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Todd Komarnicki Speaks on Bravery

January 22, 2025
Calvin University January Series

On day two of the 2025 January Series, writer and filmmaker Todd Komarnicki spoke about creativity, perseverance, and storytelling, reflecting on his years in the industry.

In an interview-style presentation with moderator Shirley Hoogstra, Komarnicki talked about writing the film Sully; producing the Christmas movie Elf; and writing, directing, and producing the 2024 film Bonhoeffer, a biopic about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian who spoke and worked against the Nazi regime. 

Storytelling has been part of Komarnicki’s life since childhood, he said. As a boy, he would toss a ball around in his backyard, catching it and giving announcer-like play-by-plays to baseball games for hours. He also enjoys reading and is happy to see that books have survived into the digital age. “We live by stories,” he said. “They connect us.”

Asked about the writing and editing process for his screenplays, Komarnicki emphasized the need to keep improving. As he works through screenplays with his two editors, he said, a typical screenplay goes through 35-40 drafts. Even in life, he explained, we often need a rewrite – how many times do we get things right the first time in our relationships with family and friends? “We live under grace and under forgiveness,” he added. “How many times did Jesus tell us to forgive? This notion of getting another crack at something is written in the code of being human.”

Komarnicki went on to reflect on the “eternal now” – the idea that we enter into every moment and interaction carrying everything that’s happened to us until now, and this moment will affect our future. “The history of our lives is in our bodies,” he said. Some of this history is visible, in a scar or an injury, he said, while much is invisible. People bring things to an interaction – insights, injuries, perspectives – that are from their experiences. If you don’t understand someone’s perspective or reaction, ask and then listen.

Bonhoeffer is an eternal now film, he said, and it goes back and forth in time within the character’s memory. Rather than feeling like flashbacks, the memories connect with what the character is going through. Seeing this, said Komarnicki, helps us to connect more intimately with the character.

Komarnicki also said he researched for years to write Sully. The story is about a real-life pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, whose plane collided with a flock of birds in flight, causing the engines to quit and forcing an emergency landing on the Hudson River. All 155 passengers and crew survived because of Sully’s quick response and skill. Komarnicki emphasized that Sully’s 35 years of experience led to that moment in 2009 when the pilot was able to assess and react to an extremely dangerous situation.

Komarnicki encouraged his listeners to share stories and to listen. He said he appreciates, for example, an initiative in the Netherlands in which university students and young adults are housed in buildings that include a retirement center on the ground floor, bringing young people into contact with older people. The young people bring life and energy to the senior residents and find themselves receiving wisdom and inspiration from hearing the seniors’ life stories. “There’s some way to use everything that we’ve been through and to share it across generations,” said Komarnicki.

Komarnicki’s view of life and the world was shaped by his father, he said, who knew the whole Bible well but spent much of his time in the books of Job and John. These books show the deep, unchanging, and unconditional love of God for us, but also convey the deep difficulty of what it means to be alive, said Komarnicki. 

God does things differently than we expect, Komarnicki added. Jesus won by seeming to lose, and his closest followers scattered. “This is not the building of a mythology that would draw anybody, but that’s the beauty of it. . . . Without death there is no resurrection. . . . When these dark things happen, things that don’t make sense, go back and lean on the fact that it feels like Saturday so often, but [that] we’re here talking about this because Sunday [has] arrived. And it can arrive for all of us every day, all day – and it is a real call to be children of the resurrection.”

Asked how Bonhoeffer’s story affected him, Komarnicki reflected on bravery and the call to act, even sacrificially, to help others. He said he’s still learning from the real courage that Bonhoeffer displayed at the risk of his own life, his family, and everything he held dear.

