Evangelicals were introduced to a new level of faith-based filmmaking 15 years ago when brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick released “Flywheel,” a $20,000-budget film using church members as the cast and production crew to convey biblical truth.
“We’re just amazed at what the Lord’s done with it,” Alex Kendrick told Baptist Press (BP).
The brothers, who served on staff at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga., went on to produce “Facing the Giants,” “Fireproof,” “Courageous” and “War Room.” They’re still astonished at how God used their meager skills and tools in Flywheel to change countless lives.
Flywheel tells the fictional story of a dishonest used car salesman who comes to know Christ and changes the way he operates his business, risking financial ruin to uphold his integrity.
The brothers grew up in the 1980s experimenting with editing between their camcorder and VCR to tell silly stories around the neighborhood, Kendrick recounted. “We’d do dangerous stunts – falling over fences and wrecking bicycles or jumping down into a ditch or something.
“We enjoyed that, but we slowly developed a knack for learning how to do basic shooting and editing and storytelling,” Kendrick said. “As we grew older and the Lord began calling us into ministry, that love for telling stories was always with us.”
When they arrived at Sherwood in the early 2000s, Kendrick could see a movie in his head, but it was “so much harder to pull off a two-hour feature-length story than we ever imagined.”
