Douglas Urbanski knows what a good film looks like, because he’s made lots of them: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Darkest Hour;The Social Network; and now Slow Horses, an espionage thriller series made in London for Apple TV+. But we’re talking good as in morally good. What, I wanted to know, was a Catholic film like – that is, one made by a Catholic like him? Was it somehow infused with Catholic values, not overtly, but expressing an underlying world view?
He knows exactly what I mean, and he says frankly that, except for The Exorcist, “whenever you make a movie which is a Catholic religious movie, the movie will fail.” But he asks unexpectedly: “Want to find a means of moral conversion? The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote a Catholic story. And he asked: how do we tell the story? How do we make the story relevant? The one thing that must be in place is that people involved must be committed. Mel [Gibson] is committed, he’s a traditionalist Catholic. Mel made his movie [The Passion of the Christ] and other studios jumped in on the act. But they flopped.”
What Douglas doesn’t mean by a Catholic or Christian film is what Christian evangelicals mean by it: clean, family-values movies. He sometimes gets friends emailing him to ask how he can reconcile the “dirty words in your movie” with his faith. Bad language plus sexual situations? Sounds to me he’s simply depicting life. He says that “the characters in my movies speak in the vernacular”. But he tells his critics not to get confused about the bigger picture. What’s notable about his films is what you don’t get. “You won’t get glorification of drugs, euthanasia or abortion. I won’t glorify communism. I have to come to the correct moral conclusions.” In other words, you don’t come away from a Douglas Urbanski film with your sense of the moral order subverted.
He is 65 now and he’s exactly what you want in a film-maker: genial, authoritative, quick, a brilliant gossip, and ready to laugh. He’s from New Jersey and has been working in the UK on and off since the early 1980s. His family was Polish and not particularly devout; his grandmother – “a living saint who never said a bad word about anyone” – was an English Methodist who converted to Catholicism. He wasn’t always devout himself. Between leaving high school and about the year 2000, he didn’t practise his faith. He quotes that familiar line from GK Chesterton’s Father Brown: “I caught him with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”
And what was the twitch? One thing that shook him was the AIDS epidemic in California which took so many of his friends. He had, he said, “what Holocaust survivors call survivors’ guilt”. And he once asked a priest: “Why me?” The priest said patiently – the best answer, Douglas thinks, he could have given: “You don’t understand. Plainly you’ve been left to pray for them all.”
He is a minister of the eucharist and altar server at a church in West Hollywood: St Victor’s. It’s a role he didn’t seek out but was thrust upon him when the elderly priest, Monsignor Parnassus, came down at early Mass “and poked me with his walking stick”. The church itself is nothing much to look at, and it’s not the Catholic church in Beverly Hills favoured by most celebrities, but the priests there are something else and it has a Latin Mass in the ordinary rite. It was there that one of them, a monsignor, told his congregation at Sunday Mass: “You should try to come to daily Mass. Trust me. Nothing bad will come of it.” And he did. And he kept going, knowing that the tempter would be trying to get him to give up.
It’s a mixed congregation, he says, with “lots of gay men”. Once someone objected that gay couples might be receiving communion, and the priest answered: “Who do you think you are? They’re groping for grace. Once they come through the door, we accept them.” Yet this is, observes Douglas, a thoroughly conservative parish: “A real Catholic church in the least Catholic place. It’s not teaching Catholicism-lite – it’s the Church Militant.”
He’s married to a Jewish lady, a first-generation Holocaust survivor; their son is Jewish but he went to a Catholic school and is, Urbanski observes, the only Jewish boy who makes the sign of the cross at the Passover meal. “To us, the interfaith aspect is not ever something we discuss directly, it’s so integrated in our lives. Sometimes Holy Week and Passover come together and we celebrate the Passover meal and Good Friday. It works perfectly.” Sometimes, he thinks, Catholics can forget that Our Lord was Jewish, “and his mother, and his earthly father. I have a Jewish family that I am married to, and a Jewish family that I worship with,” that is to say, in church.
In London, he stays at a grand, traditional hotel, not far from the Jesuit Farm Street Church. He attends Mass at Farm Street but occasionally gets irritated by having “social justice issues pushed down your neck from the pulpit”. During the most stringent months of lockdown he had the bizarre experience of being one of only two people rattling round that enormous building: he and a famous friend. He was working on a film, notwithstanding the restrictions. The kitchens were closed for much of that time, so he had to slum it with dinners from the Cipriani restaurant brought to his hotel by Deliveroo; later the hotel chefs would send up his meals on a trolley. On one occasion, his friend had the grand piano summoned from the basement and he played it, just the two of them. It would, I say, make a terrific film scene. The other place, he says, where he was left quite alone overnight was the vast space of Westminster Hall. “It was spooky there.”
That was during the making of his film Darkest Hour, which was about Winston Churchill, who only brought God into his speeches in order to appeal to Americans, yet “managed to come to the correct moral conclusions. You don’t have to be religious to do that.”
In his films, “whenever there’s a clash of wills, of God and the devil, the good side wins.” But for that to happen “you have to say there is such a thing as good and evil. And nowadays it’s controversial to say that there are good things and bad things, that it’s not all subjective.”
Having been so long in the film business he has known an extraordinary number of writers, and he thinks some of the least religious, like Arthur Miller, made interesting work because of their moral uncertainty. “The bigger and better the writer, the less they know what it is they’re writing about. They’re having an internal argument with themselves.” He knew John le Carré, for instance, and he found him “long-winded and convoluted, but this is John le Carré writing about his own confused relationship with the West. God has no place in his life.”
Well, God has a place in Douglas Urbanski’s life. In his own way, he’s put his faith in film.
Slow Horses is available on Apple TV+
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.