‘Sound of Freedom’ Director Calls QAnon Labels ‘Heartbreaking,’ ‘Not True,’ Debunks With Details of Film’s Origins
14.08.2023 - 13:13
/ variety.com
Tatiana Siegel Despite its status as the highest-grossing indie film since 2019’s “Parasite,” “Sound of Freedom” has been dismissed as a QAnon fever dream by large swaths of the mainstream media. But that derisive label is “so ridiculous” to the film’s writer-director Alejandro Monteverde, who began working on the project in 2015, two years before QAnon emerged. “The origin [of the film] has been avoided, purposely or accidentally, in the media,” Monteverde said.
“The origin will answer a lot of these misconceptions on the film.” Back in 2015, the Mexico-born, L.A.-based Monteverde says he was unaware of the scourge of child sex trafficking until he watched a network news segment on the subject. What he learned “shook my soul because I didn’t really believe it [existed],” he says. “I just, in my head, could not put those two pieces together — an adult and a child.” That night, he couldn’t sleep.
So, the next morning, he discussed the impact of the news segment with his wife and mother of their three children, actress Ali Landry. She urged him to begin researching and writing a screenplay. “At that time, the movie was called ‘The Mogul,’ and it was purely fictionalized,” he adds.
Not long after, the film’s producer, Eduardo Verástegui, met Tim Ballard, a former special agent for the Department of Homeland Security, and the project morphed into a story based on Ballard’s time when he was assigned to the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and deployed as an undercover operative for the U.S. Child Sex Tourism Jump Team. Jim Caviezel signed on to star as Ballard, with Mira Sorvino, Bill Camp, José Zúñiga and Verástegui rounding out the cast.