Newt talks with Nicholas Ma, an award-winning director, writer, and producer, about his new film "Leap of Faith." The film follows 12 diverse Christian leaders as they navigate contentious issues and build bonds over a series of retreats in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The discussion delves into Ma's career transition from global economic policy to filmmaking, his inspirations, and the challenges of documentary storytelling. Ma reflects on the influence of Fred Rogers, the subject of his previous documentary "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" and how it shaped his approach to "Leap of Faith." The conversation highlights the importance of storytelling, emotional truth, and the power of vulnerability in creating impactful documentaries.
In this episode of news World. In the new film Leap of Faith, twelve diverse Christian leaders find hope and fellowship at a series of boundary breaking retreats in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Five women and seven men struggle with some of today's most contentious issues. The divisions between them become apparent and tests both their common belief in the universal importance of love and kindness and the bonds they build over the course of a year. Inspiring and provocative, Leap of Faith explores whether we can disagree and still belong to each other in a divided world. The film directed and produced by my guest Nicholas mah He is an award winning director, writer, and producer based in Brooklyn. He produced the documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor about the life of Fred Rogers, which premiered at the twenty eighteen Sundance Film Festival, and most recently the WNBA documentary Unfinished Business, which premiered at the twenty twenty two Tribeca Film Festival. Nicholas, welcome and thank you for joining me on Newtsworld.
Glad to be here, thank you for having me.
Well, I have to start with what you used to do before you began your filmmaking career. As I was learning by your career in preparation of this interview, I understand you covered global economic policy on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after working as a consultant in New York and Shanghai. That's a pretty cool career.
A very different one. Yeah, you know, I think it's important if you want to make documentaries to vols spent time in the world and experience it, not just to look at it from the sidelines.
Since you're in Brooklyn, did you find Shanghai a real education? Yeah.
I think the joke is that everyone feels like they're in Shanghai at the inflection point in the city because it grows and changes so quickly. And I was there from seven to nine, and I felt like, you know, when I came, you know, pizza was catch up on toast, and when I left, it was the largest importer of Neapolitan pizza ovens in the world. So you know, it's constantly changing. And I think so often in the US we have been a place that has embraced change and sort of kept pace and set the pace for change. And then being in Shanghai was a rude awakening of just how fast change can be.
Klosetight were there a couple of years ago. Shanghai on Friday Night is a lot like New York. At least the part of the city we were in is remarkably modern and remarkably part of the larger world.
Absolutely, absolutely, And.
As a historian I found it fun to go down along the river and see the old buildings. It's both a city of the future and a city of the past, although a more recent past than most of China.
That's true, and it's managed to keep that flavor more so than some of the other large cities.
So you're busy covering global economic policy, and then you go to film in What was going on in your head? What led you? Had you always secretly wanted to do film or did that suddenly hit.
You No, I had always wanted to do it. I think I was scared of sort of living in the cultural space and having the courage to sort of say I want to tell stories. It's you know, I came from a family of people in culture, and that felt, you know, like an intimidating choice, and I thought I'd forge my own path. I think when you live in DC. You do realize though, the power of storytelling, right, You realize that everything is far too complicated, and so you have to find a way of telling a story that can have a kind of emotional truth to it, even if you can't fully summarize all of the nuance of an issue. And the same thing making a veritane documentary, right, you have hundreds of hours of footage and you have to condense it to ninety minutes. That feels true, but of course is going to leave out hundreds of hours of conversation.
So you have picked a topic which I think is wonderful in terms of a gentler and more positive America. And that's Fred Rogers. What got you to think about that? Had he influenced your childhood very much? So?
He was the one thirty minutes a day where I think I felt most calm and at peace, which was I think save my parents many days to sort of have those thirty minutes to themselves too. But you know there was a way in which somehow he could speak so universally to such universal ideas, and yet they would feel so specific to a child, whether you were living in downtown Chicago or in Nebraska or in Texas or where we were in Massachusetts. You know, somehow he seemed to speak to the essence of what children needed to hear.
When you were doing the documentary Won't You be My Neighbor? Did you learn things about Fred Rogers that surprised you?
Absolutely? I think there are two beautiful sort of surprises about Fred. One is the importance of his faith, right. I think we forget that he's a Presbyterian minister, and because he was so careful to make sure that the way he spoke to children didn't have the valance of his personal faith, and really inhumanist, universal terms, it's easy to not realize just how connected it is to the books that were on his shelf, books by people like Henry Now and by Bonhoeffer, etc. That sort of shaped the way he thought about the world and how love operates in the world. And the second is how much he was committed to his own personal growth. Right. He was never attached to saying I know everything now, And I think perhaps it is that love command of his being able to say, if I love you, it means there must be something that being in relationship with you will teach me. And he was always open to that experience, and I think that's a really hard thing to do. I find it hard to do personally, and I really admire that. To see one's life as being not a fixed position but sort of a vector that points towards something is hard, but I think a really admirable quality.
