There is a turning point in every Jeremy Saulnier film where it feels like the writer-director is reaching out through the screen, grabbing you by the throat, and commanding you to pay attention to the violence about to pop off. In Blue Ruin, it’s during the mild-mannered Dwight’s sloppy murder of the man who went to jail for killing his parents. In Green Room, it’s the maiming by machete of a punk-rock band’s bassist. And in Rebel Ridge — the genre experiment that Saulnier has spent six years working on, kept alive after its star, John Boyega, walked away, and describes as “First Blood meets Michael Clayton†— the film’s stranglehold moment happens in its very first scene.
The setup: Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), a Black former marine, is biking into the small town of Shelby Springs with $30,000 in cash to pay for his cousin Michael’s (C.J. LeBlanc) bail when he’s immediately targeted by the town’s police. They run him off the road. They detain him. They imply that he’s a criminal, and they smirk at his military service. And when they find his money, they essentially steal it in an abuse of civil asset forfeiture. Organizations like the ACLU and the Institute for Justice estimate that police departments and federal agencies misuse the practice to collect billions each year; agents need little evidence to seize money or assets, and there are basically no repercussions afterward. Everything that happens in the western-inspired, legal-thriller-flavored Rebel Ridge stems from that initial injustice, which Saulnier describes as “unifying†in how much it angers people of all political beliefs — and coalesces the film’s audience behind its protagonist.
“Having someone wronged felt right for me at the time, and I found it infuriating,†Saulnier says of learning about civil asset forfeiture and deciding it would be the subject of his next movie. “I don’t like to inject big, broad themes forcefully into my films, but I felt passionately about this. I wrote it in 2018, and perhaps a little unification was in order.â€
Rebel Ridge has all the same crackling, visceral tension of Saulnier’s previous four films. But it swerves when it comes to the outright violence the director’s fans have come to expect. Terry is an expert-martial-artist badass, but he prefers to defuse, not exacerbate, situations; his partner in unraveling a conspiracy and cover-up in Shelby Springs is Summer McBride (AnnaSophia Robb), a government employee with her job on the line. Saulnier knows that Rebel Ridge is a divergence from what he’s done before, but he wanted to make a movie that his teen and tween daughters could watch. That felt like a challenge: “Can I get through a screenplay without killing everybody in it?â€
You’ve said it wasn’t one specific instance of civil asset forfeiture that inspired Rebel Ridge. But there is a racial dynamic between Terry and Michael and most of the police officers they interact with, and a suggestion that civil asset forfeiture is a tactic with an outsize effect on communities of color. What kind of research did you do while writing the film?
What my research found is that it affected a lot of people. Ranchers in Texas who had their entire ranch seized, along with the farm equipment on it and their vehicles, because they had a couple of marijuana plants. It’s a loophole that’s exploited; companies offer seminars on how to utilize civil assets forfeiture to enrich your police department. And, sometimes, part of the dynamic is it’s because they need to, because a lot of local PDs are beyond underfunded, which leads to not the best hiring practices. It’s this combination of effects that are putting law enforcement in a very tough predicament, and that trickles down to pretty shitty law enforcement. It certainly affects communities of color in certain ways. It affects people without the means to fight the practice, because it is not tied to a criminal charge, so your normal constitutional rights to indigent defense can be sidestepped.
Your films have certain shared qualities. They take place in small, enclosed communities. The protagonist is an outsider or someone living on the fringes. There’s a life-or-death struggle on an existential scale. But Rebel Ridge feels more like a legal thriller to me, like Michael Clayton and Erin Brockovich, in addition to sharing a general frame with an action classic like First Blood. Were you purposefully playing with genre?
Absolutely. The reference I used once I finished the film was First Blood meets Michael Clayton. The spark of the film was more the Eastwood era of westerns, the Man With No Name, and having a guy ride into town on a horse — but in this case, it would be a bicycle. Sometimes, it’s not until the finished version of the movie where I’m like, “Oh, that’s me referring to Axel Foley in the police station, having this really kind of cordial pushback against cops. Shit!†Or I didn’t know that the Ford F-350 Dually in this movie is a total homage to Lethal Weapon 2. I might enjoy it as an audience member. As a filmmaker, I do not gravitate toward self-referential movies that wink and nod and know they’re a movie. I like to have the sanctity of the story be pure. But for my look book, it was First Blood, Michael Clayton, Mississippi Burning. An image from True Romance made it in there and a shot from Interstellar — it was a big truck going through a cornfield. Dirt and texture and color palette. But if I’m too hyperaware of the references, I lose track. I had to avoid a Colonel Trautman joke I was gonna make when they’re all in the police station trying to find out who this Terry Richmond actually is. I felt that would break the wall.
