Stories That Move
When we create videos for our clients, there's often an incredibly rich narrative that we can't include in the final cut. Being behind the scenes, we're fortunate to hear the depth and full context behind each story.
So in this podcast, we want to pull back the curtain and allow you to experience the extraordinary stories of extraordinary people we've been honored to connect with.
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Stories That Move
Tyler Thompson | The Art of Storytelling in The Chosen
In this episode of Stories That Move, hosts Matt Deuel and Alexis Grant, interview Tyler Thompson, a writer and executive producer of the hit series The Chosen. They explore Tyler's creative journey, his upbringing in a storytelling culture, and the early days of The Chosen's production. Tyler shares insights into the challenges and triumphs of bringing the series to life, the importance of humanizing biblical stories, and the impact of audience reception on the show's evolution. The discussion highlights the impact of personal experiences on creativity and the need for artists to engage with the world around them.
Keywords
Tyler Thompson, The Chosen, storytelling, filmmaking, creative journey, production, audience reception, biblical stories, writing, creativity, storytelling, The Chosen, character-driven, emotional connection, writing process, audience impact, future projects, unique perspectives, filmmaking, personal experiences
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That's kind of how I got connected to Dallas Jenkins, who is the creator and showrunner for the Chosen. I worked as a video editor for him. Then, over time, dallas and I eventually made this short film called the Shepherd, which became functionally like the pilot episode for what the show the Chosen would become.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to another episode of Stories that Move. I'm Matt Duhl and, as always, I'm here with my co-host, mason Geiger, and today we have the privilege of talking to someone who's been part of one of the most impactful and talked about television series in recent years.
Speaker 3:So our guest today is Tyler Thompson, executive producer and writer for the Chosen. As a storyteller, Tyler has played a key role in shaping a series that has resonated deeply with audiences around the world. His journey in film and television is inspiring, and we're excited to dive into what it takes to craft stories that move people.
Speaker 2:I'll be joined by our Chief of Staff, Alexis Grant, who's stepping in as co-host while Mason is traveling this week, and we're going to talk to Tyler about his journey into filmmaking, how he became a part of the Chosen and the creative process behind writing and producing such a powerful series.
Speaker 3:This is going to be a great conversation, so let's get started. Please welcome Tyler Thompson to Stories that Move.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody, welcome back to Stories that Move. My name is Matt Duhl and with me today new co-host Alexis Grant.
Speaker 4:Hello everybody.
Speaker 2:Alexis welcome.
Speaker 4:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Alexis is our chief of staff. She joined Dream On Studios last fall. We are so grateful to have her, and Mason is out traveling the world supporting our clients in a pretty big way. Yes, and so we had to look into the bullpen and say who's up. And, alexis, are you enthusiastic about jumping into this?
Speaker 4:I'm stoked. Yeah, I lost the nose goes game, but that's okay, I'm here, I'm excited. I get to talk to a friend today two friends actually, so yeah.
Speaker 2:Excellent, excellent. And we're here in our new Stories that Move set. So just lots of new things.
Speaker 4:I know.
Speaker 2:Mike and Steven dove in and created a new set for us, which is amazing. So, hey, for those of you listening to the podcast, if you didn't know, we have a video version. It's available on YouTube, it's available on Spotify. You can dial in and just see all of our beautiful faces, if you want to do that. So, yes, all right, well, let's dive into it. We are so excited. All right, well, let's dive into it. We are so excited. Today we have with us Tyler Thompson, who is a writer and executive producer on the series the Chosen, and I mean, my goodness, this is a huge deal. We are talking 100 million worldwide viewers, four seasons completed, season five kind of in production right now. Tyler, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to talk to you.
Speaker 2:And what's amazing about this for us is, once again, alexis. This is another incredible guest that you know, so help us connect the dots here.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you know what. We started to work together I think a couple of years ago back when I was at another agency. Tyler, I just knew you as a name on an email, didn't know your background, but I knew you were an incredible writer that I could quickly text for a project without even knowing the whole history of it. And I think that in itself was just remarkable to me of like hey, here's a guy who's willing to hop on a project last minute and cranks out incredible work in such a humble way. Come to find out. Oh wait, he's kind of a big deal.
Speaker 4:But I just love that. And so, Tyler, tell us a little bit more about you, your background. You know who is Tyler outside of the Chosen, Because you're so much more than just a writer and a producer.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Oh thanks, alexis. Yeah, I think we first met you and I probably three or four years ago, maybe I actually don't even remember, because it's been a while since I have been doing those little side agency jobs from that previous agency that you were at and the studio have grown, happily, to be so big that I don't have time or capacity to take on some of those smaller gigs.
