Crossing Over With Tom Shadyac

The director of 'Dragonfly' talks about children's spirituality, intuition, and what's real about near-death experiences.

BY: Interviewed by Laura Sheahen

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Tom Shadyac, the director of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Nutty Professor, and Patch Adams, spoke with Beliefnet recently about his new film, Dragonfly. The movie, which stars Kevin Costner as a man receiving messages from his dead wife, focuses on the near-death experiences of young children and the hero's journey towards understanding his "unfinished business."

Dragonfly, with its overtly supernatural elements, is something of a departure for you. What was it like to work on a film with spiritual overtones?

It was exciting, challenging, different--usually I would cut to the joke, now I would cut to the unexplainable, to something mysterious, to something not provable. It's really about the story, and how to lay those clues out there to keep an audience interested.

We've all heard about people who have seen tunnels, white light, and relatives during near-death experiences (NDEs). But we don't hear so much about flatlined people who relay messages from dead people they didn't know, which is an important aspect of Dragonfly. Was that aspect of the film based on any real-life experiences you or the scriptwriters had heard of?

I think the scriptwriters based it on the reality of contact with the other side, the light, the creative force. There's a reason, which is what the journey of the movie is about, why the message is so important. It's unfinished business. I've read books--

Embraced by the Light

and other NDE books-and while the people that I can recall weren't necessarily given messages, they were given charges: Your work is not done. There's something more for you to do. You're not finished.

Our movie is just more urgent. There's an urgency to the message because it's a vitally important message for this man's life.

You'd read Embraced by the Light even before working on this movie. So would you say it's a personal interest?

Oh yeah, I've read many NDE books. So many religious tomes and spiritual books. You'd be very surprised by the books on this Hollywood director's shelf.

Can you name a few?

I'm a freak for this stuff. I've been reading Thomas Merton--I have all 50 of his books. What I tend to do is get a great book and read it seven times. I think Merton himself said there's two schools--you can read everything, or you can find a dozen amazing books and incorporate them into your life. I've read a lot of Merton, I've been to Gethsemane, done silent retreats.

I read a cross-section of things. I believe in unity, as opposed to division. So I'll read something like Thomas a Kempis, the

Imitation of Christ

, and go ahead and read Rumi, to give me the Sufi tradition. I love the

Tao Te Ching

, the Stephen Mitchell edition. There's a lot of beauty in these traditions. Right now I'm reading the book

Pathway of Roses

by Christian Larson. I'm into Rilke--his poetry is so spiritual.

What common threads in these spiritual authors speak to you personally? What do you find yourself remembering?

They all go within, where you have to remove yourself from the distractions of the world and find yourself within. It's very much what the movie is about. Joe has a lot of voices in his life, telling him no you can't, you're crazy, you're wrong. But there's this intuition, that voice inside saying there's something to this. And that's what faith is. That's what I find in all the great religions--quiet down, be still and know that I am God. Go into that quiet place, Jesus said, and shut the door. And listen for me there. And then bring that out into the world. Because the world presents us with a whole different agenda: are you successful, is your car fast enough, do you have the right things. All great spiritual traditions say, "That's the illusion."

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