened all six screens. It went on general release across the UK on 13 April 2012, and in 2013 it won two BAFTA Cymru awards: Actor, for Michael Sheen, and Sound.

Making it

How McKean made the film

“…my own very personal take on what happened, it is my ‘gospel’.”

Dave McKean, Unseen Films, 26 October 2012

Fourteen hours into two

McKean edited “fourteen solid hours of drama” into a film of about two hours, writing short linking scenes, an animated story for the Stranger and moments alone with the Teacher, shot with Sheen at the end of each day.
Unseen Films, 2012 (opens in a new tab)
Cameras in the crowd

So as not to spoil the play for its audience, McKean’s crews agreed to shoot from concealed positions. Much of his editing time went on cutting around press photographers who had no such scruples.
Eye magazine, 30 October 2013 (opens in a new tab)
The audience’s footage

“I sent a message out on Twitter for anyone that was there with their phones or handy-cams or whatever, and wouldn’t mind donating them to the show.”
Dave McKean to Crosslight, 2013 (opens in a new tab)
A thirteenth disciple

On the last night the water screen computers crashed, some of the lights failed and the sound would not work. McKean’s sound recordist was “drafted in as a strange pink shirted, cowboy hatted 13th disciple” to hold a microphone to Sheen so the dialogue could be heard and recorded.
Unseen Films, 2012 (opens in a new tab)

On the UK DVD

A commentary by Dave McKean
Deleted scenes
A 20-minute cut of one of the BBC’s hour-long documentaries, edited by producer Eryl Huw Phillips

Source: Dave McKean, Unseen Films, 2012. Where to find the DVD.

The BBC documentaries

Passion in Port Talbot. A two-part BBC documentary followed the making of the play and then the three days themselves. McKean’s producer traded the film’s sound for access to the BBC’s footage, so the film and the documentaries share a few shots.

The series on IMDb. Source: Dave McKean to Unseen Films.

The music

The score is by Dave McKean and Ashley Slater. We could not find a soundtrack album released on CD, vinyl or digital services, so the film itself remains the way to hear it.

The sound team won BAFTA Cymru’s Sound award in 2013. McKean’s biography credits sound designer Ian Sands.