Speaker 1:But those were really fortunate for me in the early, early days of the show, as we were just starting to get some traction before there was a livable wage to come out of it. It was nice to have little agency gigs and I feel like Alexis, you and I were often working with kind of like nonprofits, like by the Hand in Chicago and World Vision, some just like global philanthropic endeavors. So that's kind of that's the context that you and I come from. I also lived in Chicago for over a decade, so that's kind of where I started. I grew up in rural Illinois and then I went to school in Chicago and then lived in the city for a while.
Speaker 1:That's kind of how I got connected to Dallas Jenkins, who is the creator and showrunner for the Chosen. I worked as a video editor for him and then I was also doing my own thing in the city. I was writing plays, I was playing music in like a folk band and just working on my own projects, making little short films and things. And then over time, Dallas and I eventually made this short film called the Shepherd, which became functionally like the pilot episode for what the show the Chosen would become. So it all kind of started in Illinois, Chicago, that sort of artist scene, and then it has grown into, as you mentioned, Matt, a worldwide kind of phenomenon which is exciting to be part of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's incredible. So we want to get more into that and what you're doing. But again, just to kind of back up a little bit, what did life look like for you growing up and what was the moment that you started to connect with just some of this creativity and creative production for you? I mean because again, it sounds like a lot from the music to the editing, to the writing, to the producing. I mean, there's a lot of output there. So what were some of those moments, that where you started to identify like, oh, I think this is what I want to be about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I grew up in rural Illinois in a farming community of about 2,000 people, really really tiny, and the interesting thing was I grew up. Actually going to my parents took me to a really small kind of German, a church of like German origins, a tradition that comes out of what's called the Anabaptist tradition. It's not Baptist, it's something else entirely, and one of the hallmarks of that tradition is there's no centralized like leadership in the church, so there's no pastor or any like paid staff. It's like all lay people, and I think it's because that tradition maybe got burned by hierarchical structures in Europe, maybe from the Catholic Church. We don't do Catholic slams or disses in Chosen World, particularly because Jonathan Rumi, who plays Jesus on our show, is Catholic. He's Catholic. I don't want this to get out of the world and someone do a soundbite of like.
Speaker 1:The writer of the Chosen was bashing Catholics.
Speaker 1:It it's Catholic college degree and a lot of them were like hog farmers, wheat farmers, dairy farmers, and their only understanding of like when they would preach from the Bible they could only connect it to what they were reading that was on the page and their own experience with the earth right Like tilling soil, you know, growing crops, animal husbandry, all these things that actually also appear in the text.
Speaker 1:So I was raised in this like storytelling culture that wasn't overly like heady right, like all of these lay ministers could talk about, or not all that they could talk about, but their source of inspiration was just whatever stories were in the text and their own experience, living a life close to the ground, and so that was the context that I grew up in, just like hearing, hearing Bible stories and other. They would tell personal anecdotes from the pulpit as well, and so I was raised in a story-centric culture, even though it was agrarian. We had a TV that we didn't watch all that much of, but my parents did love movies and so they were always going to the. I don't know how old your viewers are if they can remember this such a thing, but like a VHS rental store, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And on the weekend my dad would bring home classics, you know, like Black Beauty Bridge on the River Kwai, and made sure that I was raised with the canon of great film. So when you sort of pair those two things together in concert with. Also, my English teachers held me and my fellow students to an extremely high standard for writing, uncommon for a small public school in rural Illinois. For whatever reason, our English teachers were some of those rigorous people I've ever come into contact with and they I mean Alexis, you were very generous with your words, saying if you needed a writer you knew you could just call me. That's what, like Mrs Moyers, my high school English teacher, would want to hear. Like they would be proud that they produced people that a creative agency in a big city could pick up the phone and and get a a really solid outcome.
Speaker 1:So I guess those three things together, like being raised in a storytelling, like community of faith um, that was, like I said, heavy on narrative light, on theology, yeah, um.
Speaker 1:And then, uh, uh, parents who loved many things but also loved movies and, and you know, wanted us to see the really good ones.
Speaker 1:And then teachers, um, who made sure that that our high school produced excellent, excellent writers, no matter what field they were going into.
