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Bella Producer Leo Severino Talks About Bella DVD, "the Entertainment Ultrasound"

New promotion tagline, "Can a movie really save a life?", inspired by The Passion tag line

By Steve Jalsevac

May 7, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - On Monday LifeSiteNews.com interviewed Bella producer Leo Severino about the DVD release of the movie on Tuesday.

LifeSiteNews: You are now at the stage where the Bella DVD's are coming out. Bella was intended to fill what you saw was a need for ethical and inspiring Hollywood quality films that would appeal to general audiences. The movie has several themes, but tell us why you see the DVD release is so important for women with distressed pregnancies.

Leo: Well, what is beautiful is that we have heard many stories but one recently - through a crisis pregnancy center.  There are a lot of stories, in short - where people watch the film, not knowing what it was about, having already scheduled an abortion - but after seeing the movie, decide not to abort their child. 

In some cases, there is an example where there is a crisis pregnancy center that had counseled a young lady and who had decided to go through with her abortion. She had an appointment and they decided to give her a copy of Bella. They gave her the copy and the next day she came in and let them know she decided that she was going to keep her child as a result of watching the film.  So, Jason Jones came up with the idea to have what we call the Bella10 campaign, where people not only purchase and view the film but contact 10 other people to ask them to do the same.  For him, his idea wasn't just for people to send our email to their entire database - which obviously helps - but to physically contact 10 people and be responsible for 10 people getting the film but also passing on that 10 campaign so that they in turn reach out to 10 more people - with the intent to continue that on and on and on. 

Through a foundation Jason has decided that he is going to give crisis pregnancy centers copies of Bella to give to the young ladies that come to the centers.  He loves the initiative, as obviously everybody does. Jason always called Bella the entertainment ultrasound.  There are a lot of young ladies who may be a week pregnant and can't really see their child yet but if they see Bella, it is like an ultrasound because they see the face of their child in Bella.  They realize that the choice is a child - not a bag of cells.

LifeSiteNews:  So it is another way of informing them.

Leo: Another way to heighten their awareness to see what is really living inside of them and the consequence of their choice which, at least in Bella, is the child.  This little girl personifies the child that is living in their womb that many people want them to think is not a child.  So, anyways, that was a cool idea, I thought.

LifeSiteNews: This seems to be a very unusual movie DVD promotion campaign but as you explained, it has some very specific objectives for doing that.

Leo: Well, the tag-line for The Passion when it came out - one of the first trailers - said, "Can a movie really change your life."  So, you know when all the stories came out about all the children's lives that have been saved by Bella, we were just talking with Steve McEveety (producer of The Passion) about that tag-line and thought the tag-line for Bella should be: "Can a movie really save a life?"  And, at least in Bella's case, we know of 13 and probably 2 more children so far who were scheduled to be aborted and when their mother saw the film, they decided to have their child.

So, that is the beauty of the story - it inspires people to first of all see the beauty of the life that lives inside of them but also to be selfless - even if it means offering their child for adoption - choosing 9 months of sacrifice so their child can live forever. 

This movie is a weapon of mass instruction.  There is a magic to it - 90 minutes in a dark room with a screen that is big - people allow that information to come into their mind and heart and influence them.

LifeSiteNews:  So, the video gets released tomorrow (Tuesday May 6)?

Leo: Tomorrow Eduardo is on the Today show with Kathie Lee Gifford who has been incredibly supportive and the DVD - it is also released tomorrow.  He is taping Neil Cavuto tonight - it's on either tonight or on tomorrow night and Eduardo is also going to be on Bill O'Reilly tonight.

LifeSiteNews: Have you received many orders to date for the video?

Leo: I don't know the very latest numbers but what is really cool is that we emailed our database.  We have a huge database with over 1 million people and over the weekend Bella became the number one top-selling romantic movie on Amazon.com and that is pre-order.  We beat Pride & Prejudice and Atonement.  We were number one in our category which was Romance.  We were 29 over-all.  They group not just film - they group all film and television.  So, we were 29 overall of all DVDs in their database which is pretty wild.

LifeSiteNews:  The plans were to go into other countries - South America and Europe and so on.  Has anything moved on that aspect regarding theater showings?

Leo:  This past weekend it launched in Latin America and it has been launched in many countries from Canada to Australia and in August it will be in Spain.  Spain is our last stop.

LifeSiteNews: The DVD is currently available in how many languages?

Leo: The DVD is currently available in English and Spanish.

LifeSiteNews: Any more movies in the works?

Leo: You know, we have a lot of films in development and our director has been working on those but we haven't come to a conclusion yet but the rest of the team - myself, Eduardo and Sean have just been 100% focused on this international release of the DVD so I would say, by the end of the May, we are going to spend more time on deciding what our next film is.

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