Hollywood multi-hyphenate Todd Komarnicki first burst onto the public’s radar in 2003 as one of the producers of the Christmas comedy classic Elf. From there he went on to demonstrate his versatility across several projects and genres, notably the dramatic screenplay for the much-acclaimed 2016 biopic Sully (based on the book by the late Jeffrey Zaslow).
With Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin, Komarnicki is again in dramatic biopic territory as he takes on the life and times of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who resisted the evil of Nazi-era Germany—even to the point of pushing the bounds of the Sixth Commandment and becoming involved in a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Most people today, including me, would say he was justified in doing so, but what are the implications for our current politics when comparisons to Hitler are thrown about rather loosely? That’s just one of the profound questions raised by the thought-provoking film, which opens in theaters November 22, which, coincidentally, is the 61st anniversary of the JFK assassination.
JWK: What drove you to take on the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
Todd Komarnicki: The fact is: Dietrich tracked me down. I said no to writing this movie originally. Then I said no to directing it for a year and a half. God was not interested in my no. He was interested in His yes. It just pursued me until I finally gave in. Then, when I gave in, I found such profound fruits, such deep joy, and a kind of courage in a person that I hadn’t really experienced before. Certainly I’ve seen courage and written about courage, but I just found Dietrich to be at another level: a man really willing to hang it all on the line—everything he believed, everything he had—and trade it in to do the right thing.
How did you first encounter him?
When I was in my early 20s, I read The Cost of Discipleship. So I knew Bonhoeffer. I knew his photograph was one of those photos you always saw at Christian bookstores. He was kind of on the Mount Rushmore of Christianity. I encountered his story when I got a call about a movie that was going to be made about Mister Bonhoeffer. The money had been raised and there was a director. [I was asked if] I would be willing to take a peek at the script and maybe rewrite it. I wasn’t available schedule-wise, so I said, “Well, I can’t rewrite it, but I’ll read it. I’m happy to give you my professional opinion of it.”
Anyway, I read the script and it just wasn’t worthy of the man. It wasn’t worthy of the man’s story. In fact, Dietrich wasn’t even the main character in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer story. A fictional character had more lines of dialogue and more pages of space in the script. So I said to the person who had called me, “You guys have to start over. You need to make a movie first and foremost from Dietrich’s point of view. Secondly, he did all these cinematic things in his life. You have to have them in a movie, otherwise you’re gonna lose all your investors’ money.” To their credit, Manuel and Camille Kampouris, who were the chief investors and the people who put all this together, listened to me. They said, “OK, we’ll start from scratch. We’ll wait till you’re available, and we’ll follow your vision.” That was a huge blessing.
Maybe it was also a blessing that it was delayed because the story seems more timely than ever right now.
Yes. Timing. I’m a big believer in the fullness of time. I know before I got involved they had worked on it for six years. So for them, it’s now 12 years of waiting—but yes, as I’ve been saying in interviews, Dietrich is not just a man for alltime. He’s a man for our time.
What do you think his story has to teach us in our time?
So many things. I think his deep humanity mixed with his heroism. I love that he’s a hero that follows through and does everything that you want in a hero in a movie, but he also wrestles with doubts. He wrestles with the cost. He wonders if he’s doing the right thing. He’s confused by the fact that he knows that he’s following God’s will—and certainly God would not want the Nazis to rise—but they continue to rise. There was real evil in the world. He was called to fight it. I think his courage is incredibly relatable.
The timing is perfect because we currently live in an era where [examples of] political courage are few and far between. Mostly people are at their bravest when they’re talking to their own constituency, when they’re talking within their own silo. That’s actually not political courage at all. Political courage is when you speak on behalf of the forgotten, and it can cost you everything. That’s real political courage. So I’m hoping that on both sides of the aisle—because both sides of the political divide in our country currently claim a connection to Bonhoeffer, [which] I think is a beautiful thing—he can broker the distance between the two as groups come together and say, “What do we have in common?” instead of “What do have against each other?”
If Bonhoeffer were with us today, what would his message be?
