Jim Britts thought for sure he had declared the wrong college major. Britts graduated from Biola University in La Mirada, Calif., with a degree in screenwriting. But already he knew he was pointed to another career: That of a youth pastor. Working with kids steadily from the time he graduated from high school himself, he was already deeply in ministry before he left Biola with his diploma.
Turns out, Britts' degree is paying serious dividends more than a decade after he graduated. The youth pastor wrote a screenplay for the film To Save a Life, the story of how a boy's tragic suicide helps change the trajectory of many, many lives. It wasn't long before the film had acquired a casting director, a cast of professional actors and some outside funding. The result: One of the slicker, grittier and perhaps better Christian films ever made. Advertisement
: You've got an interesting background for this film, being both a screenwriter and youth pastor. I'm guessing you showed the film to your kids. What did they think of it?
Jim Britts: They saw it kind of through two lenses. They absolutely loved the film, first of all. We've shown it to a lot of youth workers too, and they loved it, but teenagers love it more than anybody. My kids loved it as a movie, [but lots of them were in it, too, and so] every 12 seconds you hear someone go ‘hey, that's me!' So I try to tell them that once it's in theaters and you have all your non-Christian friends there, you can't do that every 12 seconds or they're never going to get into the film. But they are very fired up. It was cool getting to do that with them.
YWJ: I imagine you see quite a bit of yourself in here, too, more figuratively than literally. How much of this was based off of your real-life experiences as a youth pastor?
JB: I would say every character was definitely based off a student that I've had in our ministry, and in writing the script, I envisioned different students. A bunch of the scenes were definitely all based on real life. The whole story isn't a true story, but I sure had to pick up kids at parties before. The beer pong scene (Jake, a hot-shot basketball player and champion beer pong player, walks away from a critical "match," deciding that beer pong goes against his newfound Christian values) was actually based off a kid in our group who is now a leader in our junior high ministry. First time he came to our church he came hung over. But he started going to our high school group and he became a Christian not too much later. He shared with me how he was the top beer pong player in the area and, just after accepting Christ, was in a match. It was the exact scene. He dropped the ball in the cup and walked away. What's cool is that that kid is actually the guy playing against Jake in that scene. That's his story and he got to be the guy in the scene.
