Testing God 3

Credo Ergo Sum

Not too many films have ever been broadcast on British television with a Latin title. ‘Credo Ergo Sum’ was George Carey’s suggestion. How he got it past Channel Four I shall never know. But it was perfect. “I believe therefore I am” plays a salutary counterpoint with the more familiar Cogito Ergo Sum. ‘Cogito’, translated as ‘think’, has come to be seen as synonymous with logical, rational, scientific and, in the minds of some, with atheistic thinking. While ‘Credo’ translated as ‘believe’ strikes the militant atheist as alarmingly recidivist. And yet‘Credo’ works just as well.

When people use latin quotes I always think there is a hint that they are suggesting they know better. After all they know latin! So I think it’s often a good thing to take a look at what the quotes really mean. What Descartes, being French, originally wrote was “Je pense donc je suis.” The verb ‘penser’ does indeed mean ‘to think.’ But it doesn’t not have the narrow connotation of being just logical, scientific thought. Like the english ‘think’, penser is all kinds of thinking. It’s more the act of thinking than any kind of thinking in particular. And there is reason to believe that Descartes meant this general mental act not some narrower logical thinking. In fact in a marginal note Descartes went on to write, “We cannot doubt our existence while we doubt” ( my empahsis). Here it is doubting not reasoning that Descartes himself points to. And in a posthumous publication Descartes wrote '“ Dubito ergo sum” - ‘I doubt therefore I am’ - and said explicitly this was, for him. the same as cogito ergo sum. Dubito, credo and cogito. All of them are the essence of us not any one of them.

We chose Credo partly, I have to admit, just to stir things a bit and more importantly because we wanted to emphasise that belief is something we all do, scientists as well as ‘believers’. The idea that belief and believing are ignorant and out-dated states of mind, that survive only in the thinking of the feeble and the religious, is tosh. Science and scientists believe all the time. The believe in the unproven while they work to prove or disprove it.

Belief is essential to creatures, who as Andy Clark and George Steiner, each in their own way say, have to make up their minds about things they don’t have enough information about and don’t have the time to properly consider. Questions not answers are the human genius.

The ability to believe is not to be sneered at. And those who do, betray something shallow about themselves. Dislike stupid and hurtful beliefs by all means but not belief itself, or you reduce people to something less than human.

Anyway, forgive me, that was a bit of a rant.

Of three films in the series I found this third one the most difficult but also the one truest to my own thinking. Where this film ended, with George Steiner’s encomium to questions and uncertainty, was where I began the film ‘Dangerous Knowledge’ which I made seven years later. There is a strand of my films which I thought of as all being connected. Each picking up on questions left open by the film before. I often used to say I was trying to make one of those grand series which my father made, but I had to make mine by stealth because the fashion for grand narratives had passed.

I should say at this point that none of what I’m writing is important. You don’t need to know any of it to watch the series. This is just me being an old fart of a film maker talking about my films.

Before I set out to film Testing God I had written a complete script for each of the first two films. About 30 pages each. Each took about six weeks to write. I was about two weeks in to writing film three when George Carey called me to his office and told me I had to start filming pronto. I said I didn’t know how they did things in News and Current affairs where he had worked, but that filming without a script on a series which is about ideas rather than a given event or crime made me worried. He said, in as many words, stop snivelling and man-up. So off we went.

I knew many of things I wanted to have in film three I just didn’t yet know how they would all go together and what exactly they would all say when they did. We cut the films in order and by the time we got to film three we were in a zone. By ‘we’ I mean me, my film editor Ed Harris and my assistant producer Tom Alkin. Tom and I had different ideas. Tom had a more ‘buddhist’ outlook. We had a few memorable disagreements. At one point I think I threw him out of the cutting room. I hope he can forgive me. But his and Ed’s impassioned commitment to the series was a major part of its success. I had the last say and so its flaws are mine.

And of course there was George Carey. In our last-but-one viewing George came in and Ed and I knew we were in deep trouble. The edit had gone massively over. The only time I have ever done that. I had known it would happen because there had been no script when we were filming, and so I had left a big ‘hidden’ pot of money to cover the extra cutting room time. We weren’t over budget but even so George was rightly alarmed and after viewing the still not finished film he went very quiet. Ed and I wisely said nothing and waited like men before a storm. George actually shuddered (he really did) and in a strangled, barely controlled voice said, “What the F**k have you been doing in here?” I had never heard George raise his voice or swear before. I had never been sworn at in my editor’s cutting room before.

Something about that kick in the backside broke the mental block. We watched a couple of key transitions in the film. We had them all cut, pictures working beautifully, but somehow I had just not been able to find the right words. Suddenly they came.

I had been determined to make a film about doubt and uncertainty in the world, and its value, vital necessity even, in our thinking. But you have to express the value of that doubt and uncertainty, clearly and exactly. What I hope we made is a film about the beauty and value of Dubito and Credo Ergo Sum.