When Pope John Paul II made his last appearance last spring, many just saw an enfeebled old man being propped up in a chair. Writer Judd Parkin saw, instead, a man refusing to give in, who kept trying to communicate even though his body was failing him, even to the point that he could not speak.

"Which I think shows incredible courage," Parkin said. "When most people would have given up and stayed in a chair in the dark, he kept trying."

And it was that image of His Holiness that became, in a way, one of the driving images of the film "Have No Fear: The Life of Pope John Paul II," which aired Dec. 1 on ABC.

The film stars Thomas Kretschmann as the pope. Parkin said that it wasn't until after he and his partners had cast Krestchmann that they found out that the actor had grown up in East Berlin, when it was still under Communist control, not unlike the pope.

Parkin said that the project actually began back in 1996, when he was making the film Nicholas' Gift with his partner Lorenzo Minoli. "Lorenzo was suggesting doing a film on the life of John Paul II," Parkin said.

It was one of those ideas that kind of stayed on the back burner until 1999, when Parkin and Minoli participated in a papal audience. Even then, Parkin recalled, His Holiness was already ill. Parkin said that seemed to be the focus of American perceptions of John Paul II at the time.

"How ill is he?" Parkin said. "There was this morbid death watch. Yet you came away [from the audience] with that there was nothing morbid about him. He just walked in on his own steam."

Parkin recalled that His Holiness began his statement using note cards, then began speaking on his own. "You could tell he was sharp as a tack," Parkin said.

But that experience convinced him that he and Minoli really needed to tell John Paul II's life story. The only problem was, no one was interested in buying it at that time.

All that changed last spring with the death of His Holiness and the ABC network eventually bought the project.

Parkin, who is a practicing Episcopalian, said that not being Catholic may have added a different perspective to the telling of the story. Parkin wrote the script with Minoli, a practicing Catholic, and Michael Hirsch.

"It was a good give and take," Parkin said of the writing process. "It was nice checks and balances."

He said that he and his partners didn't want to present His Holiness as perfect, instead keeping the focus on the humanity of the pope. Yet even so, Parkin said that everyone working on the project came away admiring John Paul II.

Of course, distilling what Parkin described as "84 years of life into 88 minutes" was no easy task, but Parkin and his partners decided to focus on the key defining moments of John Paul II's life, using his trip to Jerusalem as a way to show him meditating on his life.

But for Parkin, the ultimate key to John Paul II's life is essentially the title of the film: "Have No Fear." In a world where old people are shuffled away and forgotten, Parkin said, John Paul II made sure that others saw him going on even in the face of illness and pain.

"He wasn't going to hide away," Parkin said. "It was his duty to carry through his pain, like Jesus."

Parkin said that came out of his audience with John Paul II.

"It took away a lot of my own fears," Parkin said. "It was that constant message. He went through everything. That to me is one of the key messages of the film. The triumph over fear."