Speaker 1:Um, so all of that together, I think, sort of conspired to uh, help me embrace a creative life, because I think a lot of people maybe who grow up in in the Midwest or something, sometimes their community of faith, sometimes their teachers, sometimes their families maybe don't always champion like you could go be a writer, you could go be a filmmaker um, I I've known a lot of people from those contexts who had a lot of potential and then, um, they were sort of pushed towards something more practical. Thankfully, for whatever reason, my parents never pushed me toward practicality. I neither did my teachers and neither did my faith community, so I was unencumbered of those burdens of like no, you should be an engineer or no, you should become a doctor or a lawyer. I know a lot of people whose parents wanted them to become doctors or lawyers, whose parents wanted them to become doctors or lawyers. But that's more since I've moved out here to LA that I encounter people who've now become screenwriters or filmmakers but who had to overcome families who were really pushing a more traditional path.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for sharing that and it's so cool to hear so for you, as you kind of grew up in this environment of story and you had some encouragement to just lean into it. Yeah, what were some of those, you know, first steps of kind of, yes, stepping out and kind of putting yourself out there in some of those writing and producing ventures.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I when I was in seventh grade for my birthday I got a again. I don't know how old your listenership is, but a camcorder, like a video camera, standalone. That's not a phone that you use like tiny little tapes in. They weren't like cassette tapes, they were little videotape things. I think it's obsolete this technology now.
Speaker 1:But I just immediately, once I got that, started making little short films with, like, my cousins, with my siblings, with friends from church, and then those little short films started to like grow and, um, I did like a, actually a feature that was based on this historical book, fox's book of martyrs, which is like stories about, um, the different ways that the apostles met their respective ends. It seems, really seems. It sounds, sounds really gory and in some ways it was, but it was for something the church was wanting to. Actually I don't even remember the context of why they asked me to do that and I just ran with it and of course my parents and family was super supportive and helped with costumes and props and animals and all these things. So they kind of started with that. And then I made more of those types of things. I made a feature film that was kind of based on the life of Jacob and Esau and sort of what happened to them. So I kind of was doing this sort of thing out the gate Once I got to college and afterward I sort of shifted my focus more toward playwriting, because I was deep in the Chicago like performing arts in live theater and all that, and I was playing music and having a good time and still sometimes making a short film here or there when I had time or financial capacity and trying to make it all work.
Speaker 1:So I started very, very young. All of those projects are suitably bad. We gotta see them. Well, yeah, I mean, I hope not.
Speaker 1:But what I will say is, if anything good ever came from someone seeing those, they would be like, oh, this is really bad, but this is how great, not greatness. But this is where everyone has to start. And so whenever people are asking like, oh, how do I get started, I'm like you just have to start. Like you start now with whatever you have, even if that's with the camera on your phone, and you make a short film with like two of your friends, even if it's only like three minutes long, and you edit that together, put that out there and just make, make, make, make, make, and.
Speaker 1:And so I, for whatever reason, because I was growing up in, you know, the mid, early mid 2000s, like the culture around, like teaching, creativity was not as pervasive as it is now, and so I that I can't answer, I don't know how I I think it's just the creative impulse, like I just had the impulse to make things. I didn't have someone say like you should start now. I just somehow, preternaturally, for whatever reason, knew that I couldn't not make things, and I still feel that way today. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:I love that. My start was my Sony Hi8 camera making those home movies with the friends and plugging back into the VCR with the RCA cables and then my CD player to add in music and you press play on everything at the same time and record.
Speaker 4:Hopefully it's insane.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah. So I love that and I love that advice of just get out there, get started, try something. I mean just so critical.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, even a few minutes ago, you said okay. Even you know, a few minutes ago, you said okay, I don't know who your viewership is right. I think our viewership is anywhere between a 16 year old to a 70 year old. You know, we are based here in Midwest USA, good old Indiana, two hours what is that? East of Chicago. But you said something earlier to the lines of you know Chicago. But you said something earlier to the lines of you know, sometimes those in the Midwest just default to.
