Telling the Forgotten Story of George Washington—Interview With Tammy Lane | Crossroads

Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're sitting here in Capernaum Studios in Texas, and we're speaking with Tammy Lane. Now, she's the founder of Capernaum Studios, and she's also the director of a new series coming out called Washington's Armor, about young George Washington. Hey, Tammy, real pleasure having us here. Thank you. Thank you for letting me be here. It's a privilege. Yeah, and it's a beautiful place you have your first off. I mean, I'm loving Texas, I have to say. This is a very Texan place that we're in right now, so welcome to Texas. Yeah, so, I mean, I was walking around the studio a bit yesterday, and I was really impressed. I mean, you have, you know, I mean, it looks like a slice of Hollywood here in Texas. You have all these different sets from biblical times. You have these sets that look like modern towns. You have what look like historical American sets. I mean, this is quite the piece of work you've done here. Tell us about how you started this whole thing. Well, we started about in 2005. I felt the call to build a first century village, which you saw, because I wanted to do some biblical-type films, and I wanted to allow other people to come and film their projects here and just have a nice place. I used a studio at one point, and we built, you know, a little village inside the studio, and then we tore it down, and I was just like, I really wish we had something permanent, you know, that we could use it for people to come out and people to be blessed by. And so I started the process, and it took years to do it. You know, I built one building in the village, and then probably a year later built another, and then, you know, so it just kind of, we built the garden. We have that 30,000 square foot statue garden, and we built that, opened it in 2018, I mean 2008, and we started doing live productions and having people come out to have an experience. We had, you know, and we still do the live productions. We have hundreds of actors and volunteers and, I mean, a crew. It just takes a lot of people to do that, but we do three live productions a year, and then the Lord started bringing in other filmmakers, which is really what the dream was, you know, in the beginning, the vision, and in 2018, it really hit. And so then after that, it's just, you know, spiraled, so it's a good thing. Now, I was watching the trailer for Washington's Armor, and this looks really good, actually. I mean, legitimately, like, I was watching. I was like, wow, like, I want my daughter to see this, you know. Not only emissaries of the crown, but ambassadors of the divine, we shall cross without delay. How did this start? I mean, tell us about the story, because I've never seen anyone really approach George Washington when he was younger. Yeah, well, I read, so I read a book called The Bulletproof George Washington by David Barton. I read that in, it was 17 years ago, and so then I thought, 17 years ago, I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to do this film, and, you know, it's going to be great. But it took 17 years for it to actually come to fruition, and, you know, I knew that this story needed to be told. You know, you don't see it in history books. I never knew about it until I read that book, and it is really God's providence over Washington and young Washington, and I love stories of how people get started, you know, how their coming-of-age story, coming into their purpose. So I was very intrigued by how he became, you know, the first president of the United States. How did, what was his, what all did he go through? What did he have to endure to get to where, you know, he was, which he did endure a lot. So it's a great story. You know, and I was watching a bit of the trailer, too, and having films that show a person's moral journey, I think is something that modern Hollywood is starting to miss. But I think that is where the real power in stories come from. Yeah, I do, too. I think it's interesting. I mean, and, you know, he's not perfect, and that's what God does. He works, he's perfect, and he works through fallible people. And, you know, and just, and you learn, you see his journey of how he learns, and he grows, and he did have very high integrity, high level of integrity. And he, you know, I just, I love, I just love his story. I think we can all relate to his story just because he wasn't perfect, you know. He did make mistakes, but then he continued on and persevered and, you know, went into the calling that he had. So can you tell us a bit about the story? What's the story here? So it takes place about 20 years prior to the Revolutionary War, and it's when he, you know, the first time he goes to battle. And so we see the story of Jamonville Glen, where he runs into the French, and they, you know, basically starts the French and Indian War, or the Seven Years' War, as some refer to it. And so it kind of shows that journey. It also shows the journey of when he meets Martha, and before Martha, and, you know, and she was married to a man named Daniel Custis, and had the children. You know, Washington didn't have his own children. They were her children that he, you know, adopted and raised and everything. And it was just really hard back then. Another good thing to learn about Washington is that, this isn't good for him, but it's interesting that he was sick a lot. He had malaria like two or three times. He had tuberculosis. He had dysentery. He had just fevers. He was just a pretty, pretty sick person. But even when he was sick, he would go into battle, or he would, he just, I just can't believe the level of his perseverance and his commitment to what was happening, you know. And at that time, it was the French and the English fighting basically over the land, American soil. Everybody wanted American soil, and so the natives, the Native Americans, they would choose a side. So then you had