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"Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," St. Paul supposedly wrote to the Hebrews (if you believe in that sort of thing).

Jared Hess, the Salt Lake City-based filmmaker behind "Napoleon Dynamite," got fascinated with a group of people whose faith required more solid evidence.

Hess said that a producer buddy of his, Jason Hatfield, "turned me on to this world of pseudo-biblical archaeology, people who don't have any legitimate archaeological credentials, just take the Bible and try to go out and find things to support their belief in the Bible. …

"Every couple of years in the news, you'll see like, a group of Chinese Christian amateur archaeologists have found Noah's ark — and then it turns out to be a forest ranger's cabin that was covered in an avalanche, and they're like, 'Dang it.' "

That kind of absurdity seemed "a place so ripe for comedy," Hess said. And so it came to pass with his new movie, "Don Verdean," which opens Friday in Utah and goes nationwide (in theaters and video-on-demand) on Dec. 11.

Don, played by Sam Rockwell, is a biblical archaeologist who gets bankrolled by an evangelical pastor (Danny McBride) to track down artifacts that will get parishioners in the pews. Don and his Israeli fixer, Boaz (Jemaine Clement), have a lead on Goliath's skull — with David's stone still embedded in it — but when the search turns up empty, Don and Boaz resort to fraud.

"I just loved the idea of a guy who's a believing Christian, who has found things over the years that he believes support the narratives in the Bible to increase people's faith — but he gets wrapped up in a big, giant hoax," Hess said in an interview this week.

Utah knows a bit about contrived evidence for scripture. This is where B-movie producer Chuck Sellier made "In Search of Noah's Ark" (1976) and "In Search of Historic Jesus" (1979). And it's the place where in the 1980s Mark Hofmann committed his crimes, which escalated from forging material about the LDS Church to setting off bombs that killed two people as his plot unraveled.

Utah also proved to be a great place for Hess to shoot "Don Verdean," and he used locations in Salt Lake City, St. George and Kanab.

Southern Utah proved to be a good substitute for the Holy Land, he said.

"We all felt validated when we had a guy playing an Israeli police officer, who actually was an Israeli police officer in Jerusalem, and he came to set and he was like, 'You did a good job. This looks exactly like the desert by my house,' " Hess said.

"Don Verdean" — which boasts a supporting cast including Amy Ryan, Leslie Bibb and Will Forte — reunites Hess with Rockwell and Clement, both of whom starred in his 2009 comedy "Gentlemen Broncos."

"I have a serious man-crush on Sam Rockwell, and the same for Jemaine," Hess said. "When I started to write it, I texted him. I said, 'Sam, I'm writing this thing for you about a biblical archaeologist.' He said, 'I'm in.' "

Hess collaborated with his regular writing partner, his wife, Jerusha. He joked that their writing process "can get very heated. But when we're done with a script, I don't remember who wrote what. We're hammering it out from the very beginning."

The Hesses have four children, so "the schedules are crazy busy. We try to carve out three hours to write every day, before they get home from school. Then it's all over."

While "Don Verdean," which premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, makes its way to the nation, another of Hess' movies remains in limbo.

"Masterminds" — a heist comedy starring Kristin Wiig, Owen Wilson, Zach Galifianakis and Jason Sudeikis — is one of the movies caught up in the financial mess at Relativity Media, the mini-major studio that declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July after lawsuits and missed loan payments.

"It was so out of everybody's hands when films become assets in bankruptcy proceedings," Hess said. There's always the fear that a studio's bad news rubs off on a movie, but "in this case it was so public that the company went bankrupt."

The Hesses have more projects in the works. They are working on something for Paramount's Nickelodeon label and are attached (as they say in the business) to a Disney project, "Overnight," that he describes as "like 'Die Hard' in a toy store." Meanwhile, Jerusha "is itching to direct" — her first directing effort was the witty 2013 comedy "Austenland" — and they have some scripts in the writing stages.

In the decade-plus since "Napoleon Dynamite" blew up into a pop-culture phenomenon, the Hesses have made Hollywood studio movies and indie films and seen the differences and similarities.

"If you're doing an independent film, you go out and do your own thing, and there's not a lot of second-guessing about what you're doing," Hess said. "When you do a studio film, there's a little more worry about taking creative risks. Studios with bigger budgets want to play it a little safer. But at the same time, people just want to make a good movie."

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow him on Twitter @moviecricket. Email him at spmeans@sltrib.com.