Speaker 4:You know the traditional path of building a family, building a career, stability, and that's great, there's nothing wrong with that. But you know, I love that push for okay. But what if there's something more? You know it doesn't have to be Hollywood, it doesn't have to be the chosen or, you know, being known worldwide, it's not that at all. But it's just this push for more and unleashing what's within you, whether that's, you know, your creative writing skills, directing, or maybe you want to be an accountant and your parents want you to be a teacher, whatever. That is Right. But I do love that you were surrounded by parents and friends and family who said, yeah, do it, tyler, do it. And you did it, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah I got lucky in that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think even with the Chosen, again, you know people now connect with it and see it as just this gigantic thing and it is. It's everywhere, you can view it, on anything, and you know there's just tons of things happening there. But you all started with a concept small film and it grew into something and season one was, I mean, through kind of crowdfunding, right, crowdsourcing, so so, again, humble beginning. So talk to us about just, yeah, those early days of what it was like to be on that production and just how you've seen it grow and evolve through the years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean early days. Like you said, we were reliant on crowdfunding and we only even we wrote. We were in the process of writing an eight episode season but after four episodes we had to. We didn't have enough money to keep going and so we went and they filmed the first four episodes of season one, just hoping to kind of get those out there to raise some enthusiasm and awareness. And so it was crazy, like when we wrapped episode four we didn't even know if there would be an episode five. But thankfully it slowly, like little by little, caught on. We were able to finish that season and I loved those early days before. It was big because there still is such freedom.
Speaker 1:But I think the pressure was always there because we respect the material and particularly the source material of the New Testament and the Old. We have such a what's the word? We hold the text in a high regard. So the pressure is there to write something that reflects the excellence of what we're working from. That pressure was always there. But because no one was watching it, we could just kind of dream up the craziest things, and I mean Dallas's idea to make the character of Matthew autistic was made at the jump and I feel like if we were looking at doing that now, like for the next season I'm not saying we wouldn't do it, I just think there would be more scrutiny, more noise, more chatter. And there was no scrutiny, no noise, no chatter. When I say no scrutiny, I want to be clear From the jump. They always had experts, like collegiate university people, reading our scripts and giving us feedback about like hey, you want to be careful of this or that might drift a little far from tradition or whatever. So they would pull us back into line if it ever got too out of line. But we were never trying to push the envelope. Making the character of Matthew autistic or the character of little James having a limp are are things that are maybe not in the source text, but they are plausible. We weren't trying to break anything down, but yeah, I just.
Speaker 1:I really liked. I also loved the anonymity of those early days, like no one had heard of the show and so you know, nothing would change if I told people I was writing for a show called the chosen, like they wouldn't react one way or another to me, whereas it does feel different now it seems like everyone has at least heard of it. So, yeah, there's there's kind of a reaction that that that comes out, that I, whatever, it's just it, it's this time in my life and and and it'll, it'll pass. You know, sure, um, but yeah, I loved. I loved the kind of scrappy.
Speaker 1:It was scary because we didn't have any money and it was just sort of paycheck to paycheck on, trying to figure out how to keep us all doing this thing. And maybe that's an artist thing to kind of glamorize the salad days Like, oh, wasn't it fun when we had nothing and everything was a struggle. Maybe that's something you could only do in hindsight, but I remember being really happy, like loving doing this thing. That seems so. What's the word Unlikely? Like we often said, like we were proud of it. We were like this is probably the best show that no one will see, because, also, for a while it was hard to see it. Like people had to log in through a weird app and there were like hoops to jump through, and so when COVID hit and they made it free and everyone was staying home with nothing to do in March of 2020, they just started watching this free show, and then that's when things really changed.
Speaker 2:Absolutely no. And to me, I mean it just it speaks to you know, in those early days for you, all of you were operating out of your giftings and your passion to where it was. Yeah, sure, of course you need a paycheck and you need to survive, but, like you were fueled by just the fact that you were able to be there and to do it and to make it, and there was something about that that that drove you guys in such a cool way, right.
Speaker 4:It's that shift from oh this is my day job to like no, this is my day job, even if I don't get paid. This is awesome and I kind of love that. You said this is something that's really incredible but maybe unlikely for people to watch. I won't be the first to hide it, but I didn't watch the shows until last year and that was because I was out of shows to watch and I was like I probably should watch that thing now, like I've known Tyler a few years, let's see what you know what this is and I was blown away, like it was jarring. Just those first few episodes of I did not expect that. You know, I went to a Bible school out in Chicago. I learned all the texts. I just I never imagined Matthew to be that way, or little James to be that way, or even the, the opening scene of Mary and all that. I'm like wow, like I don't.
Speaker 4:Yeah, there's power in creative storytelling um and I think you guys just do it so well.
Speaker 1:So oh, thank you. Yeah, you're definitely not. You're definitely not the first person uh to to have avoided the show for a long time and I but, to be honest, I would too if I, if I, if someone was pushing me to watch this show, it would take like 50 people telling me before I probably would do it. It's because of the history of these things being so cheesy and bad.
