A producer’s dream arrives on screen

By Ed McNulty

Film producer Ken Wales, right, chats with actor Ioan Gruffudd, who plays British abolitionist William Wilberforce in Amazing Grac. Photo © Samuel Goldwyn Films/Roadside Attractions

I first met Ken Wales at a media conference sponsored by the Presbyterian Media Mission at San Francisco Theological Seminary several years ago. The Hollywood producer, a Presbyterian, held his audience spellbound as he recounted his many years spent in television and film. He started out as an actor playing the daughter’s boyfriend on the TV show “Father Knows Best.” As a producer he worked with Blake Edwards (The Pink Panther), and was the driving force that brought to CBS Television Catherine Marshall’s book Christy, garnering several Emmy Awards.

At the conference Wales mentioned that he was working on two projects, a sequel to Chariots of Fire, and a film on the 18th-century British abolitionist and member of Parliament, William Wilberforce. When I talked with him via telephone in mid-February, Wales was in a Virginia Beach hotel preparing for an interview on “The 700 Club” about his Wilberforce film, now titled Amazing Grace. From Virginia he was scheduled to go to Wilberforce University, near Dayton, Ohio, to screen and discuss his film at the only institution in the world to bear the name of the great British abolitionist.

“The film has been very well received,” Ken said. “At its New York premiere an associate of Barbara Walters said that the audience gave it a standing ovation. Recently I showed it at the Earl Lectures at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, and the reception there was also enthusiastic.” Wales said he had been working on this project for six or seven years. “Originally I wanted to do a film not about Wilberforce, but rather about a man I admired very much, John Newton, the author of the hymn ‘Amazing Grace.’”

He explained the Newton-Wilberforce connection: John Newton, once captain of a slave ship, was converted to Christianity while still captaining his ship. Much later, when he retired from the slave trade, he realized that the profession and the Christian faith were incompatible, and turned against the practice. Wilberforce came to know Newton and his stories of the horrors of the slave trade when he lived with his aunt and uncle for a brief period as a boy. His aunt and uncle, evangelical Christians, were friends of Newton’s.

Wilberforce’s widowed mother, however, was a  “proper” Anglican, who believed that Christianity was one of those innocuous things one put up with on Sundays for propriety’s sake. Horrified that her 12-year-old son was imbibing the religious fervor of the “Methodists,” she traveled to the estate and brought her son home, despite the pleading of his aunt and uncle. The boy relapsed into the frivolous lifestyle of card parties, dancing, and eating, characteristic of well-to-do English citizens of the time. Later, however, when facing the prospect of a career in the House of Commons, Wilberforce experienced a Christian conversion. He visited his old mentor John Newton, who gave him the advice that changed the course of history: that Parliament was perhaps the very place in which the young man could best serve Christ.

Ken Wales explained how difficult it is to gather the finances for a movie, hence the “six or seven years” it took him to bring his dream to fruition. “I was discussing my project with Philip Anschutz, and he suggested that I join forces with his [company] Walden Media, because they were interested in doing a film on William Wilberforce, the spearhead of the British abolitionist movement.” This made sense to Wales, because of the connection between the abolitionist and Newton. Soon the project was green-lighted, with Michael Apted signed to direct the film. Walden Media had a promising track record, with such films as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Holes and Because of Winn-Dixie.

Wales says the $30 million budget for Amazing Grace was modest—at least compared to such epics as Superman Returns or the Mission Impossible series—but “some have thought it has the look of a $100 million epic.” (After seeing the film, I agree: the scenes of sailing ships in the harbor are truly spectacular, as well as those showing the bustling streets of London and Bath, and others showing Parliament in session.) The Parliament scenes, Wales revealed, “were shot in an old church that we found. It had the famous curved balcony for spectators, very much like the one in the old Parliament chamber.”

The opening of the film also was modest by blockbuster standards, Wales says—“850 screens, but hopefully the number will increase when word of the film spreads.”

As for future projects, Wales says his other cherished dream of producing a sequel to Chariots of Fire definitely is in the works. Its title, Wings of Eagles, comes fromthe Isaiah passage that Olympic athlete Eric Liddell read on the Sunday he refused to run—one of Chariots of Fire’s most powerful scenes. Wales said his film takes up where the original left off, following Liddell to China after his brief Olympic glory. The young man served faithfully as a missionary, until being captured by the Japanese in World War II. He died in a prison camp.