Komarnicki shared a few stories he recalled from the filming of Bonhoeffer. He said he knew he wanted an all-German cast for the film, so he contacted a friend in the German film industry. Jonas Dassler was the only actor she recommended to play Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but he had just started a break from acting. His agent turned down the offer but then read the script and was so impressed with it that she shared it with Dassler despite his decision to take a break. Dassler ignored it for weeks, Komarnicki said, until, singing a hymn at his beloved grandmother’s funeral, he realized that the lyrics to the song she’d requested for her funeral were penned by Bonhoeffer. He read the script and accepted the role. 

In addition, one of the extras who played a fellow prisoner with Bonhoeffer told Komarnicki on the last day of filming that when he received the call to play an extra in the film, he had been planning to end his life, but the experience of spending time helping to tell Bonhoeffer’s story had transformed his life and outlook.

“Sometimes we think that God is doing one thing, and then we find out that, no, God is doing so many things around a particular set of facts,” said Hoogstra in response to these stories.

The filmwriter also shared that in Bonhoeffer’s own life, the experience of studying and living in America, getting to know African Americans and to appreciate jazz, and then to be dismayed at the overt racism and “othering” happening in America prepared him to be sensitive to the Nazis’ language against and their ostracizing of Jews when he returned to Germany, and to speak against it.

Komarnicki hopes that one takeaway people will find when they see Bonhoeffer is that life is hard and that we’ll come across things we can’t do – but that we live in partnership with God. “It’s not that a thing is difficult. It’s that it’s waiting to be transformed,” he said.

Each movie Komarnicki has been involved with, he said, has taken about seven years from idea to completion, with research, writing, casting, finding funding, filming, marketing, and other steps along the way – and there can be challenges at any stage.

“The persistence you have to have to be in the movie business seems to be extraordinary,” observed Hoogstra. 

In response, Komarnicki told about a “gift” he’d received. In the film industry, he said, you hear “no” very frequently, and that can be discouraging. But he sensed God telling him a few years ago that “no” can be a kind of “Vitamin No” – every “no” leads to a new way to try something, a better way to write something, a different approach that can strengthen and improve your work so that when “yes” comes, you’re ready to make that “yes” as good as it can be. “‘No’ is just a redirection; it’s not an ending,” said Komarnicki.

He explained that Elf, as he and the writer envisioned it, almost didn’t make it to theaters. It’s a movie about lightness, kindness, and second chances, and the studio wanted something edgier, said Komarnicki. “When we finished the movie, there were strong voices saying that it was too upbeat, too light, too family friendly. The studio recut the film – against the director’s will – to be edgier.” Komarnicki and the director and the producer made a case for the movie to be released as they had envisioned it, going to studio executives and saying, “You greenlit this script with this actor and this director, and we made that movie. You have to let us release the movie we made. You have to trust us.” The executives relented and released the movie, and it has stood the test of time. 

Asked how a storyteller prioritizes the facts and the message they hope to tell within the story, Komarnicki shared some advice he received from author Frederick Buechner years ago: tell the truth. A character, whether fictional or based on a real person, whenever he opens his mouth, needs to sound like himself. With Sully, Komarnicki said, he was able to go over dialogue with the real Sully and create a version that was true to him. With Bonhoeffer, he said, he tried his best to honor the theologian’s experiences and fit the dialogue to it. Komarnicki added that in some situations he will alter the timeline of the real story to make it fit cinema better, while still honoring and representing the actual events.

When asked for advice for dealing with challenges, Komarnicki offered, “Live the way God calls us to live every day, every moment, by his grace and for his glory. I don’t think there’s blanket advice except to cling to Christ.”

Komarnicki concluded the presentation by encouraging students and writers to enter the field. “We need storytellers; we need writers badly. You need to sit down and get great at it,” he said. He noted that while there are a lot of writers, there are few great writers, and even fewer who know how to finish.

“We need excellence,” he explained. “And what better place to come for excellence than people who are close to the Creator? If you live and walk with the Creator of the universe, then the expectation would be that you have the greatest imagination. Marry the greatest imagination to the hardest work, and change the world.”