Speaker 2:No, and that's what I was going to say is, you know, I'm a little older than you. Two Grew up in the 80s and 90s, and it's just to think about faith-based production, it was just painful, I mean, like this is so and so I think, to have something that's such a high caliber, high quality, and yet to me and I think you said this, you know, in what you said a minute ago, at the heartbeat you all have tapped into just the humanity of these stories in such a beautiful way and, yeah, taking these sacred texts and these sacred stories and just helped them to be real and human, which is just so beautiful. So, yeah, I mean, what was the I don't know, what was the inspiration for that kind of viewpoint with it?
Speaker 1:You mean the viewpoint of prioritizing the humanity and the characters around Jesus instead of the divine. Yeah Well, dallas and I had been making little short films, like little vignettes of anecdotes from the Bible for many years before we started the Chosen. The Chosen so we actually had done a short film about the two thieves, like crucified on either side of Christ, but the whole short film was just about their lives and it didn't reveal until the end, like, who they were. So it was just kind of about two people who who took like different paths but ended up both committing crimes and then ended up, you know, in the same jail cell. And then by the end the audience starts to put it together like, oh, these are the two thieves, or whatever. So we were always trying to take these obscure points of view and elevate them and be like well, what would that be like for the people who you know, went to jail for committing a crime and then found themselves, you know, walking toward their execution, you know next to Jesus, like what would that POV be like? And so we'd been exploring that.
Speaker 1:And then Dallas had long had an idea for a short film about one of the shepherds who was at the nativity, like just zeroing in on him and his life and culminating in this experience of the announcement you know, that the Messiah has been born, or whatever. And his main thing was he said I want to do it without showing the angels, I just want to see, like light on the faces of the shepherds and see them react, and then they run, and but. But so he came to me and said that's my, that's my main idea. Send me like a one pager of like, what would your approach be? And so we focused on this story of a shepherd who was considered unclean for a couple of reasons he has a club foot and also he sustains an open wound in the market and can't go into the synagogue because he's bleeding and he's ritually impure and all these things. We tried to like, establish him as an outsider. And then once we made that, that that's that, for whatever reason, resonated with people and, and so that was always the blueprint from ever since we had our first writers retreat um, actually in elgin, illinois, uh, because that's where dallas was living.
Speaker 1:I drove out from chicago to elgin and and sat in his basement with ryan swanson, our other writer, for three days and we just put ideas on whiteboards. But we kept coming back to interpersonal dynamics over spectacle. So we always said in the jump we would prioritize a scene with just two people talking in like a quiet corner of a room over like a big crowd scene with miracles. Now we ended up graduating to being able to afford big crowd scenes with miracles and walking on water and all the rest, but at the beginning we didn't have anything approaching a budget for that. So we were like all we can afford to do is it was like.
Speaker 1:I mean Alexis was talking about her experience of watching those first episodes. If you watch them they're like a play, like they're just a series of scenes where you have one or two people talking in a kitchen, on a boat, like while fishing, standing in the marketplace, while Matthew's collecting taxes, you know, before his life changes just talking to his guard, gaius, who is watching him. Like that's all we could do out of necessity. But they've never supplanted or replaced the primacy of being character-driven, being plot-driven, being story-driven and emotion-forward Like. I don't know if everyone experiences it as emotion-forward, but we're always looking for, like people to be able to see themselves reflected back emotionally and what the characters are going through.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I know, when I first watched it I was like, wow, this is deeply personal to the character and to me, which was shocking, right, like, like you said, a lot of movies or shows, it's you know who's got the most flashiest scene or the coolest special effects, and sometimes it's a little overkill. But, um, I, I love the, the fresh approach that you guys took, not again out of, not just out of necessity as far as budget goes, but just because that's how your style was and I think, yeah, it's, it's different and it's something that I think the world needed you know, yeah, that seems like it so, as you look back um, you know through the so four seasons are out.
Speaker 2:You guys are in pre-production on season five, is that correct?
Speaker 1:Um, there's four seasons available to stream, and then season five is having its theatrical release at the end of March. Okay, and then we're in pre-production for season six, which we'll start filming in April. So we're happily like kind of ahead of schedule.
Speaker 3:Um right kind of ahead of schedule, but not in every way.
Speaker 1:I encourage people to go see season five in theaters. We filmed it on, we used wider lenses to account for IMAX and it deserves to be seen on a really big screen in a big theater with a lot of people. It's very exciting because it's Holy Week, so it's all of these climactic events like the turning over the tables and things like that that you want to experience on a big scale.
Speaker 4:Amazing. Speaking of big scale, what was that like in Times Square in New York? Was that last week that you were there seeing? Just yeah, again, poster of your work.
