Interview: Chris Matheson

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I'm thrilled to welcome our next guest to the show Chris Mathison is an author and screenwriter who screenwriting credits include rapture-palooza Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and of course their subsequent bogus journey he's also an accomplished director and the author of a new book titled the story of God a biblical comedy about love and hate Chris welcome to the skating atheist thanks nice to be here so I have to warn you at first and i am a big fan of your work yet bill and ted came out when I was about 12 or 13 song with my best friend who was in the band that i was in that was going to be famous as soon as we learn to play our instruments.
This is the movie that introduced me to my single greatest comedy influence in george carlin as I had a ton of reasons to love that flick now obviously I brought you want to talk about your new book but i don't think i can make it all the way through the interview without at least one bill and ted fanboy questions so do you mind if we just get that out of the way first not at all okay so this question is actually about the sequel Bill and Ted's bogus journey this was a movie that came along at about the same time my life as I was being introduced to douglas adams kurt vonnegut money by that company that you're treated religion with irreverence if not downright mockery and of course in bogus journey you have your characters going to hell going to heaven beat the Grim Reaper battleship it's a very least lately lampooning a lot of Christian mythology in a PG franchise so especially after reading the story of god i'm curious if there was any pushback from the studio on that anything that you wanted to include in those parts of the movie but weren't allowed to the movie was originally titled don't go to hell that was what and I wanted to be called and that's what it was called.
I think even through production and they backed off from that and originally we had a lot more inhale they there was a their adventure and inhale which they liked which was frustrating to the demons and the devil because their bill and ted and there is getting excited and upbeat no matter where they are and they they were excited about the big rocks that they were sentenced to pound away at eternally so they were inhale more and they were in heaven more and originally they were going to the characters that we're going to come about you know it into that been sort of out of left field can meet exception that a Martian scientist is their accomplice in act 3 which is you know bizarre even when I think back on it all right it's kind of funny but it's bizarre originally it was going to be biblical figures there's a draft somewhere where basically Moses and and Noah and I don't know who else you know Abraham are are there they're the ones who come you lack in act 3 and are accompanying them on their whole i doing you know whatever Moses parting the cars on a freeway or something like that right and and maybe that was a little bit too we're reverence for the studio i don't know i don't i don't know why we ended up changing that or might have just been honestly that they felt just like it felt like a repeat that they were historical figures again because I kind of already kind of feel like historical figures so you know let's throw Martian and instead i guess but yeah I mean you know a lot of the same interests that Google go that far back sure hmm alright so let's turn to your new book which by the way i'm also at risk of being pretty damn fanboy about now this is going to sound like bullshit everybody who hasn't read the book but I very literally laughed out loud before page 1 in this book and i would challenge any of our listeners to make it further than that without at least a chuckle I'm not to be honest I don't think that I could do the premise justice so I'm just going to leave that to you what is the story of god I wanted to tell the story of this character from Genesis to Revelation I wanted to follow him on his whole emotional journey and see if i could piece together a character who made sense to me I was for a variety of reasons sort of drawn to the Bible at from a comedic standpoint there's a lot of really great found comedy the Bible's mean it's quite funny to me as long as you don't take it seriously.
Yeah right i mean if you take it serious I don't understand that I am I find that kind of hard to grasp myself but I at a certain point thought I want to try to get inside this guy.
His head or at least be on his shoulder and make sense of him who hit his behavior is so bizarre he's so volatile he's so horrible and destructive and and and strange and hard to understand he's just kind of all over the map he seems to range two men and then he gets a little bit nicer at times and and I and I wanted to try to find coherence to it what what is the deal with this guy what is wrong with this guy what is motivating this guy what why does he do this stuff that he does so that was that was the impetus for reading the book and and so what did you learn about god what what is the what are the the threads that time together.
Well i think that there's an underlying I think there's three ways of looking at him and one of them is he's just kind of a fraud he's kind of the woods because he doesn't really have all the power that he says he does he's just kind of a big fake and that's kinda funny I find in there and there is certainly evidence in the book to to back that up the second is he's kind of a fool he does have all the power but he's really not that bright it's sort of universe created by a guy who has an IQ of 98 you know he just makes a variety of boneheaded decisions and then he gets mad at himself and frustrated and you know basically you know kick on the ground like and a movie and then tries again makes another stupid mistake and then the third one which i think is the most compelling and them and the most deeply rooted in the text is that he's a freak.
