The director of child trafficking thriller Sound of Freedom has distanced himself from QAnon believers who have celebrated his film as championing their cause, saying comments made by the film’s star Jim Caviezel “hurt my work”.
Alejandro Monteverde told Variety that he began writing the film in 2015, two years before QAnon formed, after seeing a news segment about child sex trafficking. His film stars Caviezel as Tim Ballard, a real former special agent for the Department of Homeland Security who investigated sex crimes against children.
QAnon is a far-right conspiracy that says the world’s liberal elite are part of a satanic global pedophile cabal that subsists on children’s blood to remain youthful. While there is no reference to the conspiracy theory in Sound of Freedom, the film was labelled “Maga-friendly” and “QAnon-adjacent” and has been championed particularly by QAnon believers and conservative viewers, with former president Donald Trump hosting a screening of the film in July.
While Caviezel and Ballard attended the Trump screening, Monteverde did not, telling Variety: “There’s people that are too close to the film that are in politics. So it’s like, I love you, but I have to keep my distance.”
He said he felt “really sick” when he saw Sound of Freedom being described in the media as linked to QAnon. “It was heartbreaking when I saw all this polemic and all this controversy going on. My instinct was to run. I want to hide,” he said. “I don’t want to give any more interviews. Before the movie came out, I did a couple of interviews.”
Caviezel has previously denied having ties to QAnon but has repeated several of its talking points on conservative talk shows and at QAnon-organised events, including that he believes in “andrenochroming”, a QAnon term for the falsehood that traffickers torture children and drain their blood to harvest an elixir of youth.
At a 2021 QAnon-affiliated event in Oklahoma, Caviezel claimed Ballard had wanted to attend with him but “he’s down there saving children as we speak, because they’re pulling kids out of the darkest recesses of hell right now, in … all kinds of places, the adrenochroming of children … If a child knows he’s going to die, his body will secrete this adrenaline. These people that do it, there’ll be no mercy for them.”
“Look, when you hire people, what they do on the free time, I can’t control,” Monteverde said of Caviezel. “I was a director. I wrote the screenplay. I hired the actor I thought was the best for this film. The subject matter was very personal to him. [Caviezel] adopted three children from China. When we met and discussed the project, he broke down in tears.”
Asked if he regretted casting Caviezel, Monterverde said: “I try to never look back into any regrets because there’s nothing I can do about it now. Jim came to the set. I’ve never seen somebody so committed and so professional on set … Everybody’s entitled to [speak their mind].
“Now, on this particular film, yes, it did hurt my work. And that’s why I’m here talking now instead of secluding myself. It’s time for me, the author, the writer and the director, to say what was the motive of the film.”
Since it was released on 4 July, Sound of Freedom has made US$173m (£136m, A$266m) in the US and Canada, beating Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning at the domestic box office. Its success has been attributed to, in part, a pay-it-forward scheme where viewers are asked to scan a QR code at the end to buy more tickets so other people can see it for free.
Monteverde said he did not know exactly how much the pay-it-forward program had contributed to the film’s box office, but said it was less than 10%. When it was suggested to him by the film’s distributors, he said, “I was like, ‘Arghhhhh.’ I became a pain. And they told me, ‘Alejandro, let us do our work. You have to trust us.’ And we made a deal.”