Speaker 1:It was a week ago today when we're recording this. It was a week ago today. Yeah, we did a Times Square takeover of our season five portraits taken by Annie Leibovitz and they were sort of everywhere and that was. That was surreal. I would say most of us don't let things like that like catch up to us too much, I think, because there's always so many demands of what we're working on. We do pause when we're there to like appreciate it. We do pause when we're there to like appreciate it and be like this is once in a lifetime. Having Annie Leibovitz like shoot portraits for your show is like really rare and once in a lifetime. And then a Times Square takeover is really rare and once in a lifetime. So we try to savor those things. But I don't. I haven't seen anyone like let it go to their head, particularly because like how could it, when there's a thousand like other things you know, screaming for our attention and and solutions and stuff?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, absolutely so. As you look back through, you know the, the, the current arc of the production. Any moment for you, that just just stood out like a scene or something where it's just like you were. You were kind of in awe, like, my goodness, I can't believe we're doing this or we got to do this piece.
Speaker 1:There's so many of those. I remembered one thing that stands out in season three is the finale of season three, which, spoiler alert, includes the walking on water sequence which we filmed in a tank in Louisiana. Wow, and we had to film it at night because it's an outdoor tank, louisiana. And we had to film it at night because it's an outdoor tank, and so it was like these extremely late nights and we had it's like a wave pool, so they had it's practical effects. The waves, like they had this churning thing that would like go thump, thump, thump and it would start to like make these huge waves and all of our cast was on the boat, um, and it was like wild to watch. Uh, you know, people fall. I mean, you know the the actors were standing, you know they were standing on the water, but beneath them were kind of like these wrestling pad type things that were cabled down and then they also had like wires on them helping them balance, but they would still sort of like fall off into the water and it was like the water was cold and there was like lifeguards bobbing in the corners and stuff.
Speaker 1:I think when I would do this to like look at it, it did shock me kind of like this. It was like titanic or something. You know. You have all these people in the water and and if you just do this with your hands and block out the blue screens, it felt so surreal, um yeah, and crazy. I mean that scene is, though what it's famous for is people feeling more connected to the emotion of what Simon Peter is going through. I guess just Simon at the time what Simon is going through in his personal life and his, like frustration and anger and sense of betrayal people really connect to, and so, ultimately, that's what I'm proud of is that it it wasn't just a spectacle. Again, going back to our our the primacy of of story and emotion, it was more powerful to us because of what's happening with the characters, not just because, like, oh wow, it's so interesting that someone's walking on water, you know.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say what's been the response. I know the response has been overwhelming, but specifically, you know what are some stories that have come in where it's just been humbling for you to hear like, oh man, this really moved people, this changed something for someone.
Speaker 1:Well, I guess what has taken me aback. From the beginning this is going to sound like a negative thing, but it just is what it is. I think a lot of people who've watched the show have had a lot of assumptions based on, I don't know where they grew up or where they have gone to perhaps to church or didn't go to church, it doesn't matter but I think people have a perception of these characters and of these stories that is so lofty and distant, like I think people sort of like know these stories, but we often say they think of them the way they perhaps first encountered them, which is to say on stained glass, which is to say up high and like far away and you know, difficult to reach, in fact, by design, like untouchable, difficult to reach, in fact, by design, like untouchable. And so I think the stories of people sending in comments of like I never, you know, thought of Jesus as like laughing or brushing his teeth or being like sarcastic or making jokes, or, you know, even getting so frustrated, you know, with the disciples, or I never thought of the disciples like having such rich personal lives and having such distinct personalities, like it's not their fault that they never thought of that, like there's some lack of or maybe not lack, that sounds negative. There's some way in which people, I think, maybe approach the Bible or faith or religion or even just history, because a lot of our viewership is not religiously inclined at all. They just love a good period drama. That's a big audience that loves that and loves history.
Speaker 1:And even, you know, there's that joke about men thinking about the Roman Empire. Like a quarter of our show is about the Roman Empire and our Roman characters and what they're all going through. And even that people have often said like, oh, I didn't understand how entrenched with the Roman story, that Jesus and his story, we didn't know that they were so intertwined to the point that Jesus is like healing a centurion's son, things like that. Like, for whatever reason, people just are not familiar with these stories and they didn't know how connected everything is. So that's been exciting to me. Another thing that I'm proud of personally, because I'm often of the three people in our writer's room. Everyone contributes the same amount of quality, the specifics of what we each bring.
