Douglas Urbanski knows what a good film looks like, because he’s made lots of them: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Darkest Hour;The Social Network; and now Slow Horses, an espionage thriller series made in London for Apple TV+. But we’re talking good as in morally good. What, I wanted to know, was a Catholic film like – that is, one made by a Catholic like him? Was it somehow infused with Catholic values, not overtly, but expressing an underlying world view?  

He knows exactly what I mean, and he says frankly that, except for The Exorcist, “whenever you make a movie which is a Catholic religious movie, the movie will fail.” But he asks unexpectedly: “Want to find a means of moral conversion? The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote a Catholic story. And he asked: how do we tell the story? How do we make the story relevant? The one thing that must be in place is that people involved must be committed. Mel is committed, he’s a traditionalist Catholic. Mel made his movie and other studios jumped in on the act. But they flopped.”