Generally, it wouldn’t be great for a writer to have forgotten dialogue they’ve written only a year removed from filming, but in the case of Christian Swegal, who studied extremist movements to get a hold of the lingo that Jerry and Joe Kane frequently used as part of their operation to convince people to abandon the government and any fiducial responsibilities they had as citizens, it’s surely for the best the writer/director of “Sovereign” has largely memory-holed it.
“When I hear some of those speeches, even in the trailers now, I don’t remember even what the logic of it was, but it does sound convincing at times,” says Swegal of writing the persuasive yet specious readings of the Constitution that Jerry would give at meetings around the country to poor communities that were particularly susceptible to his sales pitch to go off the grid.
What isn’t easily forgotten, however, is the chilling drama that Swegal eventually made for his feature debut as he tracks the father and son who eventually found themselves in the crosshairs of the cops when Jerry asserted his version of the law during a traffic stop that led to both sides drawing weapons during a tragic day in 2010. However, Swegal sees plenty to mourn much earlier as Joe, an impressionable teenager played by Jacob Tremblay in the film, wants to do right by his father Jerry, as bad an influence as they come when seeming to live in an alternative reality full of irrational fear (and made all the more effective in a strong turn from Nick Offerman). When Jerry can be on the road for long stretches at a time, making small bits of income by passing the hat around meetings with his claims of being an expert at dodging foreclosures, Joe is left all alone to answer the door at the home they share when police show up with orders to evict since their own mortgage hasn’t been paid, but he’s seen as fending for himself in a more profound way when Jerry starts bringing him along to his professional speaking gigs and Joe must decide for himself how much he should believe his own father.
Swegal considers the power of familial bonds for better or worse as “Sovereign” draws a parallel between the Kanes and John and Adam Bouchart (Dennis Quaid and Thomas Mann, respectively), the chief of police whose jurisdiction the extremists enter and his son who recently joined the force and the film conveys an unconventional sense of loss as people bonded by blood have the ability to grow unrecognizable to one another after the larger world gets a hold of them. The filmmaker shows a rare combination with the sensitivity he pays to the relationship dynamics at play and the swagger he brings to the film’s action-filled climax once a standoff occurs and sees equal opportunity for tension in a conversation at a coffee shop as a shootout. After making its premiere recently at Tribeca followed by a bow at the Bentonville Film Fest around where the production commenced in Arkansas, “Sovereign” is now arriving in theaters across the country and Swegal spoke about finding a way into this dark underbelly of society, developing a rapport with the actors and having a new appreciation for all the responsibilities that directing entails.
How did this come about?
I wrote the script in 2021, and it came about because I had some experience with a family member that had a mental health issue and became interested in this anti-government fringe conspiracy/sovereign citizen adjacent ideology and I was really interested in how that happened. I started doing some research, and I came across this crime and the true story of Jerry and Joe Kane and I felt like because I had had personal experience with someone and heard a lot of this jargon over the years, I had a personal access point and I was uniquely positioned to tell this story. It was also just a story that dealt with a lot of themes that I find really interesting and I care a lot about.
Nick Offerman seems like a particularly savvy choice to play Jerry, given that an audience’s sympathies are with the beloved actor enough to engage with a character like this. Did he immediately come to mind for the role?
Yeah, he’s long been one of my favorite actors, and we actually cast him in this before “The Last of Us” episode had come out. I was introduced to Nick through Alex Garland’s work with him on “Devs” and I just think he’s a brilliant dramatic actor. He has this ability to swing between kind of dangerous and physical, but he has such warmth, and those two things were really crucial for this character. You had to believe him as a father and have this loving relationship, but also to play the mania of that character as well and I think Nick just did a brilliant job with it.
What was it like to see the relationship dynamic unfold between him and Jacob Tremblay as his son?
It was a little jarring at first to see it come to life because you have this thing in your head that you’re writing and then the actors show up and they become those characters. Then they’re the ones that really tell you, “Hey, this feels true, it doesn’t feel true.” And they’re the ones with the best sense of it because they have to be the character. Nick’s performance brought a bit more warmth and humor at times than I was anticipating, but it was a really effective disarming tool in the beginning of the narrative of the film to have a little bit of that so that it doesn’t just feel one note throughout.