Speaker 1:I tend to be excited about helping place the context of what these characters are going through into first century Judaism, because the characters, famously, are not Christians, they're Jews and they exist in a Jewish culture that dates back centuries, eons even, and so sometimes we do these like Old Testament flashbacks that help people understand what they're seeing now, because the characters would have been raised with the stories and traditions of the Old Testament. But frequently our audience has not been raised with the stories or traditions of the Old Testament, for whatever reason. I don't know. That's not my, I'm not a pastor, I'm not a theologian. I can't answer why there's like a lack of understanding about those things, but there just is.
Speaker 1:It's new material. So it's exciting to introduce people, for instance, to the story of like Moses putting the serpent on the pole when the people were healed from the snake bites. A lot of people didn't understand how that story is connected to Jesus's conversation with Nicodemus on the roof in Kapernaum and John 3. So like stitching together the tapestry of how all these things are connected is something I'm really proud of, and then hearing people react to it always makes me feel like, okay, we're doing, we're helping people here. We're helping people put together a holistic understanding of this book that they say is important to them, and I'm sure it is important to them. But like understanding. It is something we can sort of help with visually.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, I mean bravo on just Jesus not being the blonde hair, blue eyed Swedish guy you know. So that's awesome. I love that. I love that.
Speaker 4:I think, segwaying out of the chosen you know earlier I mentioned. You're more than just the executive producer, right? Or a writer. Tell us what inspires you as a writer. You know outside of this. Or are Tell us what inspires you as a writer. You know outside of this, or are you?
Speaker 1:even doing more writing outside of this. I was a lot more until things got as breakneck speed as they are now, but I think it's important for writers to live. So I think sometimes in culture there's like a perception of writers as like we're in some loft with a typewriter smoking a cigarette, or like out in the streets of New Orleans like sort of carousing or whatever, when we're not writing, and that to me, I don't. Actually I live in Los Angeles and I know a lot of screenwriters and the ones that I know who are successful for the most part are we're very like boring and disciplined, which is to say like we do our work the same way anyone else might do their work, which is to say on a regimented schedule. Now for some people that's in the middle of the night.
Speaker 1:I know a lot of night owl writers, but writing ideas come from living, and so I put a lot of priority on still existing out in the world, doing lots of travel, lots of hiking, backpacking, camping, camping, a lot with like with friends and family.
Speaker 1:Because you just accumulate experiences, you know some good, some bad, and and all of that affects it shows up in the work, and so I'm a big advocate of for artists that, like your art, will come from your life. So you have to have your life, do your life and and be intentional about having a life and going places and having new experiences, because it will worm its way into the work. So I don't prescribe this. I love being outside, so I do as much hiking and camping and backpacking and travel as I can manage amid all the other deadlines to sort of keep me out in what's real, because we're sitting here typing on our laptops on final draft and you just can't be doing that all the time. You have to go cook a chicken breast and chop up some bell pepper. You need to do something with your hands that isn't typing, otherwise the truth and the authenticity will just leak out of your work.
Speaker 4:You'll be lost, right, right, I love that. I think, scrolling Instagram, I see a story of, oh okay, tyler's on another hike. Where is he now? I remember I think it was last year seeing you were in Greece and you were just walking around this island. I'm like I wonder what he's up to Do. You have any stories coming out of those, specifically those hikes? You love being outdoors. You love being with your friends. You know we've got a mutual friend from the agency that I used to work with that I think you hang out with often. You know, referring to Tony over here but, yeah, just tell me more about the richness that comes out of that community. And you know those are things that inspire you, right, and it doesn't have to be in your writing but just in life overall. Or, yeah, maybe who is Tyler outside of the traditional nine to five writer job?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so that anecdote you referred to, I was hiking around Patmos in Greece. To be clear, I was teaching a workshop there where I was mentoring screenwriting students and we had a day off where I was mentoring screenwriting students and we had a day off, and so I hiked all around the island of Patmos, which is doable, like you can actually walk the whole thing. I think it's maybe 17 miles wide or something. And I just remember I got to the opposite end of that island on the hike and there was sort of no one around. There was not a monastery.
Speaker 1:What do nuns live in A convent? There was a convent in the hillside, sort of behind me, and I wanted to, I think I wanted to just cool off in the Aegean Sea. So I found a spot where I was like oh, I can kind of go swimming here, and it was the quietest place, because those Greek islands are so far from main civilization and even what's on those islands barely passes for civilization. It's all very, it's like so small and primitive in a really positive way. And you know, the shops close, like in the afternoon, people go home and take a nap and then they like reopen at five when one of the cruise ships will like dock in the harbor and tourists get off and it's just like a slower pace of life.
