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The Sunday Blessings Podcast is hosted by Jay Hildebrandt and features stories of faith, hope, and inspiration. You'll hear extended interviews, musician & artist spotlights, and more. Sunday Blessings can be heard weekly on Sundays from 5am-5pm mountain standard time on Classy 97, Sunny 97, and Classy 97 Lite.
Sharing stories of faith, hope, and inspiration. This is the Sunday Blessings podcast. Welcome everyone to the Sunday Blessings podcast. I'm Jay Hildebrand, and we have TC Christiansen with us today. Thanks for being here, TC.
Glad to be here. TC is well known for his faith based historical cinema. He's produced films such as, Kochville Miracles, 17 Miracles, Ephraim's Rescue, and my favorite, Escape from Germany because because I was one of the extras in that. So that's to have a special place in my heart for that one. So, TC, let's get right into this.
We're gonna talk mostly today about your newest film, Raising the Bar. But, first of all, just so our audience knows, what sparked your interest in filmmaking initially? Well, in the fifties as a kid, my dad had a home movie camera, an eight millimeter camera. It's kinda rare, really. There weren't that many people that did, and it fascinated me.
I really loved looking at that. And then I had my dad's had a cousin and an uncle that were in the photography business. And my family was all medical. He my dad was a dentist. My brothers and nurses that all went medical, and I I knew early early on, I'm not smart enough to do that.
And so I gotta find something funner to do, and I decided movies would be fun. And I took off after it at a very young age. I decided in the eighth grade that's what I was gonna do. So most of your movies here have something to do with, real historical events and people. So what draws you to that in particular?
I think there's power in telling a true faith based story Mhmm. That it gives you it's like a leg up. You know, you start off with something that people, hopefully, when they see, we we say it's a true story or they've heard from PR that it's true story, that they're they're more into it. Mhmm. You know, if I just made up these stories, oh, okay.
That's kind of a nice story. Thank you. But when you realize this this really happened to people, I just think it just it brings all of that level up, and, I think it affects people more in the way I want to affect them. And how do you balance when you do this historical accuracy to what really happened to making sure that it has some some cinematic flare to it with with the story? You change things very much or you have to, you know, kind of revise things a little bit?
How do you balance that? Well, I try to tell the true story, but, hey, it's a movie. Mhmm. And people don't live their lives, like, you know, oh, now that we're gonna have an inciting incident at page 20. And, you know, so I I do do some finagling around, but I try to do it so that I don't step on the story.
That the story itself is, it's tangible, it's true, and I'm not just going around just making things up. Mhmm. I think we've all seen stories that, are purporting to be true, and they really take some big liberties in it. And some might say that I've done that too, but I try not to. Okay.
Now you're not just so you write these stories. You've been a cinematographer, and I know you're you're right there next to the camera when when these are being filmed. And, you're also the director of these movies. I know. I'm doing all that.
You're wearing a man of many hats. Yes. But I bet there's some advantage you have in making a movie being so familiar with all those different parts of movie making. How how is that helpful? Well, the good side of it is that I start the planning right off.
When I'm writing the script, I don't just come up with scenarios and locations and but I'm thinking, who would be an actor that might be able to do this? And I'm thinking, where could we film this? I I I I can't come up with locations that are so crazy that I can't somehow capture them. Mhmm. So I'm toning in right from the start where typically a screenwriter doesn't limit themselves to that kinda stuff.
They'll just write what they think is the best script they can do and let somebody else worry about that. Yeah. So if you have a scene at the North Pole and you're filming in Southern California, it's gonna be kind of tricky if they and expensive to to do that kind of thing. Well, let's talk about raising the bar. How did you find this story, and what drew you to this particular story with Alma Richards?
Well, I was raised in Layton, Utah with 10 kids. And, also, our grandma lived with us in that mess of a household. And our grandma was from Parowan, the city that Alma's from. And so she knew Alma. In fact, she know knew him so well because he was my grandmother's brother.
Wow. So Alma Richards is my great uncle. So this is a family story that I've known, you know, since I can remember. Yeah. We my all my brothers, we all wanted to be track stars because of Alma and athletes like Alma was.
None of us were, but it it anyway, that this is something that's been tumbling around, you know, in my head for a long, long time. We have a a clip of the trailer that I wanna share. This is just the first half of the trailer going through the, where he is discovered by a BYU track coach. And so let's let's play that right now, and then we'll talk a little bit more about it. Hey, fellas.
Who's that? One of the most gifted natural athletes to come along in years. A high schooler. You cannot remain a ranch hand. You were made for something of wider influence.
Have you ever thought about track? It's a new sport here. Next competitor, mister Olmer Richards. You just jumped two inches under the BYU record. Well, I'll try harder.
So, TC, that gives us a little bit of an indication of the first part of the film or how this all happened. Tell us more about the story of the film. And I I guess, you you know, if you give away the ending I already knew the ending and most people do, but but tell us what happens there. Well, Alma is just kind of pulled into this track idea, and a theme that I have going is he's like most people that are young and just getting going. He doesn't know what really he wants to do in life.
