Mel Gibson's 'Christ' Reveals Crucifixion

In his first nationally broadcast interview about his starring role in Mel Gibson's much-anticipated film "The Passion of Christ," James Caviezel - Gibson's Jesus - detailed on Friday the ordeal of filming the Crucifixion scenes, noting that the overall experience prompted many in the crew to convert to Catholicism.

"I was on the cross about five weeks in 30 degree temperatures," Caviezel told nationally syndicated radio host Sean Hannity. "It was up on the side of a cliff. It's like going up to the Grand Canyon. When the wind gets going, you're in the center of a twister. The Cross is teetering and I'm looking down on all these people shivering in their jackets and mittens. I'm up there for days - nothing on, my arms tied down."

Caviezel said Gibson did his best to make filming the Cross scenes more comfortable by positioning heaters at his feet out of camera range. But the effort merely resulted in giving him "fried toes," he said. The frigid temperatures and cooked flesh turned out to be the least of Caviezel's problems.

"During the scourging scenes, there was a board on my back and the Romans would wind up and hit it," he told Hannity. "And this guy hit me square on the back and I had a 14 inch scar on my back and it really knocked the wind out of me."

The physical punishment, however, wasn't as traumatic as the lightning that struck him while he was hanging on the Cross. "I was lit up like a Christmas tree," the actor told Hannity. "It felt as if I had two hands slapping my head and all of a sudden I had 200 extras scurrying. I had no idea what happened. All I was seeing was pink and a kind of a fuzzy static in front of my eyes." Caviezel said that when one of the crew came over to check if he was OK, he was struck by lightning, too. Asked if he thought the lightning strike was "a sign from God," Caviezel told Hannity, "I think the whole thing has been that way."

Noting "the amount of conversions on the movie," he said the experience of filming Christ's story "really changed people's lives." Caviezel recalled telling Gibson, "I think it's very important that we have mass every day - at least I need that to play this guy." "I felt if I was going to play him I needed [the sacrament] in me. So [Gibson] provided that." At the same time, Caviezel said, Gibson went out of his way to be "very respectful to people like Maya Morgenstern, who's Jewish and whose parent was a Holocaust survivor." Morgenstern plays the Virgin Mary in the film.

He defended "Passion" against charges by critics that the film encourages anti-Semitism, stressing that it offers sympathetic portrayals of Mary, the Apostles and other Jewish figures. "There's no broad brush applied here to any particular group," he told Hannity. "This film does not play the blame game. "We are all culpable for the death of Christ," added the film's star. "My sins, your sins put him on that cross."

Caviezel credited Gibson with pulling off the immensely difficult project. "Working with Mel Gibson was a little bit like waltzing with a hurricane," he told Hannity. "It's always exciting and you're never quite sure where it's going to take you. The guy is kinetically a genius."