Speaker 1:And I remember there was someone living in like a small hut on this really remote side of the island like, like I said, the only thing recognizable up in the hills was this convent and this guy would had caught some fish. I I couldn't see by what means, but he was just sitting on the um shore just quietly like carving up these fish and he like never spoke and I just like sat there for like almost an hour kind of watching him work. Completely. He was completely absorbed. It's like he wasn't listening no, this is a podcast, but sorry, he wasn't listening to like an audiobook or a pod. That was me. When I'm cooking, I'm like listening to stuff I'm catching up on yeah, what happening.
Speaker 1:He wasn't listening to music. He had no AirPods in, there was no other people around except me, maybe 25 yards off, and he was so engrossed in his work and it was like the simplest thing and I don't know if it was to feed him or him and someone else or a family, but when it was done he just gathered it all up and walked away into this little grove of trees and the peacefulness of that. I don't know yet what that has wrought on my work or what exactly I took away from that, but that's just my most vivid memory of that particular hike that you're talking about. But yes, I try to be outside as much as possible and my family is really important to me. They're kind of spread around but you know, nieces and nephews are like bringing. Bringing whatever joy I can to their life. Is is a huge priority for me.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I think that's important to for all writers and creators, if you don't have your own children or grandparents to keep in your life. Young people and old people, because they both, I think, teach us so much, and I think it's very scary when a writer or an artist only has um contemporary friends their own age. I think it's. There's something, there's so much that like with children, they are seeing and experiencing the world for the first time and and when you can see it through their eyes, that to to me, it helps you see things that you wouldn't see before. And then, I think, with older people, which both all of my grandparents now have passed on, but I'm close to a few older people through church and it's always good to spend time with them, to always keep the perspective on how much things have changed or how much they've stayed the same, and just to have that multi what's the word? There's a word for that.
Speaker 3:Here I am a writer.
Speaker 1:Intergenerational. Thank you, alexis. That intergenerational perspective I think is critical and I think when an artist doesn't have that, you can tell there's a sort of, there's a sort of there's just a blind spot.
Speaker 2:That shows up. Yeah, what a beautiful perspective, so good. Well, I know we need to wrap this up and get you on to your next thing, but just last question here. Real quickly, you're leaning into season six. I think you kind of have seven seasons. Total is what you all are looking at. What are you excited about for the future? And maybe it's right now just these couple of seasons, but are you starting to dream about the next thing and what's coming up for you?
Speaker 1:A little bit. I get this question all the time. I you know I'm trying. What I'm trying to do is finish the work that's in front of me, just because it feels like the one thing I have before me to do, and and so we're starting. So we're starting production on season six, but we are outlining and starting writing on season seven because we write a whole year ahead from when we're filming.
Speaker 1:So it is chaotic to be releasing season five, filming season six and writing season seven all at once. It's difficult to keep it all straight. But, yes, I have started to think about a little bit what's after, just because it's important to do that. I often tell artists to be present to the work and not to be too married to a five-year plan, but you still have to plan as though there will be another five years of your life, and so I am thinking about that. But I am actually thinking of keeping it pretty close to what I have been doing. Dallas and Ran and I have designs on some spinoff series and some things that pretty close to what I have been doing. Dallas and Ran and I have designs on some spinoff series and some things that are close to the universe that we're already in. So that's not the most exciting answer, but I think whatever you see next from us will probably look slightly similar to what you've already seen, but maybe in an earlier All I can say is in a much earlier time period.
Speaker 2:That's what I'll leave it at. Awesome, well, congratulations on just amazing work and the impact it's having around the world. Again, you can find the Chosen through the Chosen app, through the Chosen website and just about every single streaming platform that exists. Tyler, thank you so much for your time, your generosity, to share with us here today. Yeah, thank you so much for your time, your generosity, to share with us here today.
Speaker 4:Yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Of course, it was great talking with both of you.
Speaker 2:Awesome To all of our listeners and viewers. Thanks for joining us on Stories that Move. We'll see you next time. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Stories that Move brought to you by Dream On Studios.
Speaker 3:Make sure to subscribe so that you don't miss the next episode and remember if you or your organization have a story you're eager to share with the world. Dream On Studios is here to bring that story to life.
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Speaker 3:Yeah, we believe every story has the potential to inspire, to move and to make a difference. Let's make yours heard.
Speaker 2:Until next time, keep moving forward and keep telling those stories that matter.
Speaker 3:Take care everyone. We'll see you next time on Stories that Move.