Mhmm. And if he has a calling and he's searching for that and he's wondering if it's this track thing. Well, he within two years of him going out for track, there he is on the world's grandest athletic stage at the Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden. Mhmm. And a part of the story that I love the most is how many obstacles came in front of him.
You know? He's our hero, and yet he just can't just jump up and accomplish his goal. He had so many things that just kept coming up to keep him from getting where he wanted to go. But like any great protagonist, he overcomes it, succeeds, and comes home with a gold medal. So what is the I guess that's sort of the moral of the story.
That's that's the message you want people to go away with. Right? Yeah. The main thing I want people to come away with, on a it's a motion picture. It's gonna it's in theaters and so forth.
The main thing I want them to do is think, that was good. I liked it. It was entertaining. It had tension, and it had made me cry, all those things. But, yes, you're right, Jay, that that that that idea of a young person finding their way and overcoming obstacles.
So Sunday Blessings is a faith based program and the podcast too. So these are great moral implications as there more to it from a a spiritual sense with with the divine being part of this whole story? Well, one of the things that Alma did that I get questioned about commonly is, did he really kneel down and pray before his final jump in that stadium of 8,000 people in full view of them? And the answer is yes. That's what Alma says.
He actually tells later in life what his prayer was, what he was saying and asking for. So Alma brings in a spiritual side to the story, and I tried to do that too with his family because he came from a strongly religious family. And at the end of the film, it's really what I'm saying is that family basis is what helped him accomplish his goal. Were any of these extras in the film related to any of the original people? Just a few.
It'd be more tow toward my family Mhmm. Because, you know, we we, of course, are part of the Amel Richards family. But mostly, we had, extras that we found and brought in, and there's a quite a few of them we had to do. It's a it's a thing I do, Jay, that's just really dumb is here I'm making an independent film, small budget, and yet I'm gonna recreate a stadium in Stockholm with 8,000 spectators. I was wondering where you got all those extras.
Well, what it's the magic of computers because what we do, we film about 20 of them. Mhmm. And then through the computer, we're able to duplicate them. It's that kind of thing. Wow.
That's fascinating. Now I know that one of them, the person who plays Jim Thorpe, who we we know is one of the first Native American Olympians, he was actually a a boy from Idaho where Sunday Blessings originates. Tell me about that. Well, I knew that I had to find someone to play this part of Jim Thorpe. He was a competitor of Alma's, but on the American team.
And so I went to the BYU, track coach and asked, have you had some American Indian athletes in your track program? And he goes, oh, boy. And he'd been there thirty five years. And he said, we've had just a few in thirty five years, and they're not high jumpers. They tend to be long distance runners.
Yeah. Man, I didn't okay. What am I gonna do? We start sending out word to universities and all over to try to find someone who's an American Indian that can high jump, and it took about two or three weeks. And I get a call from a kid.
He says, yeah. I'm a high jumper, and I'm American Indian. I wanna play the part. And I'm thinking, oh, man, we're we're gonna have to bring this kid in from Bangladesh or where is this kid? Could be anywhere.
Yeah. Where are you? He said, oh, I I'm a high jumper at this small college called Weber State, which is 10 miles from my house. Anthony Garcia. And he came and met me.
I told him, yeah. Let's, get you going. And I have to tell you this too about Anthony. When he came and met with me, he said, you know, just a week ago, I was sitting in my dorm talking to a roommate, and I said to him, you know what I'd like to do? I'd like to be in a movie.
Woah. Well, one week later, and here I am calling, and Anthony did a great job. Now a lot of your movies deal with miracles. And as I've talked to you before with Escape from Germany, there are two kinds of miracles that that you have seen. One is talking about the miracles that are the topic of the films, miracle that that happened there, and then miracles that happened in making the film.
And I think what you just described is maybe one of those miracles. What are some other miraculous things that you've you've seen that both as part of the story of the film and in making the film? Well, I'll tell you one was miracle for me in making this, Raising the Bar film is that we were having to cast it during Zoom, and I don't like that. Mhmm. But I had no choice.
And I ended up casting a person as Alma that I had not met. They were from a back east. Mhmm. And it just so happened. Here's the miracle.
That person that I cast had booked another film in Utah and was coming out to do that film right before we were starting. So I said, oh, great. Then I'm gonna get with you and talk to you and whatever. I soon as he got here, I took him to BYU track, had him run through some things with the track coach, Mark Dowson. And I was there, and I was flabbergasted.
He was not an athlete. He he could not even he didn't even and he was not an athlete. He was not the person for the role. He he had never been able to pull that off. And so I had three weeks before we started shooting.
And this this sub miracle is that Paul Wutherich was available. I'd worked with him before, but not in a leading role. But he came he was available. He wanted to do it. He got in shape just really quickly and did a terrific job.
