By Peter T. Chattaway

GROWING UP a couple of hours north of Regina in Foam Lake, Saskatchewan, Kevin Miller couldn’t have foreseen that one day he would be filming dark thrillers in Russia or helping a Hollywood celebrity promote the Intelligent Design movement. But that is, indeed, what the 36 year old writer has been doing in the last few years.

“I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a kid,” he says. “Either a comic book writer or a screenwriter – those are the two things I always wanted to do. I’ve always liked sci-fi and fantasy and that sort of thing, and that’s what you tend to find in comic books and in film. And I’m not anyone with tremendous visual gifts, by any stretch – but that’s just always appealed to me. I’ve just always been a geek at heart.”

For several years, Miller – who studied at the University of Waterloo and has lived in Abbotsford, BC for the past decade – worked as a freelance writer and editor of various books and magazines, some of them published by an imprint he set up with his pastor, Brad Jersak of Fresh Wind Fellowship. But then he found that he had reached a point where he didn’t know what he wanted to do anymore.

In 2002, looking for direction, Miller spent several months at Youth with a Mission’s Crossroads School in Hawaii. There, he met David L. Cunningham, son of YWAM founders Loren and Darlene – and a budding filmmaker in his own right.

He had just finished directing Kiefer Sutherland in To End All Wars, and Miller pitched him an idea he had for a movie about urban explorers – people who go spelunking in abandoned subway tunnels and the like. The result was a horror film, set in Russia, called After . . .  

“I was ready to give up writing,” says Miller, “but I found myself on a plane four or five months later heading for Moscow.” Instead of quitting his profession, Miller took it to a whole new level; After . . . became his first produced movie.

His newest project is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a humorous documentary in which Ben Stein – the actor, game show host and political pundit best known for playing a boring high-school teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – asks why scientists who question Darwinism have been run out of academia.

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The idea for the film came from Walt Ruloff, a former software entrepreneur who lives on Bowen Island, B.C. Miller was hired to give the film narrative shape.

“On a dramatic film, the writer is off the project as soon as the film is written; but on a documentary, the writing is the last thing you do,” says Miller. “For this project, I was there for initial consultations and about 60 percent of the shoot, and I spent weeks and weeks, whittling that film down from about 200 hours of footage.”

Stein narrates the film in a voice-over that he co-wrote with Miller. “In a sense,” says the latter,  “you’re not writing a script that creates a movie, but a script that reflects the movie that’s already been done, stitching the scenes together.”

Miller says he doesn’t think of himself as working in a Christian “niche market.” For one thing, Expelled star Stein is Jewish, not Christian.

“And what Expelled really does is try to address the question of what role, if any, does religion have to play in science,” says Miller. “So it’s much bigger than any religious subculture.”

But he concedes many of his associates are Christian. “This is a networking business, and a lot of people I know in the industry right now are people of faith, and that just tends to grow organically. And that’s just the way it goes.”

Miller and business partner Nathan Frankowski – who is directing Expelled – are currently developing a project for Every Tribe Entertainment, the company which made End of the Spear. They are also working on Operation No Living Thing, a film set in Sierra Leone during the civil war there.

But first, they have to finish Expelled. The film was originally set for wide release on Charles Darwin’s 199th birthday, February 12, but it has now been pushed back to April – partly to give the filmmakers more editing time, and partly because business at the box office isn’t all that good during the cold winter months.

The change in release date suits Miller just fine, since his wife Heidi is expecting their fourth child in February, and he had assumed he would miss the film’s premiere.  “That was going to be a problem for us,” he says, “but now my wife can actually go.”

Winter/Spring 2008