Well, you went from that, which was very well received, But now you're picking and choosing topics. How did you pick the next couple of films? How do you say yes to this and not to that.
My mentor and the producer on Leap of Faith, Morgan Neville, always reminded me that with a film, you're essentially getting a graduate degree in a topic. So it's better be something that you're interested enough in to sustain you over a couple of years because you're stuck with it. And I think that's really wise advice. I think I'm always interested in stories of people that are trying to do something really difficult, and where if it's difficult enough, whether they succeed or fail becomes less relevant than the journey of watching them try.
I mean, if you get bored by the topic.
They're going to get bored, absolutely, So.
It'd better be something that you have some level of passion.
About exactly, and they will feel it. They will feel it because all of a sudden, something will become a little trite or a little cliche or a little bit phoned in, and you know, all of a sudden, you feel like it's an advertisement or like it's a schlocky piece, as opposed to something that sort of keeps gripping you as you go through it.
What something pops in your head and your boy, that would be an interesting documentary, you know.
I think it's a feeling. For me, it's do I want to feel this feeling. I think film is an emotional medium. It's not really an analytical medium. It can be both. It can convey information, but I think one of the things that it does uniquely well is to convey an emotional experience. Right. That experience can be melancholy or fear or joy or It's not that it's only one emotion, but it can convey emotions that are hard to convey simply with words or in an essay or in an article or a speech. So I think often at the core of each of these films is a feeling that I am longing for or curious about, and that I think is when I know that it connects to the story. The story can be intellectually interesting to me, but unless I know what is the feeling that is at the core of this, then it doesn't feel like a film. When those two things come together, then all of a sudden, I'm like, ah, Now this has the kind of juxtaposition of sort of head and heart that can take at the distance, it's a beautiful day in this neighbor, A beautiful day for a neighbor.
Would you be mine? Could you be mine? When you made Won't You Be My Neighbor? Do you have any idea that to become the twelfth largest grossing documentary? I mean, it's grossed over twenty two million dollars, and I should say it's still available streaming on Netflix. Did you have any idea would be that successful? No?
And I think if you try to make something like that often it can fall flat. I think we knew, probably a little bit before the world knew that it was going to be successful, just because we kept on finding unusual audiences that it spoke to right that all of a sudden, you'd share a movie that was made by Morgan and me and Karen, and all of a sudden, it's speaking to someone that you didn't think it was going to speak to, or that you didn't know, and you realize, Okay, now there's something within this. There's a power within this that we're becoming aware of, and that's a really special things. So I think we probably had a little bit of a heads up, but no, I don't think we knew from the beginning. And I think if we had thought that it was going to be from the beginning, you then make choices that actually dull the overall experience because you're so keen to make something feel universal that it doesn't have the kind of life and vivacity to it that it needs to.
And won't you be my neighbor? One of the themes is love. Did that consciously carry over to your new film Leap of Faith?
It's more in hindsight that I know that you know? I think after screening what you be my neighbors? So many times one of the questions people would always ask is where the Fred Rogers of today? And I didn't have a good answer, but I didn't like the kind of pessimism that it created that people would sort of say, we can't have nice things if only we had fred back kind of thing. I don't like that rear view mirror feeling. And so I think it meant that I was primed when I read about Michael's work in the Colossian Forums work to see it as something that looked forward, and that was exciting to me. You know, it's like a different way of being together that we don't see very often, and that I'm not even sure we believe as possible, and I'm not sure I believed was possible, And so I was curious to sort of investigate that as sort of you know, what is the compliment and won't you be my neighbor? What is the grown up version that we're looking for today?
In some way, you're looking at twelve really diverse Christian leaders. You have five women, seven men. I don't know much about this, but they're brought together by Michael Golker of the Colossian Form. What is the Colossian Forum.
It's an organization that takes as its inspiration Scripture right Colossians one seventeen, All things hold together in Christ. Their point is, let's make that true on earth. Right, Let's bring congregations together, Let's bring people together. They had never done it with a group of pastors. They had never done it with this diverse group, and I think as they watch sort of the tenuousness of how our country is holding together and how Ristianity is holding together right now, they wanted to try something bigger, and so they brought these twelve pastors together and that's where sort of the film came in, where we said, look that if you're willing to bring them together and ask them to be on camera from the beginning, there's a story there because I think it's something that all of us are curious. What would happen if we actually spoke to each other and is there something on the other side of that or do we all just have to walk away at the end of the day and sort of take our marbles and go home.
