Sean McNamara, the director behind REAGAN and SOUL SURFER, is set to write and direct BLANK CANVAS, a new faith-based drama.
It’s adapted from author and artist Marcy Gregg’s 2022 memoir of the same name, according to a Deadline report.
“I truly believe that miracles happen no matter what. That’s an important part of my life,” McNamara told Movieguide® in an earlier interview about the faith that drives his filmmaking.
BLANK CANVAS follows Gregg’s real-life ordeal. At 30 years old, she suffered a serious medical complication during childbirth that erased 13 years of her memory, according to Deadline. She had to rebuild her identity, her relationships and her faith from scratch, a journey that eventually shaped the message she now shares with audiences as a painter and public speaker.
McNamara will produce the movie with his longtime partner, David Brookwell, under their shared banner, Brookwell McNamara Entertainment. Will Crenshaw of Beaumont, Texas, will serve as executive producer, Deadline reported.
Gregg, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, Dev, and their three grown children, published her memoir through Tyndale House Publishers in 2022. Both the book and the movie it inspired center on faith, healing and what Gregg calls finding beauty in hope and second chances.
This isn’t McNamara’s first movie built around a true story of faith under pressure. His 2011 movie SOUL SURFER, about surfer Bethany Hamilton’s recovery after losing an arm to a shark attack, earned close to $50 million at the box office and a Movieguide® Teddy Bear Award for its wholesome, faith-affirming message.
He went on to direct THE MIRACLE SEASON, SOUL ON FIRE the Dennis Quaid-led REAGAN biopic and BAU: ARTIST AT WAR. Movieguide® gave REAGAN a rare 4 out of 4 stars for entertainment quality, noting that McNamara “has made a lively movie that hardly ever flags” despite the pitfalls of the political-biopic genre.
“I don’t want to have another film which is just super sad. Because if it’s sad, nobody wants to see it,” McNamara said of his approach to BAU: ARTIST AT WAR, a Holocaust drama he chose to build around humor and resilience rather than despair alone.
“The ones that said, ‘I’m just going to die here,’ they went quickly. But the ones who really were resilient knew how to wake up every day and find something to live for,” McNamara observed of the survivors he studied for that movie. It’s a line that could just as easily describe Gregg, who had to relearn how to wake up to her own life one day at a time.
That same instinct — finding hope inside hardship rather than dwelling on it — seems tailor-made for BLANK CANVAS. Gregg’s story isn’t really a tragedy; it’s an account of a woman waking up to a life she didn’t recognize and choosing, piece by piece, to believe in it again.
Before he was known for faith-driven true stories, McNamara built his career directing television for Disney and Nickelodeon, a background that still shows in how briskly his movies move even when the subject matter turns heavy. Brookwell McNamara Entertainment, the production company he and Brookwell have run together for years, has become something of a quiet engine for faith-and-family movies that studios might otherwise pass on.
No cast or release date has been announced yet for BLANK CANVAS. But between McNamara’s track record with true stories of resilience and Gregg’s own testimony of second chances, the movie looks like another entry in a filmography that keeps treating faith as the whole point of the story, not just a subplot.
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