On View : Faith, Lies and Redemption : TNT’S ‘JACOB’ IS A TESTAMENT TO PERSONAL GROWTH

Peter Hall, the renowned British stage and opera director, acknowledges that he’s not a religious man.

“I have no religion,” says Hall, who devoted 30 years of his career to running England’s two leading national theater companies--The Royal Shakespeare Company, which he founded in 1960, and the Royal National Theatre, where he succeeded Laurence Olivier. He currently overseas the commercial theater troupe, the Peter Hall Company.

“I am a worried agnostic,” he adds with a smile.

Being agnostic, however, didn’t stop him from directing “Jacob,” which premieres Sunday on TNT. The Old Testament parable about redemption and faith is the second in a series of Bible stories TNT is dramatizing for the small screen.

“Jacob,” an international co-production with Germany and Italy, features an equally eclectic cast: Matthew Modine as Jacob, Lara Flynn Boyle as Rachel, Irene Papas as Rebekah, Giancarlo Giannini as Laban, Juliet Aubrey as Leah, Joss Ackland as Isaac and Sean Bean as Esau.

“When my agent rang me up and said that Turner would like me to do one of their Bible, Old Testament movies, I said, ‘Don’t be silly,’ ” recalls Hall, who directed the 1990 TNT movie “Orpheus Descending” with Vanessa Redgrave and Kevin Anderson. “He said, ‘Look at “Abraham,” which they had just made.”

Hall, 64, was impressed with the miniseries “Abraham,” which starred Richard Harris and Barbara Hershey. “I thought it had a great texture because of where it was shot (Morocco). I actually believed (the characters) were looking after those sheep. In most biblical films, you feel that the sheep have been asked to cross camera from one side to another.”

He had little knowledge of the Jacob story when he was asked to direct the film. “I must confess, all I could remember about Jacob was that he was a twin and that Esau was a hairy man and Jacob was a smooth man. And that Jacob had conned his blind father Isaac into giving him the inheritance, the leadership of the tribe, by deception, by putting kid (goat) pelts on his arms. His blind father feels them and says, ‘Esau.’ I also remember something dimly about ladders, Jacob’s ladder. But I couldn’t remember anything else.”

So he refreshed his memory by reading the Old Testament. Much to his surprise, Hall discovered the parables to be extraordinary stories. “Without wishing to belittle them at all, they have to be thought of as metaphors like the great myths--collective stories of mankind.”

Jacob, Hall says, “is a wonderful story about paying for deception. Jacob is the story of a very, very weak deceiver who is very neurotic. He is a human being. He suffers as a consequence and he turns into something rather extraordinary. It is the classic story of sinner to saint.”

Hall hopes he has given the story a human texture. “For starters, this isn’t an epic,” he explains over a cup of tea at the St. James Club bar in West Hollywood. “They don’t speak in an old-style English as if they wandered in from an antique shop. They are not Shakespearean. I tried to get a cast that was very modern in its sensibilities.”

As in the case of the very American Modine, who has starred in such films as “Full Metal Jacket,” “Birdy” and “And the Band Played On.”

Like Hall, Modine knew very little about the Bible. “When I try to do research for something like this, I try to read everything I can,” says Modine in a phone conversation from New York City. “It is interesting, whether it is the story of Jacob or Abraham, it is always a story of a person’s search for something. Usually, the search leads them to something inside. I believe Peter and I felt that it was a journey of looking inwardly. If you think of the events in Jacob’s life, not the religious overtones, and say he is living today, what you have is a man who spends his life feeling terribly guilty for things he should not have done. And then he spends all of his time in penance.”

“Jacob” was filmed earlier this year in Morocco. “It took 27 days and we worked around the clock,” Hall recalls. “We had a wonderful Italian crew. On the last day we did 43 (camera) setups, with Matthew in all of them. The only problem was the heat. It was quite often 95 and 100 degrees and we shot from 8 in the morning until 7 at night, six days a week.”

Because Modine has been making movies for more than a decade, he knew how to pace himself.

“Those people who did the costume changes and in the hair and makeup departments were the best I ever worked with,” Modine says. “All of those beards the guy applied hair by hair by hair. We would come in at 5 in the morning to start putting the hair and makeup on and then you’d spend the whole day filming until the sun went down and then you have to get all of that stuff off. There were times I wish I would have just left it on and gone to work the next day. But you feel so horrible with the dirt and the makeup. So you would go back to the hotel room and soak in the tub to get it off and leave a horrible mess in the hotel’s bathroom!”

“Jacob” airs Sunday at 5, 7 and 9 p.m.; Wednesday at 5 p.m.; Saturday at 5 p.m.; Dec. 11 at 1 p.m.; Dec. 14 at 7 p.m. and Dec. 17 at 11 a.m. on TNT.