So, if in fact the dialogue had failed, you wouldn't have had a film.
Well, I think it would have been a film with a very different emotional core.
Okay, yeah, But as it is, you found a level of commitment and a level of mutual concern that I think is pretty surprising and encouraging given everything we're living in.
I think that's right, you know, I think about it a lot like having kids. You know, you have a child, and everyone tells you it's really hard, it's exhausting, but it's also wonderful. I think people don't tell you that about having friends that are different from you. Most people tell you have a friend who believes that, you know, get them out of your life. It's not worth it, not worth the time. And I think what I learned in watching these pastors over the course of a year is it's really worth it. What they mean to each other at the end of that process. Unexpected as it is, you know, they would go to the mat for each other even though they still disagree really profoundly on stuff. And I think we need that ballast right now.
Here are twelve people allowing you to film them. Now, do they have any editorial rights or it's all you?
Yeah, it's a leap of faith.
At the very beginning. How did you build that kind of trust? I mean, the idea that I'm going to go in and have a totally open conversation and have this guy I don't really know filming me and then he gets to edit me. I mean, they were really investing a lot of hope in you.
Absolutely, But I think that there is sort of a beauty in that, you know, doing the same thing here in a sense, right, you know, we're having a conversation where I don't know where you're going to take it or what you're going to ask, but I have a faith that our conversation is going to yield something interesting and beautiful. And I think that assumption, that decision actually has a kind of power. I think the very fact that the pastors explicitly said we're trusting you put a kind of onus on me to do right by that trust right and say, okay, look, I don't want anyone to seem like a villain or flattened by this experience.
How often did they meet and how.
Long they were meeting? Basically monthly sometimes more. They had three big retreats, week long retreats where they all were together for a number of days at a time.
How many total hours of film did you have?
I think a little over three hundred hours of film?
And how long is the documentary?
Ninety minutes?
So you have the same problem, which is you've probably had four or five documentaries worth of great stuff, but you couldn't get an audience to watch six hours.
That's right. The number of people that were like, you should make a series out of this, and I thought to myself, tell me that you would watch a series out of this and we can talk. But you know, I think there's also a kind of discipline to that distillation.
Right.
It makes you ask the questions of really, what was this about, because otherwise it becomes a survey course. Right, you know, here are seventeen topics, and let's go through them one after another.
You could create an archival website with all three hundred hours and people who are fascinated by the ninety if they wanted to, or if graduate students who were into this stuff. It's the greatest of all gradual worlds. You too get to sit for three hundred hours and try to figure out how it fits into a dissertation exactly.
You know, we would happily make footage available to someone who wanted to study. And I think sort of a halfway point between that. The Calaution Forum has podcasts with each of the pastors, So if you want to double down on anyone, there's sort of sixty to ninety minutes with each of them.
You must have some sense of exhilaration when it's done. And now here's the package. I mean, what does that feel like?
You know, one of the strange things about a movie is you're not there when most people are seeing it, right, you know, it's not like a live performance, and so the exhilaration for me is engaging with someone who's just watched the movie and hearing their reaction, and that, to me is where I feel a kind of deep contentment and satisfaction. Right. The stories are terrible, right, like one in six people stop talking to a family member in twenty sixteen, one and four after twenty twenty. We've only screened it a handful of times at this point. It's now in theaters and obviously that'll grow. But the number of families that have reconnected after watching this movie is really startling. One guy said, I was estranged from my parents, and I texted them during the movie and we saw each other the next day for three hours. Right, that's beautiful. And you know, obviously the movie isn't about family dynamics. It's special pastors. But that's a beautiful thing.
The very first time you show one of your documentaries, do you have a certain amount of butterflies about how the audience will react?
Oh, my gosh, yes, yes, not only that you have these butterflies and then they're upended because an audience is always different from what you think. So all of a sudden, people are laughing in moments that you didn't expect them to laugh. They're crying in moments that you didn't expect them to cry when it's good, and that's like heartening, but also increases both the butterflies and the adrenaline because you're like, oh, this is now a new thing than it was in a small room, you know, with your editor months and months at a time trying to figure out should we move this scene here? Should we flop these two soundbites?
Your father Yo Yama is extraordinary from a world figure. What was it like growing up with that level of performance, talent and sheer ability?
You know? I think it's part of why I went into consulting in politics, because he was not active in those spaces.
You know.
I think it's taken me most of my adult life to see the path that he's forged as a gift and not a burden. And I think it will always be a little bit of both, But to see that and not be intimidated by it and feel like that makes me to compare myself against it and instead to say, wow, how beautiful to see that someone cared to be this kind of person in the world. And I'm always going to be a different person. But it doesn't mean that I can't take heart from that and say, Okay, I can try to be a similar kind of person in the world too. In my own way. I think it's taken me a long time to see that as a really joyful coincidence versus one that felt threatening.