He's there's something deeply self-hating about this character he hates us were made in His image he pretty much hates all of us and we're even the ones who likes yeah even the ones he likes he hates hates I mean arguably given the way he punishes them you'd say hates the most of all I think I think there's a deep self-hatred and I i ended up feeling a weird kind of sympathy for this character at a certain point because i thought what a horrible reality that is if you play it out what it was.
Really excruciating loneliness there is to this job right i mean they're you're all alone.
You have no friends you have no mother you have no father you have no siblings you have you know your son but you never even really meet him and it's basically murdered and you know that's like eight son.
Nice to meet you you know I just tortured and killed you based icebreaker you.
Yeah and so you're never touched you can't be touched you can't have any contact and you have one you have no friends but you have an enemy you know you have one enemy that's it that's all you've got and I think that it's sort of drives him mad.
I think there's a sort of an incipient mental illness almost from the beginning and it comes to full fruition in Revelation where you just like wow this guy's gone man this guy's God's get blown out he's a he's a complete James Bond villain at this point right right now one of the things that I loved about it is just my making God into a repressed self-loathing homosexual you explain so much about the book yet you know to the degree that God has a sexuality and of course he does right i mean the mail.
We know he's in May all mean that's that's stated and he's very interested in sex it's not like he never talks about it and let you know it's not like no that's that's beneath him now he talks about sex a lot is very very interested in sex and and balls in particular yeah but yep yet penises and balls he's very particular about how he wants them to look and he's very particular about perfect balls perfect fall and balls have two beaches absolutely perfect and he's got a very specific idea of how penises should look and you know he's all he's all over that stuff and and no interest in women right women are just kind of gross you know like women are just sort of their icky and he you know that's just their unclean there and and then when you get into sort of his his taste it's really Queenie and he really does have kind of Queenie taste when he starts talking about what he wants his temple to be all the little cherubs in the purple fabric that he wants everyone else.
And pomegranate blue fabric and gold balls and it's just like wow man you you get really really gay taste and then as any really deeply repressed homosexual does i think he hates homosexuals he hates homosexuals oh my god he hates homosexuality.
I mean the whole Sodom thing is just craziness because he never even said homosexuality was wrong up to that point he never said a word right he just nuke some and the women too yeah what's the deal man what are you doing there like are the women all lesbians I mean he doesn't give a shit if they are not I either guerre right he doesn't even bother to know their names of the of the women that play pivotal parts in his story.
No never no i mean so few women even get even eve even yeah.
God doesn't God doesn't give a name to fucking Eve you know a domestic namer he just calls her woman knows wife doesn't have any of course know his son zaben a nose wife she's kind of an important character right.
No I guess not she doesn't get a name I i thought one of my favorite moments in the book was a very subtle bed in there where of East when he goes to visit Abraham and forgets his wife's name starts calling Rachel and even know her name is clearly Sarah elsewhere in the book.
Yeah it's one of those things i guess if you know the Bible well enough I is is really gonna hit you a lot and I guess that leaves me right into my next question is how familiar were you with the Bible going into this well I would i read it i think in my 20 late twenties because I because I just wanted to because I was curious and I you know it definitely struck me I thought it was pretty interesting and then I picked it up again probably about five years ago and this time it hit me hard and I thought wow how this is incredible.
This is an amazing book and if you like comedy man you have just stumbled onto the ultimate gold mine because it's so it takes itself so seriously right you know that's what.
That's what makes it really funny like this isn't funny.