But as far as legal thrillers, yes, Michael Clayton, because the dialogue in that film is so compelling. I aspired to have that level of charge between the actors. I enjoyed and indulged in taking time to listen to people talk. If this was going to transpire in real life, it would not be Terry and Summer join forces and gear up and just shoot everybody. It would be, “Let’s talk to people. Let’s get some intel.†What would one actually do if this was not a movie trying to get to its finale?
In the film’s press notes, you talk about how it was fun “to make dialogue scenes play like high-stakes set pieces.†You’ve done this elsewhere — I’m thinking of the through-the-door negotiations in Green Room. Did it feel like you were building tension in a different way in Rebel Ridge?
It didn’t, but you make a good point, and that is, the dialogue in Green Room is more information deprivation and chaos. Those characters have no fucking clue what they’re doing, so they’re flailing their way through it. With Don Johnson as Chief Burnne and Aaron Pierre as Terry Richmond, they’re both fucking sharp, and that level of dialogue was new to me. It is a standoff, and it just keeps upping and upping and upping until there’s a very clear dynamic shift. It’s a battle of wits — or, as Terry says, it’s a pissing contest — and that’s not what I’m used to doing. I’m used to having an Everyman or Everywoman, people who are underprepared for the situation. In this case, it was the opposite.
John Boyega walked away from the film in 2021 due to “family reasons.†Recently, Joaquin Phoenix left a Todd Haynes movie, and the production shut down. But you kept Rebel Ridge going. How do you keep making a film when something like that happens?
When John left the film, it was inevitable and out of respect for all parties involved; I can’t get into the details of it. But every party would agree, it was the right situation. It had to be that way. And I was willing to risk the movie unless I found the one and only true Terry Richmond. The search was insanely short, because within weeks, I had a Zoom call in Louisiana with Aaron Pierre, and I knew in less than two minutes that this is the guy. We had a very deep conversation. We were at this perfect crossroads, his career, my career. It did not seem in any way desperate, but it felt like we needed each other at that time. And the way he presented himself, his immediate interest and investment and dedication, was uplifting and immediately reenergized me. But because of the logistics of the situation, we opted to go and wait another year, and the reason was, this was a big reset. Everyone needs a little time. Netflix was insanely supportive of giving Aaron the opportunity. And no one who’s seen the film can imagine a version of this without Aaron Pierre. He shoulders this movie — he’s in about 129 scenes, maybe, of 135. And this is not just, like, me trying to brainwash myself. It was the most amazing turn for the film. I’m not into hocus-pocus, but I believe the fates intervened and Aaron and I were meant to work together. He was overly reverent toward, as he refers to it, the text. We were in Louisiana with the blazing-hot sun, and he had to lift human bodies over his head and then learn eight pages of dialogue. The task at hand was pretty intense.
You have a team of collaborators you’ve worked with over your career: your childhood friend Macon Blair, who starred in Blue Ruin, wrote Hold the Dark, and executive produced Rebel Ridge, and the Blair brothers, who have scored all your films. What role did they play here?
Macon has his parallel career; I’ve tried to sabotage it many times so he can keep doing more for me. [Laughs] But he and my wife are the first people to ever get my scripts. I trust him. He was off shooting his film The Toxic Avenger, but he saw the first cut and gave me some really brilliant notes. There’s one particular line of dialogue, which is among my favorites in the movie — I had the concept, but it just wasn’t coming across. And I texted Macon: “Macon, translate this into awesome!â€
His brothers, the Blair brothers, Brooke and Will, have scored every single movie I’ve done since my short films, starting in 2002. They had to score Rebel Ridge over a year. It’s a hybrid of a cool, electronic, Michael Clayton vibe, but given the nature of the film, I didn’t want to go big, twangy, we’re in the South! I’ve seen that done a thousand times. I’m always pushing for subtlety and downplay this, downplay that. The last month, I was like, “Fuck it, we need more score!†I ordered a whole other 20 minutes of full-on score, and they were scrambling to the last minute. But it really was a huge part of the movie, and as we got toward the finale — and it was always designed this way — it was, “Hey, guys, I think I’m kind of done here as a filmmaker. We have this amazing footage that we captured in real cars on a real road. You take us away.†Those last moments, emotionally, are pure score. That was fun, to let go, and they literally took over the movie and drove it home. They’re very proud, and they work so fucking hard.