There are some people who become so large that it's a challenge. It doesn't mean you don't love them, but it's just almost overpowering. I think at times.
It's true, and it has been for me at times.
I mean, it's very clever on your part at a pretty early age to go. I think Alvino Zoni's not in so you're comfortable over here, you know, consulting and working in the Senate, nobody's rushing up to you and automatically being intimidated, and you get to forge who you are absolutely.
I think the question is, then how do you then make the subsequent decision right? How do you make decisions that are not that are your own and aren't sculpted by either a fear or an allure being close or far away from this person.
Those initial early stages, you're neither trying to make a decision to reject him or to affirm him. You're trying to make a decision about who you are, and that that is being able to maturely sidestep the two great options exactly. That's pretty remarkable comment on you.
Well, that's kind of you to say. I think it is something that I've struggled with, and I'm grateful to have found my way to where I am today. I'm sure you see many many young people struggle with this issue, you know.
And it's not just people who are as famous as you. Your mom, me and my dad was a career soldier for twenty four years, and I was surrounded by the army as I grew up, and it took a while to sort of sort all that out and figure out which parts were me and which parts were the things around me that I hadn't even thought about. So it's kind of an interesting phoen that sense, given how many cool things you're doing and the fact that leap offaithmovie dot com is a place people can go to to get tickets and watching this upward curve as you're getting better and better. Do you have a sense yet of what your next documentary will be? I don't.
I mean, I'm so laser like focused on this and making sure that it reaches audiences. I know that it will fall in the same world. And I don't mean faith, but this question of like doing incredibly difficult things and watching that process, right, I mean, it's funny. Someone asked me about doing a documentary on the four chairs of the appropriations committees in Congress and how does the money get spent? And I always thought that was such a fascinating idea. I think the challenge is always how do you find people that are willing to be vulnerable and willing to expose what's hard in an effort to show what's beautiful. And so that's what I'm always looking for. Who's willing to do that.
Maybe in that case, to find four retired chairs.
That's exactly right.
They have all the knowledge and none of the risk exactly.
But of course it's the risk that we see as a viewer that makes us lean in. I can't believe they're saying that. I can't believe they're telling you that.
If you could find a way to get permission, maybe working with the House historian, could you actually tape a real negotiating session and then interview the people who afterwards know what were you thinking, how did you do it, what were your goals? You might produce something very profound.
Who knows. But I think we underestimate what happens in those rooms, how hard it is, how dull it is, how long it is. And it's important to see these things work because, just like hearing pastors talk, all of a sudden, we realize the humanity behind everyone. And I think when you tell stories that are very specific, whether it's what happens inside of how Senate conference or whether it's what happens with twelve pastors, they become universal more easily, you know, And all of a sudden we say, hey, I can't just write off people who are going to vote for someone other than me, that sort of to deny their very humanity. That doesn't work. I can't write off someone who has a different belief It doesn't even have to agree with them, but I can't write them off as human beings. It's a very scary thing to do to somebody.
I think the heart of what makes a free society different is that you have to try to find some way to understand each other's common humanity.
I completely agree.
It's not as clear to me when you're dealing with people who genuinely want to kill you. But I think inside the framework of something like America, you really have to work over time, and that's part of why Clinton and I were able to reach across partisanship and you do things like balance the budget for four straight years. We had to meet thirty five days face to face and listen to each other's stories and try to understand, you know, and then walk off and figure out, well, what does that mean? And it takes that kind of vulnerability and that kind of intensity. I have a hunt. You're at the beginning of an extraordinary career. You have the rhythm here, you have the understanding both of what makes movies a unique vehicle and of how to find stories that draw people in and make them feel enriched by having experienced you.
I'm very grateful to hear you say that. I admire what you said about working for thirty five days. You don't know day twelve that there's going to be something at the end of day thirty five.
Actually you don't know day thirty four right, because we might have gone sixty days. What we did know is we were both committed for the country and we weren't going to quit. We didn't know when the end would come, but we knew we weren't going to quit until we got there. I want to thank you for joining me. This has been delightful. Your new film, Leap of Faith is remarkable. It's in theaters now. Our listeners can watch the trailer and purchase theater tickets at Leap of faithmovie dot com. That's Leap of faithmovie dot com, and we'll also have it posted on our show page. So thank you for joining me, and I look forward to your next great adventure.
I look forward to sharing it with you.
Thank you to my guest, Nicholas Ma. You can get a link to buy tickets to his new film Leap of Faith on our show page at Newtsworld dot com. News World is produced by Gingrish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guardnsei Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley, special thanks to the team at Gingrish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my three free weekly columns at gingwishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.