It would be the same. It is love for others. I think he would be talking about the Last Supper. I think he’d be talking about … what did Jesus do? He did not exert power. He actually did the opposite. He wrapped a towel around His waist, He washed His disciples’ feet, and He said to His disciples, “Go and do the same.” What Jesus knows—and what Dietrich knew—is that real power resides in service. Real power resides in love. It doesn’t live in the typical sense of power—as you see in the movie, when he preaches to Kaiser Wilhelm and he calls out the Gestapo right in front of him. The Church is not supposed to be a place of power. The Church is supposed to be a place of love, healing, and unity. I think Dietrich would be saying the same thing today.
What is the proper role of churches in politics? Like you say, both sides kind of claim Bonhoeffer. Everybody thinks they’re right. So how do churches engage in the issues that are going on now?
Well, I think the word church is the problematic word. In Dietrich’s time, the German Church was an actual thing. It was the Catholics and the Lutherans. They had enormous power. They were political forces. They were institutions that represented ideas. They were muscular and specific. When I look at what’s described as the American Church, I don’t think it embraces all of American Christendom. I think that certain folks think that they’re the Church and other folks are not the Church—or other folks are the broken Church and need to be like the Church that is the right and properChurch. I think that’s the totally wrong focus.
First of all, there are so many denominations. It’s so split wide what it is to be a follower of Christ. So church becomes a problematic word for me. The thing that is not problematic is the Body of Christ. Christians believe that all those who claim Jesus are members of the Body of Christ. It’s very clear in Scripture that “the eye does not say to the ear I don’t need you and the leg does not say to the arm go away.” What we should be leaning into currently are not our differences. It’s not “I don’t like the way you walk” or “I think you look funny.” The eye and the ear, they need each other. They’re going to be different, they’re going to do different things—but we need each other.
I think Bonhoeffer would bridge that gap because, for instance, if you look down a political divide, each side can learn from the other side. [For] each side, their relationship with Jesus has to be bigger than their relationship to a candidate or a party. It must, or the politics have become an idol to the person. So if we keep our eyes on Christ and we keep our eyes on knowing that the Body of Christ may not agree about everything but remains a body—and we can’t tear ourselves apart—then we can begin to talk to each other and, maybe, instead of raising our hands against each other, [we can] start to share ideas and start to not necessarily change people’s minds but open people’s hearts so there’s not this demonization, which is not helping anybody.
One issue tackled in this movie is the debate over pacifism versus activism. One of the problems in Nazi Germany may have been that people were too passive, but we don’t want political violence. What are your thoughts on that? It’s a tough question in a way. How do you discern when pacifism has gone the distance and activism is appropriate? You also don’t want to provide an excuse for any kind of violence.
I think we’ve got to practice this thing that is the one weapon in the history of the world that is undefeated. That is love. A radical act now is love. If you look at anything, the civil rights movement was a great movement. These people from all walks of life interlocked arms, walked across bridges, and were attacked by dogs and fire hoses. They just loved their way right through it. What happened in the end? Things changed. Love is bigger, certainly bigger than violence. We don’t need violence in our country. We need to slow down and get into listening and loving.
But Dietrich Bonhoeffer did take part in a plot to kill Hitler, right?
Yeah, no question. I think it’s very wise to remember that he decided to join that after seeing the footage that had been snuck out of the Abwehr that showed what he sensed was happening—but then he actually saw was happening—in these prison camps, these death camps that were existing and springing up all over Germany and ultimately would be where he would lose his life. I don’t think you can make a straight line between the images he saw and the change of his heart toward trying to strike out Hitler, and the current moment in America.
No, that was an extreme situation, but we are seeing a kind of rampant anti-Semitism going on in our country and around the world. What would he have to say about that?
Well, it’s heart crushing. First of all, there shouldn’t be any anti-Semitism from the Christian point of view because we’re brothers. There’s no Christian faith without the Jewish faith. God chose to speak to the world through the Jews. So there should be no anti-Semitism from a Christian point of view. I think there’s always “othering” of groups. You can go anywhere—the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, what’s happening in Sudan, what happened in the Balkan states when they broke up. … Mankind has the capacity to “other” their neighbor in very rapid fashion, and to demean and to dehumanize. So this is an ongoing human problem. It’s exacerbated now by the fact that things are upside down in the Middle East and there’s war and there’s incredible suffering. That allows people sometimes an excuse to feel like they can double down on a dark choice they should not be making in terms of attacking groups of people.