One word that keeps coming up in reviews of your films is that they’re muscular, which feels like it refers to them having distinct bursts of violence. What is your relationship with the terminology people use to describe your work?
Clearly, me, yes, I’m highly muscular. [Laughs] No, I do like aggressive cinema. I certainly like to infuse deeper layers of real human emotion and also have a little fun. And I don’t overthink any of that, because then it becomes untrue.
But if you see Rebel Ridge, and you see and hear the Dually doing its good work, in the mud, in the dust, and the jet-sounding engine, it’s fucking rad. And it does hark back to me playing in my backyard with toy trucks and G.I. Joes and blowing them up. As an audience member, with such a loving family and these beautiful three daughters and little doggies to take care of, I started to gravitate toward more aggressive cinema. I wanted to escape. I wanted to feel a little bit of fight or flight within the safety of my basement, and I think that carries through to my films. I’ll write myself into a corner, write myself out. Especially for Green Room — when I ran out of ideas or ways out for our beloved protagonists, that’s when they met their end. And the violence, who knows. I do love makeup effects. I love onscreen cinematic violence. I love gore and blood, and I absolutely loathe it in real life. And I think that’s the tug-of-war, how awful it makes me feel.
Rebel Ridge might have been an exploration of: Can I even fucking do this? Can I make a movie that is not an overall feeling of dread, where there might be, despite some harrowing moments and some tragedy, some lift to it? Can I get through a screenplay without killing everybody in it? It’s like taking a smoke break from my own filmography. Can I please show something to my kids? [Laughs] When we premiere it, it’s going to be the whole family there, including my mom. And the lift and the feedback that we’re getting is new and different and intoxicating.
This film’s opening scene, with Terry getting run off the road by the police and having his cousin’s bail money stolen from him, made me feel physically ill. It clearly lays out what we’re going to be dealing with: corrupt cops, terrible legal loopholes, and Terry not being who they think he is. Tell me about it.
It’s hard to trace exactly where it came from, but that imagery, that Man with No Name Thing and the Eastwood western thing, was certainly part of it. Iron Maiden was a part of it, too. “The Number of the Beast†is a majestic sort of battle cry. I want to start hard and big, and then go quiet and real and hear the squawk of radios and have people talking. The research really informed that scene, as far as how a civil asset forfeiture unfolds: the tricks they use, the strategies, the threat of a drug-sniffing dog. I wanted to get it right, and I didn’t want to infuse, like, my inner angst. I wanted to be very objective as far as procedure and setting, but be very subjective emotionally with our protagonist. I’m very linear in how I write. It can be a hurdle, but if I don’t feel something is true, I will stop and I will go look at videos. What would a cop say in this situation? But starting with a bang, it bought me five minutes of just talking. Much like Terry, that adrenaline dump buys you time.
How did that go on set?
Luckily for everybody, because of the schedule and the rain and the chaos in Louisiana, that opening scene was shot near the end of production — which we didn’t intend but ended up paying off huge because Aaron Pierre had fully inhabited Terry Richmond by then. It made it easy. We did get thwarted by Louisiana thunderstorms. We started, got it all geared up on that cool little bridge, and then didn’t get a single shot off and had to regroup. The challenge of that scene was timing out the dialogue so it seems real and effortless, with the insane amount of blocking and propwork — to get Terry from the ground, up over to the car, into the back seat, go through the bag, take the camping gear out, put it on the car, and then Officer Lann comes in and checks the ID. It was among the most difficult of the entire shoot, to make it just seem like a routine traffic stop.
For me, the euphoria of Green Room’s “Nazi punks, fuck off†was very similar to the euphoria of Terry catching up with the bus and fist-bumping his cousin Michael through the window. Both feel like they tap into something very elemental.
The reference for that was Cool Hand Luke. I wanted that moment between these two guys. I actually ran into C.J. LeBlanc, who plays Mike, last night, and the rapport that he and Aaron had was really heartbreaking and wonderful. I’m not used to doing traditionally triumphant moments that make people vocal, but I’ve witnessed some high-fives in theaters, and that’s very exciting.
