Original subtitles

There's something irrepressible

about the urge for cultures to create mythic stories.

What if I told you that God and the devil made a wager?

[Cousineau] The myths or stories about how things come to be.

Everybody asks this question, from children to elders.

"Where do we come from?

Where do we go when we die? Where does evil come from?

What is the moment love is born in the human heart?"

People have been asking these questions since the Paleolithic caves,

sitting around campfires.

We're doing the same thing in movies today.

-Hold the door. You going down? -Not if I can help it.

Mythic stories are about heroes who are stuck.

And to get unstuck,

they have to take a step out of their own life.

And one step, and then the next step, then the next step,

and suddenly, you're on an adventure.

Constantine is a classic male, stuck character,

who has to learn how to move on.

Why me, Gabriel?

It's personal, isn't it?

I didn't go to church enough, I didn't pray enough...

[Cousineau] Through the history of most mythology and literature,

you have a belief in the power of human beings to change.

And that's the stuff of heroism.

But especially since the two wars in Europe,

which have killed 120-plus million people,

this other sensibility began to permeate all of the arts,

and that is a deep disrespect for heroism and optimism,

and a kind of resolute disgust with this Pollyanna-ish notion of change.

And this is what we get in Constantine, here, in the Keanu Reeves character.

He is an heroic character,

but he is fighting the evil within him.

And he's trying to rescue what is ever good from the underworld.

And every character involved within this film has those different shadings.

In the classic hero's journey

that Joe Campbell cobbled together,

the hero has to separate from the way that he's been.

A crisis is always what precipitates an adventure.

Otherwise, there's no story.

If you're comfortable with all the answers,

you might as well stay home.

But the crisis precipitates the journey.

And this journey, the separation from everything the hero has known before,

moves him in a counterclockwise direction.

It goes against time, against space,

which is why great stories are timeless.

-You know what she did. -I don't know.

What are you afraid of? What did she do, Angela?

-What did she do? -I don't know!

[Cousineau] Constantine is a loveless character.

He's hard.

His voice is hard, his delivery,

his mannerisms, his heart is hard.

And there's only one thing

that redeems a fallen hero

throughout world mythologies.

John, I really want--

[Cousineau] And Angela is the character--

Who's a strong, strong woman character in her own right,

but she's also bringing him this hint of how to redeem himself.

And the hint is that he's got to let go of something.

This is the great motif of the sacrifice.

And the sacrifice, literally,

means "to make sacred."

Your life has been profane.

It's been selfish.

And to move on into the sacred realm of a mythic hero,

you've gotta make your life sacred again.

And you do that by letting go of your selfishness and letting some love in.

And his choice,

his decision to go forth and redeem the human race,

redeem the love of his life now,

is that he's got to sacrifice himself

in order for the world to go on.

The hero journey is the journey of renewal.

It's the journey of rebirth.

That's why you have to die.

Constantine, at the end of this movie, says, "I had to die twice."

So he's one of the heroes who didn't get it the first time around.

Joseph Campbell, in his most famous book,

The Hero with a Thousand Faces,

he has a wonderful phrase called "the matrix of destiny."

In other words, you have a vision.

You can be a hero or a dragon slayer like Constantine.

The question is "How do you become yourself?"

And this is the task for Constantine in this movie.

He is lost in this journey to find himself.

But so are we.

And that's why we go to the movies, to find some kind of map

so we can find our own destinies as well.