Sound Of Freedom director feels need to defend his movie, stops just short of defending Jim Caviezel
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If you skip the double-strike in Hollywood and the encouraging success of Barbie and Oppenheimer, the biggest story in show-biz this summer (so, maybe third biggest?) has been the surprising box office run of Sound Of Freedom, a standard “based on a true story” thriller that happens to hit some QAnon talking points and happens to star a guy with some QAnon leanings. And happens to be very popular with the QAnon-leaning crowd. And happens to have been involved in a dumb conspiracy of its own. And also a former president who has been indicted several times hosted a screening of it.
But in all of the noise surrounding Sound Of Freedom, one thing has apparently been lost: Writer and director Alejandro Monteverde didn’t actually want any of that to happen. In a Variety piece that seems aghast at the idea of any movie having an unintended impact or interpretation, Monteverde explains that the movie’s origins go back to 2015, “before QAnon emerged” (as Variety puts it). It was originally an entirely fictionalized story about child sex trafficking inspired by a segment Monteverde saw on the news that really freaked him out, until producer Eduardo Verástegui—the Variety story doesn’t say this, but he’s a far right anti-abortion activist—introduced Monteverde to former Department Of Homeland Security agent Tim Ballard, who founded a non-profit anti-trafficking group called Operation Underground Railroad (which he left earlier this year, apparently after some kind of internal investigation into complaints made against him).
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After that, the movie became a fictionalized account of the adventures of Ballard, who talks a lot about working undercover to rescue children from sex traffickers, and Jim Caviezel came on to star. From there, it sounds like things started to become a problem: The real Ballard was being a stickler with the script, which caused delays, and while the film was “completely finished” in 2019 (“before QAnon became a phenomenon,” as apparently noted by Variety), Disney acquiring original distributor Fox caused more delays. During COVID, faith-based distributor Angel Studios came onboard and introduced the “Pay It Forward” program where people could buy tickets for other people.
Monteverde says his reaction was “Arghhhhh” when he heard that plan and he “became a pain” afterward, but he ultimately claims it has only accounted for “under 10 percent” of the film’s total box office. That’s a bold thing to say, since Sound Of Freedom has outgrossed Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One in the U.S. and Angel Studios said that the movie made nearly $3 million of its opening $14.2 million gross from the Pay It Forward system. Presumably the number would go up from there, but this guy would know better than us.
Back to Caviezel, Monteverde makes a point to distance himself from the man’s specific beliefs, saying that some people “too close to the film” are involved with political stuff, but he seems impressed by Caviezel’s work ethic and professionalism on set—mostly. Monteverde says he respected that Caviezel, for example, was willing to film a scene even though he was “really sick” one day, and he says everyone is “entitled” so say what they want to say, but, “on this particular film,” he adds, “it did hurt my work.” Monteverde doesn’t really get specific there, just referring back to an earlier moment in the interview when he talked about how his instinct when the movie started to become controversial was to “run” and “hide,” but he implied that he was doing an interview like this (explaining the origin for the film and all that) because of Caviezel and the kind of perception that people had about Sound Of Freedom.
So take from that what you will. But, at the same time, Monteverde also seems open to doing a sequel, saying there’s “definitely a lot of interest” in going “a little deeper” on the issue of sex trafficking. Surely a sequel about this same guy and starring this same guy would have the same perception issues as this movie. If anything, they’d be much worse since it would be coming out in a post-Sound Of Freedom world. You can say “I never intended this movie to become a lightning rod for various controversial political topics,” but it’s harder to say that if you do it a second time.
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