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"The script was very surprising to me," says Holland. "The structure and style of the story were very appealing to me in the context of this subject. It was not a horror film or a satire or a story about corruption. It was a very direct and serious approach – and I felt that the subject of faith, which is so important in the world, deserved such a treatment."She continues: "I think I also identified with the main character, Father Frank, and felt that I could project myself into this questioning priest and make the film very personal."
The Third Miracle is based on a novel by Richard Vetere, a lapsed American Catholic who wanted to explore his faith by coming to terms with the idea of miracles. Vetere wanted the answer to a very complex question: do miracles really occur or do we create them ourselves in the hopes of fending off the darkness of our fates? From the beginning, he knew there would be more questions than answers.
Vetere intensively researched the Catholic tradition of saints and miracles, rummaging through ancient church documents and reading about such modern apparitions as crying statues. In a small, black book called The Ordinary Process of Canonization -- the Vatican handbook outlining the rules for sainthood -- he came across a sentence that inspired him: "a priest, a postulator, will be assigned by the Vatican to investigate miracles and evaluate if the candidate has lived with heroic virtue." The book went on to call this priest a "spiritual detective."
Says Vetere: "In reading this, I immediately was struck by the powerful idea of a spiritual detective. I could see my novel laid out before me – this spiritual detective, a priest riddled with doubts similar to my own, who goes on a perilous and suspenseful investigation that brings his battle with faith to the fore."
It took Vetere a decade to write his novel. Publishers Weekly lauded its "balance between the sacred and the profane" and its "appreciation of the mysteries of faith that is as genuine as his sense of everyday gritty reality."
This latter quality was key to making the story cinematic for Agnieszka Holland. "One of the main reasons I wanted to do this movie is because on the one hand it deals with the sociological substance of urban America in a very realistic way, and it also shows miracles in an equally realistic way. This interested me. It was very surprising and provocative. The miracles are not metaphors in this story. The challenge of telling this story in a matter-of-fact manner was something that excited me. I really spent a long time thinking about how to show this miracle, without special effects, without any subterfuge, just as something that happens the same way rain happens."
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