It’s Synonymous with Autonomous: Christian Swegal’s Sovereign

Why do we watch movies? I think it’s for the same reasons that anybody goes to a museum, or to a concert, or watches a ballet. Involved is a desire to be seen and heard, potentially satisfied by what’s to come on screen and the emotions invoked by movement and sound. Could that extend to the artist that makes/does/portrays art? 

In the act of making a movie, the director draws attention to the subject that matters most immediately to them in that fit of inspiration. Rather than seeking to be seen and heard, the director hopes that other people can hear and see the things that compelled them to write and direct a film about such topics and themes. 

Christian Swegal’s first film Sovereign is a film based on the story of Jerry and Joe Kane, members of the sovereign citizen movement that shot and killed two police officers back in 2010 in West Memphis, Arkansas. 

Here we talked about all of the things that I could see and hear, and what it means to speak of the truth within a fictional narrative. 

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

What made you want to write something like this? 

I had somebody really close to me, who because of a mental health problem, became really involved and obsessed with this kind of anti-government conspiracy line of thinking—not specifically sovereign citizen, the sovereign citizen movement, but very much like adjacent to that. It had nothing to do with politics and really everything to do with just a long standing, you know, mental illness. Having said that, though, I saw. how kind of cruelly and brutally someone with these types of delusions…like when they confront reality…there’s sort of one way we have to deal with problematic people like that, which is a lot of times through the police. And there’s not really a compassionate safety net in this country to deal with people who are struggling with mental health. I think if you live in a major city, you can see that with the homeless populations. It’s not like there’s groups of social workers that are sent out to compassionately to deal with some of these people. A lot of times it’s just the police and they’re trained in these very militaristic tactics. If you look at it from their perspective, you can understand why, they don’t know if they’re ever going to go into a situation where somebody has a gun or, it could put their life at risk– I can empathize with that as well. It was really more a problem I had with the system. 

To get back to your question, it was this personal connection with someone I saw who was dealing with this kind of conspiracy thinking and, then when I found out about this crime and became aware of this crime, it felt like I had a personal connection, a window into something like that, and I could really speak to.

As the title credits roll, before the first scene, there’s the police call. I noticed the accent of the people who were talking immediately. This film is based on a real crime. I’m wondering, is there any reason why you chose for this story to fully occur in the South still?

We ended up shooting the movie in Arkansas, which is where the crime actually took place. In some ways, “we say the movie is inspired by.” I would say the Jerry Kane and Joe Kane storyline is very close to the actual events. We tried to stay very accurate, even some of his speeches, there’s actual language from that. That 911 call in the beginning of the movie is the actual 911 call from the incident. In that storyline, we stayed tried to stay very close to the facts. In the storyline of the police family and the victims in the case, we fictionalized all of that—one just for, you know, trying to wrestle the thing into the shape of a movie, and also just out of respect for the victims, not to bring them into something that they didn’t really choose to, to be in. 

There are a couple similarities, even in the true story with the father son parallels there that I think are compelling. But to answer the question of why did we keep it in the South, the real crime took place in the south and when we got there, it also just felt right, creatively. 

In one of Jerry’s speeches he talks about the meticulousness of language. That made the fact that the story was happening down south stick out that much more to me because the way that people down south speak, is inaccurately deemed stupid, and ignorant. It’s not either of those things. That’s just the language that belongs to this region of the country. Do you have anything to say about the significance of the language used in this film as it pertains to the issue of sovereignty and being a citizen within a state? 

