Interview with Director Andrew Douglas: Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus

By Julie Simmons | Music Journalist

In his documentary, British director, Andrew Douglas, trails troubadour and Pensacola, Florida-native, Jim White, on an educational and mystical road trip through America's Deep South. Douglas discloses that he was not interested in religion prior to making Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. And yet, religion ended up becoming the central theme in the engaging film which was released in 2004, and again in 2005.

Profile of Jim White as featured on the Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus promo photo

Originally broadcast on the BBC in 2004 and released a year later in the U.S., Wrong-Eyed Jesus appealed to secular audiences by delivering balanced and nonexploitative footage of believers, criminals and artists, all of whom were steeped in religious doctrine from an early age.

"It was astonishing for Europeans to see how religion saturates every conversation in the South," Douglas explains. "Also, in Europe, we tend not to have politicians whose main part of the platform is religion."

While American audiences may be unsurprised by how religion has impacted national politics, eyebrows may levitate by how, as Douglas describes, "Fine art comes out of this crucible [the Deep South]" but not from the believers or criminals in the film.

Seamlessly, the film showcases faux Southerners. They're the artistic angels who have died (metaphorically), fled the South and have come back to observe those they left behind. Interspersed between scenery straight out of Flannery O'Connor and junkyard landscapes are musical performances by Jim White, Cat Power, David Johansen, Johnny Dowd, Lee Sexton and the Handsome Family, among many others.

Douglas recalls, "I worked hard to make these songs not feel like music videos. It was important that [the takes] were live and, for the most part, single takes. And, often painfully, the songs were in real spaces, like the barbershop. I think you tend to listen to the lyrics more than you would in different contexts."

White explains how he became a faux Southerner and artistic outlier: "I was a lonely kid who was an outsider and wanted to belong. Religion is a nice place to try to belong. I tried and tried to fit into that church. And I tried and tried to speak in tongues and never could. And I tried to prophesize. And I tried to witness but people kept making good points and I had to agree with them. It was a lot of trying for about 10 years, and then I had a 'Hallelujah breakdown' where your faith collapses on you. But to an extent, [my religious past] still exists today."

After having made Wrong-Eyed Jesus, Douglas maintains that "religion is not for me, but I can see how it has benevolent, social function, especially for the poor people. It gave their life meaning. I can't bring that into my life, but I can see the value of it. And I saw that it made the art far more interesting."

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This article was originally published in Harp magazine, June 2005

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