When director Catherine Hardwicke burst onto the scene with two contemporary California dramas — 2003's Thirteen and 2005's Lords of Dogtown — few would have predicted that her next film, The Nativity Story, would take place in Biblical times. In an interview exclusive to Premiere.com, Hardwicke talks about the day-to-day lives of Mary and Joseph, the challenge of filming with animals, and the unexpected pregnancy of the film's 16-year-old star Keisha-Castle Hughes.

How did you first decide to tackle this monumental story?

This script came to me like the middle of January this year, and I saw the name Nativity. I still didn't quite realize what it was going to be about. I started reading the first few pages and then I'm like, 'Oh, this is the Nativity.' And as I read a little bit more, I started really feeling like, wow, these are real people, not just like a little figurine in a Nativity scene. I started thinking how fascinating to go back 2,000 years and try to figure out how people lived and what they did and what they thought about. And how different is that from what we're going through today and how similar is it?

Did you have a fairly religious upbringing?

I went to a Presbyterian church. And of course, we had a little Nativity set in our house and all that, but it's really very surface. So I didn't think deeply about it at all. As I started thinking about doing this movie, I started reading a lot of scholarly works and discussions about it and a lot of people that have thought more about the meaning of each word that's written in the Bible and where did this come from.

Were there details about the Nativity that surprised you?

Keisha Castle-Hughes as Mary in The Nativity Story.

Even just the fact that [Mary] was a devout Jewish girl. Growing up in a Christian church, they don't somehow mention she was a poor Jewish girl. That is a mind-blowing concept. And I was fascinated how at that time, every waking minute you were connected to your own survival. We're getting a little disconnected from our life as people get farther and farther away from the source of food, water, and everything. But obviously there's a whole revolution where we have to turn that around and start paying attention to and taking care of the earth again, which actually is one cool thing that we did in this.

How did you do that?

It is the first movie to have the Operation Zero logo where you zero out your impact on the planet. We calculated the amount of impact we had on global warming and carbon dioxide emissions, and we planted an equivalent amount of trees to balance that out. Working on this movie and trying to find locations that could pass for 2,000 years ago made me realize [that] even in the most remote parts of the desert, there will be heaps of plastic bags blowing through. It is really hard to find anything that man hasn't screwed up on this planet. There are many more things that a film production could do that I'm planning to do on the next production. But at least it was one tiny little stamp.