Fighting Spirit: A Combat Chaplain’s Journey is enjoying some unexpected awards season chatter, but earlier this year, the documentary couldn’t even secure a slot at Sundance — or any of the usual high-profile festivals.
“I think we submitted the film to 30 film festivals, and all of them said, ‘No,’” reveals Fighting Spirit’s writer, director and producer, Rich Hull (the doc is co-directed by former Army Chaplain Justin D. Roberts, who appears in the movie). “The one exception was the Newport Beach Film Festival, which allowed us to show an unfinished cut of the movie as an early preview.”
Since then, the documentary — an examination of military chaplains who’ve been a guiding light for American soldiers battling enemies and complicated emotions on the frontlines — has received a groundswell of support from a pair of famous friends, as well as the United States Army, and some good, old-fashioned community word of mouth.
In September, actor Chris Pratt joined the Fighting Spirit team as an executive producer, instantly raising the film’s profile — especially on social media.
“Chris is kind of a faith-forward guy and a big military supporter, so he checks those boxes,” Hull explains. “He also has 50 million Instagram followers, so when he posts a video about stuff, it gets a lot of attention. We didn’t have the money to go out and buy TV commercials, or a bunch of ads and billboards on Sunset Boulevard.”
With a lean $200,000 marketing budget for a film that cost less than $1 million to make, Hull was grateful for Pratt’s dedication to the project.
“The guy just had a baby (his third child with wife Katherine Schwarzenegger), and he was shooting two movies on the other side of the globe, yet he still was super cool about finding time to post about the film a lot,” says the filmmaker. “Sometimes celebrity partners can be hit or miss, and he was just awesome, man.”
Fighting Spirit: A Combat Chaplain’s Journey marks the first ever co-production between Hollywood and the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps, which has enjoyed a relationship with Hull since he produced the documentary For Love of Liberty: The Story of America’s Black Patriots, with Halle Berry in 2010. The film would go on to win an NAACP Image Award. Hull also sits on the board of partnering Paulist Productions, the nonprofit production and finance company founded by Fr. Ellwood “Bud” Kieser, best known as the Catholic priest behind the prestigious Humanitas Prize, which honors film and television writers “whose work explores the human condition in a nuanced and meaningful way,” according to the organization’s website.
Although Fighting Spirit spotlights Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist combat chaplains, it was the film’s Catholic connections that led the team to Vatican City to kick off a round of fall screenings.
“We started at the Vatican with the pope, which was really cool,” Hull recounts. “It made my Catholic mother super happy. Inside the pope’s compound, he’s got a theater that was built in 900 AD. It was an old chapel. The people who have been invited to screen in that screening room is like a Who’s Who of the documentary world, like Martin Scorsese. It’s unbelievable.”
Stateside, the Fighting Spirit team focused on November 8 — Veteran’s Day — rolling the film out for a splashy, one day-only screening in 20 cities across the country.
“It played on 100 screens, which is a giant release theatrically,” says Hull. “It was also three days after a presidential election (on November 5), which we figured would be fairly divisive, so we were like, ‘Let’s have people who may not agree on everything come together, and who can’t agree on the power of combat chaplains? That’ll be common ground for everybody. Let’s force that to happen.’”
For the theatrical release, filmmakers were able to tap into the Army’s powerful marketing machine, which only happens under rare circumstances.
“We partnered with the theater owners and decided to give away tickets to military families,” says Hull. “We wanted it to be a community experience where people could come together, lights go down, they share this as a community — as friends, as neighbors, as families.”
The excitement generated by the shared event immediately paid off in enthusiastic reviews from moviegoers on the crowdsourced website, Rotten Tomatoes.
“We started to see the reviews come in, and we were like, ‘Oh my God, people are loving it!’” Hull shares. “Last time I checked, it’s got a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is pretty unheard of for a doc. We thought it was almost going to be a dud, especially after coming off being denied at so many film festivals.”
Despite the initial setbacks, the director believes timing couldn’t be better for a documentary with an uplifting message about facing adverse conditions with hope, humanity and a large dose of faith — whether spiritual or just belief in oneself.
“If we had put this movie out a year ago, I don’t know that it would have had the same reaction, or gotten the same attention, but I think people were so desperate for that inspiration, and that feel-good take-away.”
Hull believes there’s a lesson to be learned with Fighting Spirit — one that perhaps mirrors the result of the 2024 presidential election.
“We, as an industry, sometimes get accused of being out of touch with common audiences, and making stuff that just people in L.A. and New York want to see,” he says. “But if some industry award committee decides that this movie is worth putting up for nomination, or giving some attention to, then it kind of validates the audience that showed up to see this movie.”
Despite recent attention, Fighting Spirit: A Combat Chaplain’s Journey has yet to find a streaming partner.
“If we can get more attention on it, then we’re honoring these stories. That’s what I think success looks like,” Hull explains. “I hope what audiences take away from the movie is this kind of ethos that combat chaplains live with, which is that one person can make a difference.”
As a filmmaker, Hull hasn’t yet decided what his next project will be. But he isn’t ruling out a spin-off from one or more of the stories chronicled in Fighting Spirit: A Combat Chaplain’s Journey.
“There are so many good stories that we uncovered throughout this process that I wasn’t able to tell,” he says. “I could easily see myself going and taking one of those stories and deep-diving into it, and turning it into a scripted feature.”
English (US) ·