I think that what I found interesting—and moving to me also-–to your point about people in that region feeling marginalized or looked down on, is so much of the language of the sovereign movement and a lot of these kind of fringe, conspiracy movements, whether it’s the sovereign citizens or QAnon, all of the language is used as a means to kind of regain agency. I think so much of the language of the sovereign movement is about empowerment, weirdly. It’s about sovereignty and “We have the rights and we will not be infringed on and here’s where they’re going wrong and where you actually can reclaim power.” What you’re talking about is a large group of people. And there’s many of them. There’s over 300,000 sovereign citizens in the US just in that subgroup alone, You’re talking about people who have been legitimately injured by this system that we all live in to some degree. In most cases, I would say, they lost their home in 2008 or, they signed a bad loan and now they have a balloon payment that is crazy, that they can’t afford, They had health insurance or property insurance or some sort of insurance that didn’t pay out as it was supposed to. They filled out their taxes wrong, and now they have waves of penalties and of interest that they can’t understand. The way you run into those kind of problems, for instance, with taxes, is a lot of people feel like, “well, I don’t need an accountant to do this. I’m self-sufficient. I’ve been self-sufficient my whole life. I’m going to do it myself;” he next thing you know, they’ve got 3 or 4 times what they owed in taxes and penalties that just keep building. I thought it was just interesting that in the sovereign movement so much of the language is really about trying to regain power, and fight back. 

I think that’s what I think was appealing about Jerry Kane and his message, as misinformed as it was, is that he was speaking to a lot of people and saying, “Hey, you’ve been screwed over, here’s a way that here’s a way that actually you can fight back, I’m going to teach you. I think that’s a really seductive message to people who are in that situation. I think, furthermore, even within that community, once they learn that lingo, it’s a self-perpetuating prophecy, because then somebody like Jerry Kane, if you’re in his shoes, you sort of come up with this theory or this lingo, and now all of a sudden you’re the guy that people are looking to and looking up to, and there’s a community that looks to you, and there’s self-esteem that comes from that. In my mind, the language is derived from this place of wanting to just feel like you have agency, like you have power. 

Along with Jerry and Joe, there’s Officer Bouchart and his son, who’s also going through a kind of training or recruitment process. Both pairs have seemingly opposing ideologies, yet both fathers are just trying to teach their sons to be the best man that they can be. How is this juxtaposition/parallel significant? 

I think that those storylines are intended to be mirrors of each other in many ways and then showing that the flip side of the coin, they’re not so different in a lot of ways, even though they seem completely opposed. Certainly there’s just kind of 1 to 1 similarities in the relationship between the pair. 

When I think of the fathers and sons and that’s it’s really about…I had just become a father basically, when I was writing this script, my wife had just given birth to our son, and I felt this tremendous—I felt that before he was even born towards my son–I felt this tremendous sense of responsibility of, “Oh my God, he’s gonna look to me as this model of how to go through the world. And I’ve got to imprint some sort of information on him, and I’ve got to mold him and teach him.” You feel this sort of this real responsibility, obviously towards your kid, especially between I think between a father and a son. I think there’s a masculine drive, this sense of “I need to teach you how to be strong in the world and how to stand up for yourself—they project their image almost in a way. I think our parents, despite their best intentions, that kind of thinking is where generational things do get passed on, and it can get problematic. And I think, I think sort of in how we raise our sons and the message that we’re teaching to young men. 

Jerry homeschooled Joe, and focused on teaching him how to be an “individual,” you really he was just educating Joe to be just like himself. Seeing Joe seek out enrollment at the local highschool felt deeply significant to the whole plotline pertaining the the message of the sovereign citizens. Was this something that you had added, or is this also part of the story of the real Joe and Jerry Kane? 

I think my personal experience probably informed this. Like I said I had a family member that was very kind of involved in this, and I grew up around a lot of that stuff, and I could really relate to what it felt like—you know there’s that sort of period you’re a teenager where the adults around you are not infallible anymore. And you begin to question things and want to have your own judgments about things. This relationship between the father and son, Jerry and Joe, you know, there’s real love there. And I think he gets to be a certain age and he realizes, “wait, some of my dad’s ideas maybe are not as legit as I thought they were. Maybe he’s not this hero that I thought he was. Maybe he’s not as credible as I thought he was.” And I think breaking away from that can feel like such a huge betrayal, you know, just kind of calling it out for what it is like recognizing reality when you’re dealing with someone delusional. I think sort of stating reality or stating facts can feel like a huge betrayal to their identity, their worldview, their everything. I think I think he tries to do that incrementally, tries to challenge that.