And, of course, while everyone is opposed to Hitler, we sometimes tend to label our political opponents as being the equivalent of Hitler.
Yeah, but again it’s giving too much credence to the political parties. That’s not where we’re supposed to be having our conversation. If politics has supplanted spirituality, if power has supplanted the Sermon on the Mount, then we’re not looking to Jesus. We’re making idols of things. You can make and idolize anything. You can make an idol of your kids, your wife, your pet, your football team. There’s no question that we’re at risk when we keep equating whatever is happening in the political realm as the only thing that’s happening. We live in history. History is long. God is love. The victory has already been claimed. Death is dead. Jesus did that work on the Cross when he walked out of that tomb. When we forget that and we start just thinking this moment is the only moment, when we sort of proof-text and go, “History!” when it proves our point but not when it doesn’t prove our point, we’re just looking at the wrong thing. I really feel like our gaze—the thing that we’re focusing on—has to return to Jesus and let that inform political choice and how we live and love. But Jesus first, not second. Not party first. Not nation first. Jesus first.
You know, Bonhoeffer’s story reminds me a bit, more recently, of Navalny in Russia.
Oh, yes! Brilliant! Totally agree. Navalny is a modern Bonhoeffer, without question.
So what do you hope people take from the movie?
I hope they take the fact that this person, despite all his extraordinary gifts, was still an everyman, was still a guy that wrestled on a fundamental level with was he doing the right thing. Even Jesus said in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Could this cup pass from me?” Because that is such a key part of what it is to be alive. There’s nothing wrong about doubt. There’s nothing wrong about fear—but we must take that to Jesus, who promises us that “perfect love casts out all fear,” and we are perfectly loved.
I’m always struck by this scripture because it’s misquoted. One of my favorite scriptures from Philippians is where it says, “Be anxious for nothing but in all things make your requests known to God and the peace of Christ that passes all understanding will guard your heart and mind.” That’s the scripture, but it’s misquoted because everyone leaves out the verse before. Do you know what the verse before is?
No, I’m gonna fail that test. What is it?
That’s OK. Nobody knows, because it’s always misquoted. The verse before is “The Lord is near. Be anxious for nothing.” That is why we can be anxious for nothing. It’s not, “Hey, tough guy. Be anxious for nothing. Cut it out. Pray and it will all be all right.” No. “The Lord is near,” or in some translations, “The Lord is at hand, therefore, be anxious for nothing.” That makes all the difference in the world! When we take it off ourselves, when we stop saying, “Me! Me! Me! Me!” and we say, “Him! Him! Him! Him!” and lean on Jesus, then everything transforms. That’s the reset button we need to hit. Not being self-righteous but being self-aware. To be self-aware is to say, “I am a sinner saved by grace and that is the way that I should treat the world—as one who has received grace and can offer only one thing in return, which is grace.”
On a lighter note, it’s been 21 years since the premiere of the movie that really started your career —which was Elf—on November 7, 2003. Why do you think the film has held up so well and become a yearly tradition for so many people?
That’s a great question. My feeling about Elf’s longevity is that American comedy for the last 40 or 50 years has essentially been comedy of humiliation, comedy of discomfort, of “Dad’s an idiot!” or “Boy does wrong with girl and can’t overcome it.” Everything is just designed to make you feel miserable. … Elf is unique because Elf is not a comedy of humiliation. Elf is a comedy of life, love, and light. In fact, the central character is so impenetrably joyful that the darkness is the thing that gets changed. The darkness is the thing that gets humiliated. So people, when they come drink from the fountain, they get this spritely feeling—this feeling of hope and laughing with not at. That is why I think it has stuck around.
It’s also very nonpolitical. So much of what’s in comedy today is a dig at one side or the other. It’s a movie that everybody can watch. Like you say, nobody’s being humiliated.
That’s it! You’re right! This goes back to our current political climate. We’re more interested in humiliation and hammering people than we are in offering grace and saying, “What’s the way we can connect?” We’re all human beings, even the people we wildly disagree with. We have to extend with love—and from love—because we are loved. I remember a pastor of mine years ago always prayed, “Thank You for loving us” … That is the source of our love. If we are running out of love for the world it is because we are not tapping into the source of the One who made us.
