Here’s the thing about The Passion of the Christ, the part that’s easy to miss once a film becomes both lightning rod and legend: for everyone who watched it, argued about it, or refused to see it, there was a parallel story running under the production—messy, human, occasionally uncanny. And Mel Gibson, for all his bravado and all his wreckage, has carried that parallel story like a sealed envelope. Two decades later, he opened it just a crack. “To this day,” he said, “no one can explain it.” You can take that as mystique or humility. I take it as a man admitting that whatever happened out there wasn’t his to package.

Before the storms, before the box office, before the squabbles on cable news, there was a man with every prize that industry can confer—fame, Oscars, power—and the private collapse that those prizes rarely patch. In the early 2000s, Gibson was untouchable professionally and underwater personally. Alcohol, depression, nights he says he didn’t want to live. One night, he dropped to his knees in his living room and prayed. It wasn’t strategy. It wasn’t a pitch. It was the kind of unadorned plea people make when the scaffolding stops holding.

Out of that came a vow, not a project: tell the Passion the way he believed it happened. No soft focus, no modern sermon stitched onto the end, no English. Aramaic and Latin. No stars to distract. No buffer. Studios listened, smiled, and backed away. He put up roughly $45 million of his own money, stepped off the grid, and went to work. You can call that courage. You can call it compulsion. Both are true, and often indistinguishable when an artist thinks redemption is on the line.

He went to Matera, Italy, an ancient town carved from stone, where time seems to collect in the corners. Crews say the air felt “biblical.” A cameraperson told me the light behaved itself during rehearsal, then went strange when they rolled on the crucifixion—like the air bent. Easy to dismiss as fatigue and nerves. Yet patterns emerged. Calm before certain scenes. Winds that stopped, then ripped tents out of the ground. Clouds forming where forecasts promised blue. And yes, the lightning.

Jim Caviezel—serious, devout, game for pain—was struck. Twice, they say. The assistant director as well. No burns, only singed hair and the acrid smell of ozone. Skeptics will note that lightning strikes aren’t divine telegrams; they’re dangerous physics with lousy timing. Still, even hardened crews tend to quiet down when bolts hit the actor playing Jesus and everyone walks away intact. From that day on, people prayed before takes. Not just the believers. Habit? Insurance? Possibly. Or some subtle concession that the room had changed.

Caviezel’s endurance quickly became the spine of the film. A whip mis-angled, metal embedded in skin, the scream on the soundtrack real. A cross beam falling, shoulder dislocated. Hours on a cold cross, hypothermia, then pneumonia. He refused to come down. “If you want to play Christ,” he later said, “you’d better be ready to suffer.” That line can read theatrical in print. In context, it sounded more like someone stating the terms he’d accepted and wasn’t ready to renegotiate. He fasted, he prayed, he wandered between exhaustion and something he struggled to name. If that makes you wary, good. Actors are not vessels. They are workers. But sometimes the work trespasses.

Gibson’s directorial choices were unsparing. Keep the camera running through shivers. Don’t cut around the pain. Don’t anesthetize with edits. He knows how montage can rescue a scene; he chose not to rescue this one. For some, that’s manipulative. For others, it’s the only honest approach to a story built on flesh and failure. My read: he was filming like a man who thought contrition required contact. He wanted bodies to do what ideas can’t.

The production picked up its own folklore. A sound tech heard voices on tapes that weren’t human. A cinematographer spotted faces in shadow no one remembered filming. A crew member quit, saying the place felt cursed. Another said it felt like a confrontation—light and darkness sharing the same patch of ground until one flinched. Did all of that happen exactly as told? Memory is a creative act. But every set needs a story to move through the hard days, and this set’s story was heavier than most.

Then the release: February 2004, minimal Hollywood glitter, maximum word-of-mouth. Lines around theaters. Church groups buying out screens. People crying, praying, leaving without speaking. It set records for a non-English film and—at the time—for an R-rated one. Critics slammed it as violent, manipulative, anti-Semitic. The late-night monologues wrote themselves. In the pews, it played differently. Prisoners watched quietly. Families tried again. If you’re allergic to sentiment, I understand. But Hollywood didn’t move Passion; communities did. That matters.

After success came the backlash and the unraveling. Caviezel’s career contracted. Executives considered him “too controversial.” Gibson’s fall was well-documented and ugly—arrests, recordings, rage. The man behind the century’s most talked-about religious film morphed into a tabloid cautionary tale. The timing wasn’t lost on anyone who likes tidy narratives: storm, triumph, collapse. Real life rarely arranges itself that neatly, but the shorthand stuck.

For almost 20 years, Gibson dodged granular questions about the set. He offered simple answers: “God worked through it.” Then, in a quieter moment, seven words: “To this day, no one can explain it.” That can be read as myth maintenance or as a refusal to turn lived experience into content. I don’t think he’s protecting a secret. I think he’s protecting something that dissolves when you pin it down.

What did the film leave behind? People changed, or say they did. A Judas who converted. Crew who walked away from the industry and never returned. Caviezel choosing churches and prisons over studio lots. “Playing Jesus didn’t end when the cameras stopped,” he told audiences. “It began there.” If that sounds grandiose, consider how many actors quietly carry their hardest roles for years. The body remembers. So do the rooms where it was asked to do more than pretend.

The Passion still makes people uneasy. It’s not just the theological debates or the culture-war shrapnel. It’s the choice to use an actor’s body as the second set, to reject the safety net that modern tools offer and ask the audience to sit inside real pain. I don’t endorse making suffering a filmmaking strategy. I do understand the argument for refusing to turn suffering into metaphor. There’s a line. They walked it. Some will say they crossed it.

Gibson’s sequel—Resurrection—has been rumored and teased, pitched as a journey beyond time and a film measured in meaning rather than scale. The real question isn’t whether he can top himself. It’s whether he’ll treat mystery gently. Whether he’ll allow silence and interiority to do more of the lifting. He’s a more complicated man now. Complication, handled well, is good for art.

So what happened on that set? A director turned filmmaking into an experiment in endurance. An actor accepted terms beyond the usual boundaries. A crew worked within a space where prayer and screams shared the same air. The rest—lightning, winds, faces in frames—is how humans stitch meaning to experiences that outsize our tools. Some mysteries are not puzzles. They are pressures. You feel them more than you solve them.

Watch The Passion again, if you can stomach it. Note the stillness. The breath between blows. Ask yourself whether the presence audiences talk about is in the film or in you. The safest answer is “both.” The truer answer might be that the line doesn’t matter. Some encounters don’t explain themselves. They alter you and move on.

And maybe that’s why the film survives—not as entertainment, but as encounter. It insists that suffering isn’t defeat, that forgiveness isn’t pretty, that love without sacrifice is hollow. It doesn’t tell you what to believe. It nudges what you know but avoid. If you hear a question in it, you’re not alone. Those seven words still hang there, unhelpful and precise: to this day, no one can explain it. Which is another way of saying the work did what art at its most dangerous sometimes does—it opened the door and left us standing in it.