Can you imagine the chances that that kid from back east was coming here? And I otherwise, we would have started filming, and I would have probably gotten a couple of days into it and just gone, this isn't gonna work. We gotta pull back and, oh, it would have been an awful situation. So the people jumping, like like Paul, in this case, did they have real track athletes playing their part, you know, as, what do they call them? Stunts stunt people.
Doubles. Stunt doubles. Yeah. Stunt. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, the the truth is, we had several actors that did do some jumping, and Paul did some of the lower level jumping. But then we did double Paul with a BYU athlete. Mhmm. And here's another miracle for me Yeah.
Is that on the trip over to Stockholm, Alma Richards actually did get pink eye. And one of his solutions to that was to wear hats to and he felt like if the sun stayed out of his eye, it helped him. It was better. Mhmm. A hat?
That's how you double people. So now I can put a hat on my my stunt double, and the audience never thinks a thing about it. Yeah. So miracles all the way around there. Oh, yes.
Lots and lots of great things that happened that help us make a film. Yeah. So that that brings me to another question about you personally. It, both have on the miracle question, you know, is it coincidence or is the hand of God in some of these things? And how does your your faith play a role in all of these movies that you make?
I would call myself a man of faith, and I'm a positive person. And I would say when we're talking about are these acts of god or coincidences, I would think I would overall say, I don't know. But I think and I hope that they are blessings from god that that helps us. Mhmm. I've had so many of them happen and so many of them just almost just unexplainable that I don't have any problem saying and other people saying about them that we've received blessings for the films that we're doing.
And the films that you do are are faith based. Is that because you are a man of faith? Here's the truth of that. Here's really the truth. I never said, yeah.
I'm saying it now. I never set out to go, oh, you know what? I'm gonna just I'm gonna make faith based films. What I set out to do is I wanna find the best stories that I can find. Mhmm.
And the best stories we have in our history and culture, they are great stories, and they're better stories than I've been able to find, just with fiction or secular kind of and so I make them. That's why. Yeah. Yeah. Now I've I've noticed, in other films of yours and this one too that the music plays such a big role in in just establishing the the mood and the feeling.
Can you tell us about the music that you used for the background music for this one? I that I thank you for noticing that. Music is a big deal to me Mhmm. Our films. And my son, Tanner, who's the editor, is a very good music editor.
And most of the music that we use in our films are not composed for the film. There are other pieces that we secure that we purchase, and that allows Tan he has the music, and he can edit the picture to the music. So that's not the way it's usually done. Usually, an editor cuts it, and then a composer writes to the picture. And not knocking that.
That's how the greatest films in the world have been made. But on our little budgets, this works really well. And I find strong musical cues. And in this film, we have two in particular. One of them is Homeward Bound by Marta Keane.
And it's if you hear it, it's been around a bit. Yes. But it evokes emotion immediately, I think. And the second one is a Jenny Oaks Baker playing, a piece called, He Lives. And, again, it's just it it's not just a bed of music.
It makes you feel something, and that's what I want the audience to to do. And so we grab that music. We put images to it. We've tried to finesse it so that these great, rises happen in the music when something is rising visually, and hopefully, it all works. Yeah.
Now it was just a year ago that, Escape from Germany came out as I recall. Yep. And, you're doing this one this year. What are the plans for the next one? You have one in the works already?
Yes. This son of mine, Tanner, he's directing the next one, and it's finished. Wow. It's called Standout. It's a heartwarming touching.
It's a documentary, so it's we're handling it. It's a little different for us, but it tells the true story of Ben Care, who is a young man born with cruise on syndrome. You ever heard of it? Never heard of it. No.
It's very rare. Yeah. How almost no one has. It's it creates a very odd look. And Ben grew up being teased and having problems with that.
And I think he overcame it in his life for two reasons. One is he had a great mom that just wouldn't let him just sit in the corner and cry. She just, you get out there and stand out. Just stand out, Ben. And the second thing is he got into wrestling.
And if you've been around wrestling, that's a tough sport. Yeah. Two two people and, you know, and they have nobody else and they're each trying to get each other. And Ben became an all American college wrestler. Now he has a beautiful wife and kids.
Anyway, he's living a great life, and it's a very touching story. Well, that's great. I'll be looking forward to seeing that one too. Well, TC, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been fascinating for me, and we, would encourage our viewers, listeners to take a look at Raising the Bar.
I saw it this past week and was inspired by it, just to say the least. The cinematography, the music, the acting, everything, it's it's the kind of thing that that uplifts you. So if you if you need a boost, see Raising the Bar. Thanks for having me, Jay. You bet.
Be with you. And that's it for this Sunday Blessings podcast. Thanks for joining us. I'm Jay Hildebrandt. Thanks for listening to the Sunday Blessings podcast.
If you enjoy the show, please share, subscribe, and rate the podcast. Sunday Blessings is hosted by Jay Hildebrand and is a production of Riverbend Media Group. For more