Mr. Amiel, a London native whose career went international after he directed the BBC mini-series “The Singing Detective,” and Mr. Collee, a Scot who has been a doctor and a novelist as well as a screenwriter, both call themselves atheists. But Mr. Amiel argued that in casting Mr. Northam, “an extremely handsome, powerful and charismatic actor,” as the clergyman, he “deliberately tried to give religion and the church its due weight and gravitas.”

He continued, “Huxley, who far more shares my views on the world, we depicted more in the way that Darwin would have seen him, as irksome, pugnacious and in some ways dangerous.”

Whether or not movie executives share Mr. Amiel’s view of “Creation” as evenhanded, they didn’t exactly rush to release it in the United States, where Gallup researchers found last year that only 39 percent of those polled accepted evolution as fact. The movie had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, opened in Britain the following month and languished without an American distributor until Newmarket Films, the company that released “The Passion of the Christ,” came along and scheduled a Friday opening in New York, Los Angeles and selected cities  just barely making it into the 200th anniversary year commemorating Darwin’s birth.

Image Credit... Newmarket Films

Mr. Collee, who had created a Darwinesque character for Mr. Bettany as co-writer of “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” got the idea for “Creation” from the biography “Annie’s Box” by Randal Keynes. In the book (which is being republished under the title “Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin”), Mr. Keynes, a Darwin descendant, marshaled family papers, diaries and letters to paint an intimate portrait of Darwin’s emotional life and his lasting grief over the loss of his daughter Annie. She died in 1851 at the age of 10 of what was probably tuberculosis.

“Rather than being drawn in by an account of Darwin’s adventures on the Beagle or reading about his scientific processes,” Mr. Collee said, “you were drawn into his world via his wife and his children.” It occurred to him that by making Annie a ghostly presence in Darwin’s mind, he could tell much of the story in flashback and turn Darwin’s scientific insights into wondrous tales, fashioned for a child, of encounters with savages in Tierra del Fuego and a baby orangutan at the London zoo.