This isn't funny you shouldn't laugh at this this is dead serious this is truth capital T truth of course that's what makes it really funny and it's filled with utterly ridiculous unfathomable behavior by my god and some funny human characters here but I wasn't a familiar with it up until about five years ago now I i might be cheating a bit here because I might already know the answer to this but was there one particular part of the Bible that you were most looking forward to uh reinterpreting yeah definitely i'll i would adore the book of job because it's well it's generally perceived or commonly perceived to be this crown jewel of the Bible right that is this beautiful poetic deeply insightful work that gets at the roots of you know good and evil and it's at the odyssey and it's like why do bad things happen to good people and of course none of that's true the book of job is is is absurd I mean he's the god of the book of Job he's a character really worthy of of swiftor voltaire I mean they could not have written this guy better because he's he's a bully he's a bragger he's a lightweight he's incredibly shallow and mean the whole thing is just basically a party bet with citywide evil things happen to good people well because God makes a party bet that's why and and then most fascinating lee and hilariously he has a complete nervous breakdown at the end like somehow the knowledge that he's lost this bet because he clearly does lose the BET right makes him flip out and he's just starts talking a bunch of crazy shit and the end about his pet sea monster and unicorns now lightning talks to them you know it's just beautiful it's absolutely beautiful my co-host describes that as God's drunken stepfather rent and yeah yeah absolutely bizarre now one of the things that I love the most about the book was that the narrative didn't just incorporate the contradictions and moral atrocities of the Bible in a lot of ways the narrative actually rose out of those things that actually informed and and I thought you did a brilliant job weaving together some of the most absurd passages but it also left me wondering if there was anything that you wanted to squeeze in from the Bible but it just wouldn't fit into your narrative good question good question I i wanted to get all of the stuff that i thought was the funniest know that's kind of what I went for I mean everybody charity know the Bible everybody who reads it because it's such a massive book depending on what they're looking for the cherry pick right that's what you do you cherry-pick and the cherries that I was picking where the funniest bits so did I have to leave out any really you know maybe early on Genesis has been gone over i wrote a lot about the Garden of Eden the garden of eden then the Serpent and how ludicrous that is and and to some degree that's ground that's been gone over a decent amount because it's so early in the book I think and so I trimmed that way back I mean I could've gone on for 15 pages about bad thing because it's because it is sort of the beginning of the weirdness like why what kind of free has a big plan a beautiful perfect plan and then right at the very beginning introduces their own worst enemy into it and let some fucking up like what is what is wrong with you now yeah I did notice that it seemed like on those those those parts of the Bible that had really been picked over by comedians before you you will you just kind of did a very little unlike things like Noah's Ark and the Ten Commandments and how bizarre those are of course you obviously brought those up in the book but didn't dwell on those as much as I assume that that was why because so many other comedians had been to that ground before.
Yeah that was why that was why because i thought well you know this has been that these bits it's been looked at quite a lot and you know Ricky Gervais is has has he still fantastically funny and his his bits about Noah's Ark and the garden are spectacular.
Funny like they'll make you cry with laughter they're so funny but you know people have done that so yes so I so I I went a little bit lighter right at us I could have done a lot more on that stuff because I think they're really funny bits but right now I do want to say just if anybody's curious just how absurd the Bible is chris was looking for the funniest moments in the Bible to create this book and didn't even have to use the talking donkey from numbers so if that's any indication I so which is a ship was your biggest challenge in writing this bug i think the challenges of making his emotional journey a journey creating a narrative that's not monotonous it's not super repetitive like he just does the same shit over and over and over again he kind of does but trying to find the Ark event trying to find the evolution of the story of his character that that took some time because look at a certain way is Lady jizz does mean shit from beginning to end you know he's constantly punishing people that's that's it he just wants to punish so that that took a little bit of thought.
Yeah i was really impressed with the way because you know obviously like you said the Bible just offers you up so much humor on a silver platter but I think you took a lot more than it's just you know they're easily for the taking i was really impressed with the way that the story did become a story because that's one thing that you absolutely can't say about the Bible there's nothing cohesive about that at all and trying to leave all that together in one story arc is a very impressive feat it's not good at no it's not cohesive and and he that was kind of the challenge like how does how to take this character and it's his book I mean clearly he's the star of course he's the Stars god it's his it's his story but he's it's not obviously coherent and I wanted it to be I wanted to I wanted to track I wanted it to feel like right.
This makes sense that he would go from point A to point B to Point C and get more and more upset more and more troubled more and more his his sort of mental illness kind of spinning out and the story of Job kind of haunting here because he knows what a complete idiot he made of himself and his good sort of deterioration culminating in a basically the end of of the Old Testament basically ending with you know Babylon getting burned to the ground and him sitting up in the sky and blustering i'm just about to do my thing get outta way I'm gonna do it I'm gonna do it I'm gonna do it he doesn't know he doesn't know you know that that's that's an amazing moment I mean the ending of Jeremiah is not necessarily the funniest thing in the book but is the most stark yeah kind of abrupt gut punch in the whole book i think because he's it's just all talk talk talk talk talk talk and then suddenly ends and you get this kind of cold clinical finale where some other writer steps in place of Jeremiah and says effectively none of this happened right like it's like a psychiatrist talking about a mentally-ill patient none of this happened yeah and so that's the end that's the end of the old the Old Testament story and then I thought okay so now let's plan B I got to try something else I gotta pull back and he'll for a while that didn't work i'm going to try Plan B with my son and you know of course plan B doesn't work either and and none of it's got work you know if Plan C is Islam you know talking to Muhammad well that's not gonna work either and if plan D is talking to justin smith well that's not gonna work either none of them are right it's never gonna now I have to say I you know as I was going through the book because of the way that you built the narrative you actually skipped over job and sort of went back to it at the end there was that was terrified we're going to miss out on this on that that's because you never so happy when we have we came back for that one.
