I’ve been reading Jeffrey Overstreet’s writing about film (and faith, and fantasy) for nearly 20 years now. In that time we’ve struck up a friendship, anchored in a shared love of movies and movie music (quirky shout-out to Andrew Powell’s anachronistic score for Ladyhawke and Trevor Jones’ enchanted music for The Dark Crystal). I continue to admire the way he grapples, so sincerely and sensitively, with the deeper themes of cinema and how he connects those themes with his own pursuit of a principled life, a life of integrity… and an endless thirst for the divine.
In this fun and almost confessional conversation, Jeffrey shares his history with Spielberg/Williams, really starting with a desperate quest in his youth to obtain a forbidden grail: Raiders of the Lost Ark. We discuss what these film stories meant to a young person of faith, and how his own maturing changed his relationship to their meaning, along with his thoughts on where Spielberg and Williams have attained exalted heights—and where he thinks their steps may have faltered.
It’s a robust, religioso conversation and one that is very much of a piece with Jeffrey’s career project and his new book, Lost & Found in the Cathedral of Cinema (coming May 12 from Broadleaf Books), which I have read and highly recommend.
Find him and his writings at jeffreyoverstreet.com.
