‘In God’s Name’ explores faith

Filmmaker Jules Naudet happened to be in the World Trade Center early on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, shooting footage for a documentary on firefighters.

When two hijacked jetliners slammed into the twin towers, Naudet – “just knowing my life was shortly to come to an end” – asked himself “very existential questions, like, ‘Why am I here? Why me?’ ” he says.

“It’s very common for people facing death to do this,” he adds.

Six months after the terrorist attacks, Naudet and his brother Gedeon produced the landmark documentary “9/11,” but both longed to do something more.

“In God’s Name,” a two-hour exploration of faith, spirituality and a search for life’s meaning airing tonight at 9 on CBS, is the result of their quest.

“With these questions still in the back of my mind, who better to ask than these great religious leaders, who should have the answers,” Naudet says. “So we had the idea to take a journey to meet all of them.”

The result, he says: “I did get answers to my questions. I got 12 sets of answers.”

The brothers’ global trek yielded 180 hours of footage and included visits to Egypt, England, India, Israel, Japan, Lebanon, Russia and the Vatican, as well as Illinois and South Carolina.

The Naudets chose a dozen spiritual leaders willing to express their own thoughts on faith, hope and tolerance, and to speak about the violence in today’s world.

“We went with major faiths, and even there had to limit ourselves,” Jules Naudet says. “We tried to do only those with 60 million (followers) and above. And it was hard to find some people, because for certain religions, there is no clear hierarchy.”

Taking what Naudet calls “a very personal approach,” the filmmakers used sound, images and interviews to illustrate examples of daily faith by the 11 men and one woman.

“Much more than showing a great leader on a big throne, we wanted to look at them as individuals – a grandfather playing with his (grand)kid, a guy walking his dog,” he says.

“People of different faiths might look at them and see someone like them who prays.”

Naudet says the program shows that “the commonality between all the faiths is compassion and understanding.”

“The lesson we learned from this journey is that we have so much more to be united by than to be separated by,” he says.

Susan Zirinsky of CBS News, who also worked with the Naudets on “9/11,” served as the program’s executive producer.

“There is something interesting in the people themselves and how they have become these spiritual leaders,” she says.

“None believe themselves to be the bodies of God, but they are so deep and so smart and relate to the common man. … In their remarkable innate ability to communicate, there is a pied-piper aspect to all of them.”

Zirinsky says a crucial element in producing the documentary was the meticulous English translations required for most of those on camera.

The voices speaking the words of the leaders, she explains, all have accents that are accurate for each particular country or region.

The show’s airdate, two days before Christmas, is coincidental, Zirinsky says.

“But around the holidays, people’s mindset is a little more introspective,” she says. “They are willing to settle back and look for something in a bit of a different light.”

Naudet says the program “might open a few eyes and raise a few eyebrows.”

“When you look at the world and what’s happening, it’s easy to become very pessimistic,” he says.

But after meeting the spiritual leaders, he says, “I was left with a lot of hope for the future.”