-----From an interview by Jeff Overstreet with Scott Derrickson, the director of "The Exorcism of Emily Rose"

JO: At Seattle Pacific, our mission reads, “Engaging the culture, changing the world.” How would you encourage Christian moviegoers — especially those who are aspiring artists and filmmakers — to proceed in engaging with art and culture?

SD: Part of the answer is ... not viewing Hollywood, or any of the resources of artistic and entertainment output, as places to be “conquered for Christ.” They are places where Christians who are artistic and want to be creative must go and must be. And I think that is where the starting point needs to be.

Assuming that people have their spiritual life together, the starting point is not even about integration; it certainly isn’t about occupation; the starting point should be excellence.

The fault line running through Christian interests in the arts in America is that they don’t love the arts enough. The problem with Christians who want to be involved with Hollywood, for the most part, is that they don’t love movies enough. They don’t love them enough to demonstrate the kind of commitment to excellence that it takes to succeed in the field.

That is, I believe, our Christian duty [as artists] — is to create great cinema, and to write great novels, and to create great music. I believe that God is glorified by excellence. That’s why I believe that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is uniquely glorifying to God. It was made out of spiritual passion, yes, but it was a demonstration of the highest order of excellence in the realm of painting. And I believe that that skill and craft, as it is increasingly excellent, is increasingly glorifying to God. God is a creator and he made us to be co-creators with him.

Christians need to get their act together… and realize that it’s not about being better than the world. It’s about being as good as God intended us to be at creating things, and to become more and more creative, and more and more original, and more and more innovative. Insofar as we do that, we will inevitably impact culture. Impacting the culture shouldn’t be the goal — it will become the inevitable byproduct of glorifying God through the work itself.

I don’t think Flannery O’Conner sat down and thought, “Hm. How could I change the culture?” I just think that she loved books, and she loved words, and she loved stories, and she became as skilled at that as any writer of her day. And the result was that she wrote classic stories.

When Bono accepted a Grammy, I remember that he said something along the lines of [how] he wanted to thank God, but he always imagined God looking down and going, “No, no, no, no. Don’t thank Me; I hated that song.” [laughs]

If there’s a second part to the answer, it would be this: Christians must come to a point where they appreciate and embrace, wholeheartedly, a work of art because of its aesthetic qualities alone. [Christians] — even those who seem favorable towards cinema — tend to respond only to the content and the meaning of the content of the film. And I’m not going to disparage that; that’s a huge part of cinema. But it’s not necessarily the primary part of any given film.

It’s almost as though a fan of Renaissance art is standing in front of Picasso’s work, trying to extract the moral lessons of adultery from his paintings about his various exploits with women, and trying to dissect Picasso’s cosmology or anthropology. Yet what they’re missing is that the greatness of Picasso really has nothing to do with that. Is it there? Yeah, it’s there. Can you find it in there? Sure, I guess so. [But] the greatness of Picasso was form and style. That person standing there should just look and recognize that God breathed through this man and gave the world some of the greatest form and style ever put on canvas. That is as glorifying as the content of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

I’ve had so many arguments with people about “Kill Bill, Volume I and II.” I fundamentally reject the revenge ethic of “Volume I,” especially. It’s anti-Christian. It is an attitude toward the world that I think is [laughs] pretty destructive. And the movie borders on reckless violence. But all I can say is I love those films. I think that they are such masterful demonstrations of form and style, that they are almost completely redeemed by it. As a filmgoer and as a Christian, I don’t have to react violently against the fact that it’s a revenge movie. I know that I think revenge is bad. But I don’t know that that movie is going to propagate that idea in any kind of dangerous way. What I, as a Christian, respond [with] whenever I watch it is, “My goodness, what form! And what style! And what beauty! And, boy, I can just feel the creative passion and the excellence in that work!” I’m inspired by it. I take away something very rich and beautiful from it, and I feel better as a human being for having that experience.

That is a place that, that few Christians are living. It’s an important thing for us to get to a place where we really understand that form and style are sitting on the same level as content as things to be appreciated in cinema. My favorite films are films that embody both. I can make a good argument those are the best ones. It’s why Kurosawa is my favorite director, He was always hitting a “10” on the aesthetic and form meter, and he was always hitting a “10” on the meaning and content meter. He just never wanted to let one outweigh the other; he just wanted them both to be supreme at all times. And, and he made about 10 or 15 masterpieces because of that.