your ones that chose, there was lots of different tribes. Some chose to be with the French, and some chose to fight with the English. And basically, they would find who benefited their family and their tribe and who they could trust. And they got betrayed, and you know, so it's just such a, and even in that time, it's like a melting pot then. There's people from, in our show, there's characters that are from all over the place. A lot of them are from Scotland, you know, they're from England, they're from Holland, they're from just, you know, France. And so we have all these different accents and dialects and all of this to work with, which is super challenging. But it's really interesting to see how everything kind of started. Now, you talked a bit about the moral journey of Washington. For you, what was the real part of his story that moved you? The part that I like the best is that he really faced impossible odds. You know, he was, he didn't, I mean, he just faced impossible odds, but then he pulled through. And I know that his faith helped him to get where he was and where he needed to be, where he was going. He was shot at several times and never, it went through his jacket, and he never was injured. He never was injured in battle, although he was sick in battle. So I like that, I like that he really held a strict code in his military with his men. He didn't like foul language. If he found them drunk, he would be upset. You know, he had a temper back then. I think that he really worked on that through his life, and that got a lot better later. So, but yeah, there's many things that he, he was just a very moral person. You've taken an interesting approach with making this series. A lot of people, what they do is they'd write their script and they'd go approach studios or TV houses and be like, Hey, how'd you like to make this? You didn't do that. You decided, you've literally built your own studio and then did the whole thing yourself. And I mean, quite honestly, quite impressive quality level. I mean, if you were to tell me this is the next big Hollywood film, I'd believe you, you know what I mean? Thank you. What was the process of, I guess, why first did you choose to just do the whole thing yourself? Well, because I felt like I could do it. And I had the confidence that we could do it. Now, that was before I realized what it was going to be like to do a whole series. We actually started out, it started out being a short film, and then it went to a, you know, film that's, you know, 100 minutes or so. And then I thought, well, we can't tell the story. We can't tell the story with just one film. It needs to be a series. And so I decided that to make that bold move into it being a series. So now we're planning on six episodes and maybe, you know, a second season and everything. But we're planning on six episodes. We've got one episode done, and we're screening that actually now as we speak. And then we are filming in segments, which allows us to not filming episodes at a time. We're filming, like, segments that are, like, all the battle segments or all the House of Burgess scenes or all the tavern scenes because that, you know, you're there. You have your crew there. Everybody's in the wardrobe. It just makes sense to do it that way, and I feel like it's more economically sound to do it that way. So that's kind of what we're doing. Everybody thinks we do it as an episode, but, like, there's battle in almost every episode. And so we can't just – I mean, it's just better, I think, to do it this way. So we just finished shooting our segment of some House of Burgess and some tavern scenes and stuff like that. So it was really a fun shoot, a really fun shoot. I guess just another point on this. I don't know whether intentional or not, but through the process of all this, you kind of built your own mini Hollywood here. Was that the intention, or was this just, like, a side product of this whole production? How'd that start? Well, you know, we build sets. So when we need a set for a script, then we just build the set and make it outdoor worthy. And that way we can rent it out to other people. So it just makes sense to do it that way. We have the land. This is actually a 2,200-acre horse and cattle ranch. It's owned by my dad, and he donated, you know, about 40 acres to us to use for this ministry and for the films and whatever. So we're able to just, you know, build some pretty cool sets. I don't know if you've seen all of them, but hopefully you'll get to check it all out. We built, you know, we use every, you know, like there's a coffee shop down on Main Street area. And inside that we built Braddock's ship. You know, it looks like his headquarter, you know, his office inside the ship. And so that, I really like that set. I think that's really cool. I don't know if you got to see that one. I didn't see that one. I saw a few of them, but I didn't see that one, yeah. We also built the tavern. It's in the garden. So you can, if you haven't seen them, I can show them to you. But it's, yeah, it's fun. It's fun to, it's a blessing, and now other people can use it. I've only seen the trailer so far. You have completed the first episode. One thing I like about it is you don't shy away from talking about Washington's faith. Because, you know, when you watch Hollywood films and when you watch a lot of TV shows, they tend to not talk about that. But if you read Washington's letters and his journals and his old books, this was a fundamental part of their life and a fundamental part of how they viewed the world. I think it's nice that you've kept that, I guess, because what element do you think that plays within his story? Oh, it's, you know, he lived it out. He wasn't the type that goes around preaching all the time or, you know, saying, but he lived the principles of the Bible and of his faith, and he had a relationship with the Lord, and it's very, I mean, that's what I believe protected him and got him to where he needed to