Christopher Thornton had a career in theater and on television before a rock-climbing accident forever changed the actor’s life. The injury fractured two of his vertebrae, leaving him confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down.

However, Thornton has since pressed on with his stage acting, which led him to an off-Broadway role in the play Pyretown, leading him to guest roles on TV series like Unhitched, My Name Is Earl, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Now the 44 year-old writes and stars as DJ-turned-faith-healer “Delicious” Dean O’Dwyer in actor Mark Ruffalo’s directorial debut Sympathy For Delicious. He was asked what first motivated him to make the film

“I was struggling to make my way as an actor, and then I had an accident,” Thornton recalls, “I was only starting to get a couple of jobs again after being in the chair, which were great to get and sorely needed — and I realized very quickly that roles for someone in a chair were so limited, really small. There wasn’t a lot, and I wanted to try to do something more substantial. And I had been writing a little bit already, and I decided to try to write something. That’s really where it started for me. When I’d first gotten injured, I had done to some of these healing services, like you see at the beginning of the movie. And they were really bizarre, crazy, weird experiences and they stayed with me.”

“That came back to my head for whatever reason when I was looking for something to write,” he adds, “It was a great place to start a story. So I kind of fleshed it out, and stumbled upon the idea of making the guy in the chair the healer. I pitched that to Mark. Mark and I were roommates at the time — and he really responded to it and said that that was the one I should work on. So I fleshed out the rest of it and wrote a draft. He can tell you how long the draft was. And he really liked that, and asked if he could direct it, and I said, ‘Sure.’ And that’s kind of how it started. I would give him a draft, and Mark would give me a ton of notes, and I would give him another draft. It went that way for a long time.”

Thornton’s script took 10 years of rewrites before the film finally got off the ground. He was asked about that as well as what did any of the actors do, which include Ruffalo, Juliette Lewis, Laura Linney, and Orlando Bloom, with their characters that deviated at all from the original script.

“Really, all of the actors contributed so much,” Christopher says, “Because one of the things that we had a problem with because of the schedule and timing, a lot of the parts of the script weren’t in the best of shape when we started shooting.” We wanted to stop for three weeks or so, and fix certain things that were not quite there yet. They basically said, ‘You have to cut 10, 12 pages out of the script.’ And it was only a 100-page script at the time. And you can’t just snip it out. If you do that, you have to figure out other ways to make certain things happen. And we really didn’t have time to do it. So it was kind of a mad scramble.”

“So to answer the question: everybody, all of them,” he adds, “There are huge chunks of dialogue that Laura and Orlando and Juliette all came up with on their own, just sort of riffing off of what might have already been there, or, in some cases, was a whole new direction. So everybody brought a lot to the table, which is why we were so lucky that we got the cast that we got, because in lesser hands, it would’ve been a real disaster, I think, in certain places.”

Chris talked about what motivated him to pick The Bee Gees’ 1968 hit “I Started A Joke” as the end theme for the film when the credits roll.

“It was so long ago,” he says, “You know, you write a song title into a script, and you have no idea if it’s going to get taken seriously or if it will ever happen, just because you put it on a page. For some reason, I heard that song right around the time I was finishing up that first draft. And it was just one of those things. It just felt like the right thing to do, because of the lyrics, like Mark just said. And his voice, Robin Gibb’s, is so angelic, and it’s almost too sweet in a way. It’s almost saccharine, but in a good way. And after the darkness of the movie, for so many reasons, it just felt right.

“So I said, “What the hell, we’ll never get it,’” Thornton continues, “And I just typed it in there. And it stuck. And [Mark] liked it, and he stayed with it, and it actually worked out. But when I wrote it in there, I didn’t have any idea it would actually be in it. There were actually other titles that were written into the movie that we couldn’t get at all, so that one worked out.”

Thornton talks about how he made Sympathy For Delicious’s fairly unsympathetic characters be identifiable with moviegoers.

“When I was writing, I didn’t worry about them being too unsympathetic,” Chris says, “Just as long as they were empathetic, as long as everybody would understand why people were doing what they were doing. That’s the only thing I worried about. My feeling was it just had to be truthful. [Delicious] is just in a real difficult moment in his life when his injury is very recent. It’s not only something, of course, I could remember, it is bad. You are self-obsessed at that time. It is all about you.”