There’s a really great shot early on in the film in a diner that’s a wonderful reflection of their relationship in as much a literal way as a figurative one when the frame is sliced in half with a mirror from above in a diner and you can see Joe listening to his father who is launching into one of his rants, unable to leave the situation but getting restless. Was that actually something you had in the script or could see when you went to the location?
It was something we found in the location, and it’s funny because that scene had a lot of other coverage, and that was a shot that my cinematographer had found and it wasn’t even our main master for that scene. It was off eyeline, but we just thought it was an interesting composition, so we shot it and then in the edit, we really decided to scrap all the other coverage we had and just use that for the top of the scene because [Joe] was so cornered in that booth, but [putting that shot in] was a debate we were having.
What was it like filming in Arkansas?
It was great. Fayetteville is close to Bentonville where Walmart is headquartered, so there’s actually a very cool creative community there of people that work on a lot of commercials for Walmart and some of the other corporations headquartered there. It’s not a large crew base, but the people that were there were awesome and it’s not exactly the town where the story took place, but where we shot around Fayetteville was very similar. All the local law enforcement were very familiar with the crime and once they knew what our approach was going to be to this story, they were supportive of really helping us.
Had you actually done research in the region beforehand? The meetings that Joe convenes seem really authentic.
What was really great for me as a writer with this is there’s just a ton of research [already out there] on this crime. There were videos of seminars that he had given and academic papers written about this, a case study of extremism, so I had a lot to draw from, even visually, in staging these things. [Joe] really was traveling the country almost evangelizing and [he and Joe] had the matching white suits. All of that was true to the real story, which is incredible.
I wouldn’t want to spoil the climax, but it’s quite an action sequence and from what I understand you only had a few hours to film it. What was it like to pull off?
Yeah, that was really stressful, by far the hardest part of the shoot. We have that big climactic scene at the end, and it was scheduled for two-and-a-half days originally, and we had a thunderstorm roll in, and we had lightning strikes, and it shut down our set for a day-and-a-half, so we had to shoot all that in one day and reconceive how the whole thing was done. The crew worked really, really hard, and it felt back to film school with a lot of the way that all that was shot. Everybody was shaking the van [to create the effect it was being riddled with bullets], and we had PAs and our AD throwing the rubber glass, so it was very DIY.
When it’s your first feature, did it end up being what you thought it would be or was it different?
It was different. The most surprising part was you go into a project and I had been planning for this — I had shotlists and lookbooks and mood boards and references — and you have this kind of movie in your head that you think you’re giving to your departments. But even with that, there’s so many decisions you have to make as a director. I wasn’t prepared for the number of questions every day, minute things like “Are the shoes black or white? Is this shirt red or blue? Do we want the plant in the corner or over here?” There’s these tiny little decisions that you make, and I was shocked at how those decisions actually eveal your sensibilities in a way that’s a little bit surprising. It revealed things about my own taste and my own voice as a filmmaker that I hadn’t really planned on, so I’m learning as a first-time filmmaker what I’m drawn to as well as I’m presenting this.
One other interesting touch is the score – it’s unexpected given the general tone of the film, but it works really well as this almost a cappella sound that warps as the movie wears on. What was it like to put music on it?
James McAllister, our composer, is brilliant. He’s one of those guys that plays every single instrument and can do everything in his studio. It’s such a masculine film, and the themes are about fathers and sons, and authority, and there’s really a lack of a female softening presence in the movie at times. Joe’s mother is almost this ghost, a specter of a character that we never see in the film, so it just felt interesting to have the score represent that. James’ wife actually did these really beautiful vocals, and we thought that was an interesting way to bring in that feminine presence through the score.
What’s it been like starting to get this out into the world, particularly with its premiere locally in Bentonville?
Getting to see it in Bentonville was a treat because we shot near there, so we had a lot of the crew with us and the whole thing has been a major career highlight and personal highlight for, I think, everybody involved. And it’s really gratifying to get to see people connect with the movie, just the different types of people and in ways that maybe we weren’t even understanding [at first]. I think you have a bit of a thesis going into it like, “Here’s the target audience for what we’re doing,” and I’ve really been shocked that it’s been the opposite of that. It just shows that people’s opinions and tastes are so diverse, and that’s been really cool.
“Sovereign” opens across the U.S. on July 11th. A full list of theaters is here.