Ultimately Jerry just slams down on it and pretty much I think in that duel scene, like lets him know, “if you persist in this path, this is where we part”. And I think from that point forward he just kind of goes internal and and tries to survive kind of from that point. And, and that felt–I don’t know if it was true to the real story–emotionally true to me in writing it and it certainly, I think for the film, felt true to me.

How did people react to you when you said you know, I have a story about these topics? 

It’s interesting. It’s been and I think even with the release of the movie, it’s continued in this way—but you know, getting a film made, especially as a first film, it took a very long time for me to be able to get a film made—I knew the film that I was trying to make. I think our core team of the cast, myself, the producers, we knew this was a thoughtful film, we were trying to talk about serious issues, but then there’s kind of the economics of it-–how do you get something like this made? Facing that side it was much more leaning into the true crime element, the thriller element, the cast, obviously, you have to sell those, those parts of it. There’s a certain segment of the business that is, I would say like higher volume or action movies or movies that end up even on Redbox or those kind of things. That economic pipeline was something we tried to utilize to a degree, to then make an art film. That was tough, that was a tough pivot. And it was a tough thing to pull off because you can’t kind of go into it being like…distributors and sales, they don’t they don’t want to hear about, you know.

They don’t want to hear about the truth. 

Yeah, they don’t want to hear about generational trauma and masculinity, things like that. They’re thinking, “okay, that equals I’m going to lose all of my money.” So with that there’s one side presented, and it’s not wrong, it’s one side of the film—but the subtext and the layers that we had in the story were things that my job as the director, especially in talking to the cast and getting buy in from everybody early on, I had to let them know, “Hey, here’s what, here’s what’s beneath all this. Here’s what we’re really trying to talk about.” 

It’s not a movie that’s spoon feeding anything. You know, some of my favorite, my favorite films really like are kind that start conversations. I sort of have a position about this as it comes to like the types of movies I enjoy. I love movies that you watch and they leave you with a vibration. They leave you with like a question, something that’s kind of rung a bell and you’re left thinking about it afterwards.

Top Five?

One of my favorites that I always go back to is First Reformed. That’s a more recent movie–an ending like that, you know that film I remember seeing it…It just floored me. And it was speaking about so many things, and yet it wasn’t didactic. 

I loved warfare. I loved Sentimental Value. 45 years, Andrew Haigh’s film.I really like Michel Franco’s work. There was a movie called Memory he made with Jessica Chastain that I really loved a few years ago. Movies like In the Bedroom or Heat. There’s a movie called Straight Time. It’s one of my favorite crime movies, it’s from the 70s. 

I like movies that have subtext and, especially if it’s an adult film, if it’s a film that’s made for adults, or that’s made for film lovers. I love when it feels like an active experience, that you’re not necessarily just consuming the thing and it’s fed to you, whole. I like when a movie leaves you with “okay, now you’re part is to think about this.” Those are that’s sort of like the endings or the, the types of movies that I’m drawn to. 

So what would I be wrong to say that these kind of movies inspire your writing?

I think the types of stories I gravitated to as a younger person, and just out of college are sort of different from today. I find myself drawn to a lot of true stories. I’m attracted to the realism of it. 

I love movies that take you into a world of details and you feel like you’re just inside of it…and you maybe don’t understand all of it–I think that’s what drew me to the sovereign citizen lingo also. There’s all of this vernacular that you can’t even really try to understand it all I mean, I certainly tried to understand a lot of it just to be able to write it.

What’s in the works for you now that you’ve made this? 

I’ve got two a few things that I’m working on right now. Two specifically that I’m hoping to get made pretty soon. One is, not about capital punishment, but it’s a story that capital punishment is at the center of. The other one is about mental health. I think the justice system and mental health are two things that I find myself circling, at least recently. I think I’ll probably move on from that after these. But I think I have a bit more on my mind to sort out here.