“Sound of Freedom” director Alejandro Monteverde has embarked in a sort of damage control campaign for his film, with an op-ed he wrote for THR and an interview with Variety.
I don’t know the full backstory when it comes to the media smears behind “Sound of Freedom” — what exactly is its connection to conspiracy theorist QAnon? What does it have to do with the movie?
There’s been a lot of theories about this very subject, and, I won’t lie, I recently went down a rabbit hole looking for answers. What I gathered was that QAnon followers believe sex trafficking in Washington DC is real and that ‘Sound’ star Jim Caviezel might be a follower.
There isn’t really much proof that Caviezel is a Q guy, except for a speech he gave, a few years back, about a “storm” coming, which is a phrase Q followers tend to use in their insistence that a reckoning will occur for all the evils in the political world.
With that being said, writer-director Monteverde tells Variety that he’s rather irked by the QAnon comparisons. He says that he started working on “Sound of Freedom” in 2015, two years before the Q movement began.
The origin [of the film] has been avoided, purposely or accidentally, in the media. The origin will answer a lot of these misconceptions on the film.
Monteverde claims that the origins of the film started when he watched a news segment on TV detailing the the scourge of child sex trafficking. That very night, shaken by what he’d seen, he was not able to sleep. His wife then came up with the idea of turning this topic into a movie.
Obviously, Jim Caviezel, a staunch conservative, being added to the film probably didn’t help the coverage of the film, but Monteverde has tried to stay apolitical:
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.
“Sound of Freedom” has grossed $172 million in the United States, and Monteverde says that only “4% to 7%” of those receipts came from the pay-it-forward campaign. He can’t really confirm an exact number, but he says it’s definitely under 10%.
Monteverde actually won the People’s Choice Award at TIFF in 2006 for his immigrant drama, “Bella,” and he says that the negative press for “Sound of Freedom” has hurt his career, which is why he’s decided to come out and talk to Variety.
As for a sequel to “Sound of Freedom,” Monteverde confirms there have already been talks of doing one, with a story potentially set in Haiti.