HJ: I want to talk about towards the end. To me watching the movie last night, the South was a character.

GW: Yes.

HJ: That was a huge part of the movie. Tell me what that was like. I mean I grew up in the eastern part of the state [NC].

GW: What part?

HJ: Nag’s Head. I felt that was key, so tell me about that.

GW: I grew up in Charlotte. I was actually born in upstate New York, but moved here when I was really little. My wife's from Goldsboro, four generations from Goldsboro. She grew up going to Carolina Beach. Robert [Whitlow]'s from Georgia, grew up there. We made a conscious effort to make this an authentically southern movie. We just wanted little key lines, lines about barbecue, throw away lines. Renny has a line about Strom Thurmond. We don’t [rim shot], we just keep going. There's a line where a character mentions John C. Calhoon, about how he was Secretary of State. Somebody says, "In the South when we talk about the war we're talking about the War Between the States or the War of Northern Agression." I wanted to hit those cultural things. We really made a conscious choice to do that because the South is so beautiful. It's so steeped in history, and typically in Hollywood movies, [southern] people are portrayed as stupid and ignorant and they're not. They can have articulate, intelligent conversations. They can be wrong, but they can still have articulate, intelligent conversations. That's what we wanted to do with the dialog. So there's a lot of little southern touches. All of our main actors apart from Malcolm were southern. We had someone who studies dialect come in and said Malcolm's Charleston accent is flawless. A lot of the actors studied Charleston, studied the dialect. Even though they're from the south there are different dialects. Chuck grew up in Virginia so he's a southerner. He spent six months studying the Charleston accent, just to get the subtleties of it. I think in the end we were able to succeed.

HJ: We've talked a little bit about prayer. You said you prayed about the money situation. How was that reflected both before you started the movie and even on set?

GW: How did we pray?

HJ: Yeah how did that look?

GW: We did a lot of stuff. We prayed from the beginning. We shot at Orton Plantation, which is a famous plantation in Wilmington in the middle of summer, the hottest day of the year. We went to three different locations that we knew we were going to shoot at, one of which we ended up not using, with a prayer team of about nineteen and we prayed on site all day with our prayer folks, our intercessors. We prayed constantly throughout. A lot of Christian films will have somebody pray openly at the beginning of the shoot every day, which is great. I've no problem with that. I just didn't want to do that because most of our crew were just an excellent Wilmington crew, Christian or not. I mean who knows what's in somebody's heart? I had a friend of mine, Gabe Buyer, who's a filmmaker, and a gentleman named Kit Austin, who is a businessman in Wilmington, and my Pastor from Boone; they came down at various times, and Cathy Whitlow as well, and kind of took a role as a chaplain. They just stayed on the set and prayed all day. Interceded all day long while we were shooting. I could go to them and say, "It's getting a little stressful. Would you pray?" Or "I'm feeling overwhelmed." And they would pray for me. But nobody knew, and they were friendly to all the crew—and [threy were] servants and they would get things for people, but it was very low key. It was constant. And a couple of days we had big shoots, the scene where Mama A prays for Renny which is a powerful scene, we had nineteen people praying on set. I was gonna cut that scene from the movie.

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