Now it do you think you know obviously this book is super funny to a person like myself that is really familiar with by my wondered as i was reading through it you know what it's still be as funny as I if I wasn't too familiar well luckily i was able to test that because i haven't gotten revelations yet the revelations part was still hilarious but i wonder if you think that a religious person can read this book and still find all the humor in a good day Christian read this book and find it funny mhm i don't know i would like to think so i think it would depend on the Christian I mean some of them would be very presumably angry and upset and want to send me you know a death threat or something but it is their book I mean that's why I'm citing passages so frequently because i did want to kind of make it clearly this this is your book i'm not making up most of this is that this is in the Bible I'm making up very very little here i'm connecting the dots but i'm not making up very many things at all and i'm not making up any of the really truly ludicrous things i don't i don't know i may be a certain kind of Christian I what my fantasy would be a certain kind of Christian who's young could read it and go oh my god I've had these doubts and these feelings before and I couldn't admit them to myself but it is ridiculous you know how it is absurd.
It is a ridiculous it is a ridiculous story come on.
Well and it's such an easy way to learn about all of these wacky contradictions because getting through the Bible is such a chore.
It's a big book yeah there's parts that are not a lot of fun to read that is for sure there are parts that are really funded and then parts not really kind of dull a lot more of the latter than the former i would it depends on the writer you know there are some good writers in there and there's a lot of really i would say pretty flat dole writing yeah now it's possible that my own personal biblical lampooning experiences coloring my assumptions here but would you care to preemptively respond to the people who will say that you just shouldn't make fun of people's faith that that's sacrosanct and and off the table well I mean number one obviously nothing's off the table and at any time nothing's off the table and the more that you position yourself as something that cannot be made fun of the more you are drawing the attention of those who want to make fun of things the more you forbid any mockery of your butt we've system em the more you're effectively demonstrating the necessity of making fun of your belief system i would say yeah that's it that's silly it's it's it's a silly argument why should i why should we what does that mean to us we don't but we don't we don't agree with them we're not being blasphemous what we don't we don't believe in their story we think their stories ridiculous its work totally free to make fun of it as much as we want em and obviously as you proved in the book over and over again there's a lot to make fun of him there's a lot to make fun of ya there absolutely is so yeah I mean even within the first page you know you start pointing out not just the things better in the Bible but obviously the contradictions that arise as soon as you start postulating this God character like did he really just set up there for eternity and then decide to make a universe.
Yeah you can't you cannot get around it Christian's to all kinds of weird backflips trying to they do a lot of just weird hand-waving trying to come up with some way of looking at that makes sense but it doesn't because either hehe just sort of popped into existence which of course they don't believe he has to be eternal.
He's got his eternal but if he's eternal well we know the we know that the universe is an eternal it's either you know 15 billion years old or if you're really a pinhead it's 5,000 years old but in either case it popped into existence.
You know it wasn't there and then it was there and that and he's eternal and and the universe isn't so therefore he just sat in the dark doing presumably nothing right for eternally but above the water which is there within that strange too there's just him and him above the water forever.
It makes no sense but it's great and well I'll tell you what I gotta thank you for a really great read and it's going to sound like I'm blowing smoke up your ass when I say this but i honestly have not laughed that much in a book since we lost douglas adams I i was literally reading this book through tears of laughter really appreciate phenomenally funny that's great to hear thank you very much.
And of course it's like to pick up a copy of christmas book and trust me you would again the the title is the story of God a comedy about love and hate it's available as an e-book hard cover or as an audiobook and we'll have links to all three formats in the show notes for this episode that's episode 134 at skating atheist com Chris thanks again for joining us tonight my pleasure.


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