“The line that I sort of walk,” says Mike Nawrocki, the 3-2-1 Penguins! spokesman for Big Idea, “is wanting to make sure that the stories that we tell have biblically-grounded messages in them, so they can be a resource for their parents to pass values along to their kids. That’s at the core. And then we’ve got to be really funny, really entertaining, and have really great music. And then just hope that people are going to want to see them. And keep enabling us to keep doing that—with Veggietales, and with 3-2-1 Penguins! It’s a tricky thing. Entertainment itself is a very tricky business, and then when you add the ministry aspect to it—the faith aspect—it gets even trickier.” Look for Save the Planets! on DVD come September 2.

“You just want your movie to get out there,” says Gary Wheeler, director of the award-winning film The List, disagreeing with the notion that the Fox Faith label is a kiss of death. “I think that Fox, as a distributor, is also learning about the market; and they have a sincere desire to stay in this market, and hopefully make better and better films. So I think what they’re doing now is using the Fox Faith label as more of a seal of approval to Christians; and then when it’s released in Blockbuster or other places, it then comes under Fox Home Entertainment. So I think where they’ll end up is that Fox Faith will come to be seen like the Dove Awards, or a Movieguide recommendation. But for the general market—for the Wal-Marts, the Targets—you’ll see things come from Fox Home Entertainment.”

There’s little doubt in my mind, after all is said and done, that—for the filmmakers—moviemaking really is all about the story… even though they might not have thought through the cultural satire very deeply. And yet my own personal experiences with Disney’s very effective, entertaining, and enjoyable commercial ventures leave me convinced that moviemaking is also very much about good business. If Pixar didn’t make good movies with broad commercial appeal, they’d still be just another footnote to entertainment history… as would Disney. And I really doubt their success is purely accidental. Still, is director Andrew Stanton right that cynical critics like me read far too much into all this stuff? Probably. Almost definitely.

“I don’t get offered scripts that much,” says the irascible Wallace Shawn, “because filmmakers don’t like me that much. I get a certain number of scripts in the course of the year, and the scripts that nauseate me I don’t do. And the ones that are left over, I do, basically. In other words, there are quite a few that disgust me and that offend me too much, and that seem to me to make the world a worse place. And the ones that are left, I do.” So this makes everyone want to ask: Where does the Toy Story franchise fit on the Shawn disgust scale, and what does he really think of Kit Kittredge?

Dan Merchant is an ordinary guy… as ordinary as a guy can be, that is, if you’ve spent several years working in TV production, put everything you own in hock to make your own movie, spent months walking around the country with inflammatory and contradictory bumper stickers pasted onto your coveralls, and then assembled it all into a powerful, moving, insightful, often hilarious, and yet somehow good-hearted skewering of the religious debates that have gripped America’s politics for the last two or three decades. We daresay: if Dan Merchant’s Lord, Save Us From Your Followers gets much exposure, Bill Maher’s Religulous—which has now slipped to this fall’s release schedule—is going to look quite petty by comparison.

In Sergei Bodrov’s latest film, Mongol, the director gets inside the head of Genghis Kahn so that we understand a little about what made him tick. And he’s well aware that getting touchy-feely about despots isn’t popular. “Look,” he says. “Don’t you think it’s kind of ignorant to judge people who lived eight hundred years ago, who were fighting on horses with swords, after what’s happened in the 20th Century? It was the worst century, and the most inhuman. You had two world wars, the Holocaust, Nazi camps, Stalin’s camps, nukes, chemical weapons. It was insane and cruel, just the worst century in history. And you’re still just talking about the cruelty of the guy?”

“I think our film helps to educate kids,” says Chris Bell, director of the upcoming documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster. “I showed it to about five hundred high school kids in Toronto, and a lot of those kids came up to me and thanked me for telling them the truth and not hitting them over the head with statements like they hear in commercials—like, ‘Steroids will shrink your balls.’ Then there’s the one with the statue of David falling apart, and it says, ‘Steroids won’t make you a great athlete, they’ll destroy you.’ But then they watch Barry Bonds hit 756 home runs and they’re thinking, ‘Will it really destroy you?’”

A product of the 1970s and the San Francisco Art Institute, Errol Morris became an overnight sensation with 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, a film which examined the case of Randall Dale Adams, on death row for the murder of a Dallas area police officer… and eventually led to his release. “It’s hard for me to even imagine how people experience my films,” he said while promoting his new film, Standard Operating Procedure. “I’m so involved with thinking about them and making them. It’s always been my hope that they can be taken on lots and lots of different levels. They can be taken as just entertainment. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. They are, after all, supposed to be movies.”

Eduardo Verástegui has lived the movie-star life… South of the Border style. He is right, I think, in observing that we “have this tendency and inclination to imitate or copy what we see on film or television, and what we read in magazines or interviews.” But he has unhitched himself from the star cart, instead lending his talents to entertainment with a purpose. “I have to see this as an opportunity,” he says, “to say a few words of hope, so when people read those interviews they will be influenced in a positive way. Because I myself, when I was a teenager, all these things that I did—many of them—I was influenced by the magazines I was reading and the TV shows I was watching, and the movies I was watching. And now that I look back, I think, My gosh! I can’t believe I was influenced by this person’s interview! I was imitating everything that people were saying in that interview; and they were not good things, you know?”

Chiwetel Ejiofor, who stars as Jiu-Jitsu guru Mike Terry in David Mamet’s upcoming film Redbelt, is very much drawn to playing men of character. “These people still do exist,” he says, “even though, in the wider society, it’s become unpopular to point out people like this without trying to find fault in them, without trying to find where they’ve maybe done the wrong thing. But society runs well, for the most part, because there are people of good conscience and good self-knowledge and awareness—even if they don’t consciously have a code of ethics that they live by.”