“And again, there’s a lot of anger,” he continues, “It’s a dark, dark place to be. And I just said, ‘If that’s what this story is about, I have to take that seriously. I have to make that truthful.’ So you have to stop worrying about him being likable, because he’s not going to be. It’s just not possible. So I didn’t really worry about it. I just said, ‘As long as it’s real.’ And then the ending will hopefully redeem him.”

Chris was asked if he felt now was the right moment to write the film and if he had any worries about the story being controversial.

“I think everybody would agree with this, but when you write a script, you’re not planning to take 10 years to shoot it,” Thornton says, “So the timing of it, it was going to happen whenever we could make it happen. There was really no way to plan anything like that. I can’t really say that I did. It seemed to be the storyline to go when I was working on that first draft.”

“For whatever reason at the time, I didn’t want to just limit it to skid row and not go beyond the exploitation of this gift and where it would take him,” he adds. “For some reason, I just wanted to just blow it out, for better or for worse. And it just clicked. I wasn’t trying to be controversial or anything like that. It just seemed like the right choice to make in the story.”

Mark Ruffalo not only stars in Sympathy For Delicious with Thornton, but it’s the actor’s directorial debut. Thornton talks about the process of getting the Oscar-nominated actor on board.

“He didn’t want to be in it,” Chris remembers, “He said to me, ‘I either want to play this part with somebody else directing or I want to direct this and not be in this at all.’ That was the first thing he said: ‘I can’t do both.’”

Chris was asked if he would ever collaborate together again with Ruffalo on a film in the future.

“We want to,” Thornton replies, “We’ll probably do something at some point.”

Thornton also talked about the experience of working with a director who’s also acted versus a director who doesn’t also act as well.

“On a movie like this, it’s really all about the characters,” Chris believes, “There really isn’t much else to it. It’s these people behaving the way that they do, which creates the plot. So when it’s so character-driven, it’s great to have someone like Mark, because he’s such a good actor himself, and he has such amazing instincts, he’s able to give you exactly what you need. He’s also not hidden behind the monitor. Usually, he’s right there, crunched down, balled up next to the camera. He really seems with you, and that’s really nice to have.”

Chris talks about how he feels Delicious views his own exploitative behavior that he exhibits as a faith healer in Sympathy For Delicious.

“My character, I don’t think, thought twice about it until he was in jail for it, and then was forced to think about it,” Thornton believes, “But as I was saying earlier, from the beginning of the film, he’s in such a bleak place in his life, and he gets so frustrated by what happens to him, he’s completely throwing caution to the wind. He’s embracing the exploitation of it, not even calling it that. He feels owed at that point. He feels like he deserves to get something out of this. He just throws caution to the wind and goes wholeheartedly down that road, not caring at all what the negative possibilities are. And then, of course, he pays a really serious price for that. And then he has to seriously face it when he’s alone in a jail cell.”

“I think he became self-aware because of how he turned out,” he adds, “I think he was really numb to what was going on all the way through it, because of what instigated him to do it: this deep pain, this horrible bleak place that he was. It was a reaction. He wasn’t thinking about it, ‘Am I guilty? Am I responsible? Is there something wrong with this choice?’ He never asked those questions. He wasn’t self-aware at all at that point. And then it’s like getting a bucket of cold water thrown on him is what happens to him when he goes to jail. And then yes, he does regret it, and it call kind of comes to him. I think he even says to Mark’s character, ‘What was I thinking?’”

Finally, Sympathy For Delicious has Delicious faith-healing crowds in the form of a rock concert. Thornton shared with us that the concerts that inspired him in writing the film.

“I remember seeing Bruce Springsteen in 1984, and it blew my mind,” he says, “I don’t know if it found its way in the film, but that was a great show. Maybe subconsciously, I have no idea. The Flaming Lips were kind of one of the loose inspirations.”

“I also remember when U2 did a concert and Bono dressed up as a devil,” Chris continues, “He was in this gold suit with horns. It was a long time ago. I remember that having some influence. It was so decadent and so ridiculous and so over-the-top. That swam around a little bit too, back when we were doing a first draft of this.”