Don Johnson is great as the villain, Chief Burnne, who tries to intimidate Terry out of town and helped come up with the civil asset forfeiture scheme. How did he and Aaron work together?
We needed a legit heavy for this film, and Don was certainly that. I knew him from my youth and Miami Vice, but what drew me to the show wasn’t turquoise and blazers and whatever model Ferrari. It was really fucking good acting, just the groundedness of all that and him. And they had the ability to do these more complex, unhappy endings. I was in Mexico City shooting a commercial, trying to cast Rebel Ridge, and I saw the episode of Watchmen where he sings a song at a dinner table, and I was enthralled. He has a certain presence. Aaron was relatively new to this level of filmmaking, as the No. 1 on the call sheet, and Don was very respectful of that. There was one very sensitive scene outside of a hospital. We shot Don’s side and it was great, and Aaron was holding back a bit, and then we turned around on Aaron, and he finally had to unleash what he was preserving for the on-camera takes. It was this moment of these two guys giving it their all, and Don — as a far more experienced actor and a mentor — fully embracing Aaron as an actor. That was a really big deal.
I felt conditioned for an ultraviolent ending. I was like, All right, we’re at Rebel Ridge! We’re going to get Hold the Dark II, with another shootout! But this ending is more about diversion and creating confusion than bloodshed.
In my filmography, the payoffs are pretty brutal. But as a challenge to myself, I was like, What if I don’t kill everybody? And more important, it’s not just me auditioning new ideas and testing them out. It’s being very true to the narrative and very true to the character. Terry is a pragmatist. He is trying to stay on the rails the whole movie and is forced into situations where he has to pull on a different skill set. But even when he’s first grappling with the chief and Officer Lann outside the station, it was with minimum force. I mean, the greatest damage that is done in the first fight scene is, like, chagrin. [Laughs] But Terry is just trying to get what’s his and get that money across the finish line. And even in the finale, he has absolutely no intention of killing anybody. If you got this guy taking out a bunch of cops in this country, that ending is already written, and I didn’t want to go there.
He’s still the character most like an action hero I’ve ever written. But he’s also vulnerable, and subject to other people in the story. And regarding the police, it’s not, like, an overly emotional “We’re so sorry,†but them coming to grips with their humanity and finding out internally what their limit is. For some people, that’s a huge leap. [Laughs] It’s like, How can a cop not be down with murdering people? Well, it’s a cross-section of humanity, within the court system and the police force and everybody in this whole movie. We all bring our own context. It was threading the needle to get Terry Richmond where I wanted him to go, and I felt like when I designed the finale that I couldn’t think of another one.
Given the police corruption in this film, the Nazis of Green Room, and the similar military and police abuses in Hold the Dark, I’m curious if you consider yourself a political filmmaker.
Oh, certainly not. I have my own morality, my own politics, and I cannot help but infuse them into the story. But if anything, I work against that. I want to know, as a writer, how to humanize every character. Like in Green Room, when a life is lost, as a filmmaker, there’s reverence to that. It’s like, Shit, I really am going to miss Tiger. For Rebel Ridge, it was about researching all ends of it — not only this very unjust practice, but also the real pressure being put on PDs across America, and courtrooms that can’t guarantee constitutional rights, because there’s just no fucking money. And no money means you might have to hire deputies or officers who have been fired from three other PDs. No one wants to do that, but they’re forced to. It’s not just me trying to hear all voices equally, because this is a fucking Terry Richmond movie. But it’s only interesting to me if I can infuse real issues on a human level, to create actual drama onscreen. I had a Q&A the other night, and someone asked, “Was there pushback from the community?†Absolutely not. Leesville, Louisiana, way out near Texas, and New Orleans — nothing but love and support. We had law enforcement and ex-military on set, and there’s detail in the vernacular, in the weapons handling, in the geography and logistics. This film tested extremely high with conservatives, actually. People want to get behind a protagonist, and it’s fun to have everybody get behind Terry Richmond.
There is a larger systemic problem that the film is addressing, which I think people from various political perspectives could look at and be like, “Okay, I agree with this part of it or this part of it.â€
Yeah. And that’s why I gravitated toward civil asset forfeitures, because politics aside, it truly pisses me off to hear these stories of injustice. It’s a narrative tool as it relates to my movie. I get fucking angry, and it’s very fun to explore that — but from a very subjective view of our protagonist.