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Christians in Cinema · 2009

Ryne Pearson of Knowing

Angela Walker interviewed the Catholic novelist who wrote the first drafts of Nicolas Cage’s Knowing. Christianity Today pointed here. The original file is gone from the public web. This page puts a sourced record back at the URL they cited.

Dense star field in a night sky over a dark horizon

In July 2009, Christianity Today came back toKnowing on DVD week and the writer. One of them was Angela Walker of Christians in Cinema. That conversation lived at this address:christianmovienews.com/christians-in-cinema-ryne-pearson-of-knowing/. For a stretch the path bounced to ChristianCinema.com. Then both copies dropped out of reach. Wayback does not have a useful capture.

We are not going to invent Walker’s questions. What we can do is put the public record under the URL Google and CT still know, so a 2009 citation does not 404 in 2026.

What CT said the lost interview covered

Christianity Today identified Pearson as the Catholic novelist who wrote the first drafts. It said he told Walker, and separately Sr. Rose Pacatte, that later hands changed the story, that the disputed ending was not his, and that he had not set out to make a message movie. He wanted the “natural” reactions people might have if they knew the end was near. He also said the finished film leaves a lot open.

That is the whole of Walker’s piece as it survives in someone else’s summary. Treat it as a citation, not a transcript.

What Pearson said on the record that week

Knowing opened March 20, 2009. Summit and director Alex Proyas took Pearson’s original screenplay, then brought in Juliet Snowden, Stiles White, and Stuart Hazeldine. Cage plays an MIT widower who finds a page of numbers in a school time capsule and watches them match disasters. Ezekiel Films is on the copyright. The picture is not a church-market title. It uses biblical images and then sends them somewhere the Book of Revelation does not.

Two full interviews from those days are still online. On March 27, Dan Phillips talked to Pearson forBiblical Christianity. On March 28, Sr. Rose Pacatte publishedher own conversation. The overlap with CT’s account of Walker is tight enough to trust.

Pearson told Pacatte he did not write a religious assignment. “I approached this not as a message movie or anything like that.” The idea was a question: if you know everything is going to end, does that change how you live. He used the foxhole line. Phillips heard the Goldwyn version of the same point: if you want to send a message, use Western Union.

The first script was smaller. John had lost his wife. The dramatic engine was whether a predicted death could have been stopped. Pearson’s names for father and son were Adam and Noah. The plotted events were assassinations, not the airplane and subway spectacles Proyas shot. Pearson told both interviewers he was pleased Proyas raised the scale. “I could not be more pleased,” Phillips recorded. Pacatte got the same stance on the ending: he did not write it, Proyas did, and it worked.

He also refused to close the movie for anyone. Pacatte asked about the rabbits. Pearson had not written them. He offered Noah’s pairs as one reading and left the rest. Phillips asked if the figures at the end were angels or aliens. Pearson would not pick. He liked a blog fight Pacatte also heard: angels do not need a ship; the children have bodies, so they do. Juliet Snowden, asked the same question elsewhere, said she did not know, and would not tell if she did.

Pearson is Roman Catholic. Pacatte placed him at St. Emydius in Lynwood, with priest uncles on his wife’s side. Phillips asked whether he had “pedal-to-the-metal” evangelical friends. Pearson said yes, immediately, and that he knew the difference in perspective. He had seen Jewish and Christian readings of the movie and was glad of both. He saw the finished cut on opening day, not at the premiere. The line that got him was the reconciliation with the pastor father. Pacatte has John saying, “I know it’s not the end.” Phillips has the pastor saying it and Cage answering, “I know.” Either way, Pearson was pointing at a scene he did not write.

Why the URL still earns a page

Faith-film coverage in 2009 had a habit of asking whether a studio picture with a cross in the frame counted as “ours.” Pearson’s answer, in every surviving interview, was that Knowing was a story that threw off last-things questions, not a tract. CT used Walker’s piece as evidence that Christians had been in the room when the first pages were written, then asked readers whether the biblical furniture was used well. That is still the useful job: name the writers, name what they did and did not control, and do not baptize a Summit release because Ezekiel is on the paperwork.

If you have a copy of Walker’s original Q-and-A, the desk wants it.Send it. Until then, this URL holds the citation, the dates, and the interviews that did survive.

Sources

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