be, you know, and he was just obedient to follow the call on his life. So we don't put it in there to where it's overtly, you know. We put it in there as it's real, and as he talks about it occasionally, then that's in there. You know, if he's not talking about it, we don't put it in there. We don't try to force it in there. We also have a storyline with Christopher Gist, who is a frontiersman, and he fought with Washington, and he was in all his, you know, he was in his battles. They were friends. He was on the first wilderness trip that he went on. And so that storyline is also Christopher Gist is seeing all these bad things happening, you know, and he's starting to doubt a little bit and just, you know, kind of fall away from that, and his wife helps him, and Washington helps him a little bit. And so I think there's some really neat storylines that's in the show that's not even Washington, you know, because he had all these awesome people that surrounded him, and so we kind of go down those paths of all these other characters from history that are fascinating, and so you see how they lived as well. And you know what's really interesting is if you go back and read this history, I mean you mentioned there's French, there's British, there's people from Europe there, there's Native Americans, there's, you know, all kinds of different people together during this very pivotal time for the world. There were, you know, in Europe at that time you had the Enlightenment, and right around the time of the American Revolution, which is close to this time, you know, you had the French Revolution. And the French Revolution, they established the Cult of Reason, which was the first state-run, government-run atheist religion. And a lot of people don't think that maybe it goes back that far sometimes, but you had across Europe a moving away from faith, and in America you had a very kind of coming together of faith. You had these ideas battling as well during this time, these different beliefs about, you know, the future of mankind, so to speak, and, you know, what we keep from our past. And that debate, actually, it was a really fundamental part of that time in history. I'm curious, do you touch on kind of the—you mentioned this individual, this frontiersman kind of losing faith during this time and Washington keeping it. I mean, how does this dynamic of faith tie into it? Well, there is another character, Dr. Craig, who was his doctor throughout his life, and he is more, you know, on the side of enlightenment. You know, he doesn't—I don't think he was, you know, as strong in his faith at that time. And so we—but I think with seeing what Washington went through and seeing that he did defy the odds, you know, that he would do things that were impossible, then the people around him would see that, and they would think, you know, well, there's something, you know, there's something. Even the natives, you know, there was an Indian chief, and he saw that he was the one that tried to shoot him so many times along with all his people. He told them all to, you know, shoot him, all his guys, and they all tried, but they—it just wouldn't happen. And they would see, you know, the great—they called it the great white spirit or something, and that that protection is over him, you know. And I know—I know for myself that this is the Lord, you know, the Lord God, and that's protecting him, and he's probably surrounded by angels. And so—but people that surrounded him, they all—they had, you know, their different beliefs or whatever, but they did see that there's something unusual about this individual. And I think, as well, this is an important part of explaining— you know, I think there's something in that people can relate to. Because, you know, here's the reality. You know, films, they show people acting tough all the time, and they like to show the antihero and this kind of stuff, and people can relate to that gritty historical view of things. But when you talk to people and you're sitting down with people, they're really not like that. When they open up to you, you find people who are gentle and kindhearted, and they do have beliefs beyond, you know, the physical realm, right? And this is—this makes us who we are. But I think when you pull these elements out, you end up with flat characters sometimes. Yes. And even just in your trailer, to be honest, you really felt these are full characters. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. You know, I just want to tell the true story and stick to the true story as much as possible. You know, we take creative license on a few things, but for the most part, you know, it's pretty accurate. So it's just exciting to be able to tell a story like this and share that with the world, you know? Tam, I guess just last question. I mean, if you were to let people know one thing about your work and what you hope to build through all this, what would you tell them? I really want people to know God first and foremost, and I want to give glory to Him, you know, because if it wasn't for the Lord, I wouldn't be here. You know, I wouldn't know anything, what I'm going to do. I never aspired to be a filmmaker. You know, it just kind of happened as I started following the Lord, and I love it. I'm excited that I get to do this. But I really want people to be blessed to be at Capernaum, to use Capernaum. I think that when people come out here, they do feel a sense of peace, and they feel joy. I think people really enjoy being out here. I want that. I love having all these people out here. And I also want with the stories I tell, I want people to understand the foundation of our country, and I'm very passionate about this country and its foundation. And so I really want people to know the truth about how it was founded and who the people in history were and what they went through to give us the freedoms that we have. Hey, Tammy, real pleasure having you on Crossroads. Thank you. It was a pleasure being here.