The Order is a new film that documents the true life story of domestic terrorists who in 1983 robbed banks and armored cars to fuel a plot to overthrow the government. The film stars Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett, and Marc Maron. Justin Kurzel, director of The Snowtown Murders and 2015’s Macbeth crafts a compelling police procedural that grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. Kurzel recently spoke with Immersive via Zoom.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]
How did you first get involved with this project?
I was sent the script and I started reading and it reminded me of American films of the seventies. I was quite shocked to see that there was a group called The Order. They did play out the steps of this book, The Turner Diaries, a strange adventure book about how to take down the American government.
It read like a genre piece and then I realized that it was speaking pretty directly to today. I knew nothing about this before. I’m really surprised that it was a story that hadn’t been told before in this sort of way.
I liked the way it unfolded. I knew bits and pieces about the true story. It does feel like Sidney Lumet or William Friedkin’s films, it is at heart a police procedural.
That’s what I liked about it, there was a sort of convention about it that I thought was kind of cool that it started in a certain way, but then it was character-driven. You were able to, it was sort of leading you in a place, but then there were scenes in it that felt non-procedural and kind of strange.
The fact too that the lead character has the one that you see the film through felt like one of those older school characters where you didn’t know much about them and you sort of discovered who they were as you were going through the story and now were playing throughout the scenes and I kind of love that kind of aspect of it.
What was it like working with Jude Law? I mean, he is a phenomenal actor and he immersed himself in this role.
It’s just an enthusiasm that he brings, this love of the craft that’s sort of infectious. As a director, I love doing different types of takes on set and trying to find something fresh and new on the day, which takes a certain sort of energy from an actor and a trust that Jude is just wonderful at.
I guess the other thing too was the role felt fresh to him. He felt like he hadn’t done something like this. I was curious about that. That newness sometimes for an actor is really, you can sort of see that on the screen and there’s a kind of tension in that and a nervousness that I thought would be great for Jude.
Nicholas Hoult is great as the cult leader… It’s unnerving how calm and normal he seems.
Well, usually those figures that pull in a lot of people to join them kind of come across in some sort of normal way at times, which is I guess what makes him so dangerous. A lot of it is about family. I’m here and I’m going to listen to you and come over to my place and we’ll have a barbecue and we’ll make you feel included and you’re not alone and you shouldn’t be isolated and I’m hearing you.
Suddenly that attitude can become compelling for those who are sort of feeling disenfranchised or kind of like no one’s hearing me. Nick and I were very, very interested in that aspect of him, what sort of grounded him, what were the things that made people go towards him. And a lot of it was sort of in the domestic. So that was a sort of key to approaching that.
I love the way the Pacific Northwest looks in this movie. Talk a little bit about working with the DP.
Adam Arkapaw who’ve worked with quite a few times and we both had a certain, both heavily inspired by locations anyway. We shot it in Calgary actually in Alberta, so you sort of have the Rockies on one side and the Badlands on the other. These skies are just some kind of unbelievable there. Some of the best Westerns were sort of shot there. The film in a sense sort of felt at times like a Western sort of someone driving in, riding into this new place, and being kind of quite sort of swamped and this landscape quite overbearing to them.
And the heist sequences…
Looking at how those heist scenes play and not wanting multiple cameras wanting to be very sure about where the camera wanted to be and how in a choreographed way those sequences would play out through a single camera rather than a multi-camera. And that was great. There was a sort of classicism to the film that we wanted to lean on from a lot of the references that I was sort of talking about before.
It’s a period film, but it doesn’t feel labored. It doesn’t feel like a period film. What was it like piecing this together? I appreciate it when running times are under two hours.
It was a hard film to get going. These films I think in the past were blockbusters… genre kind of crime. Thriller was always sort of something that was a sort of go-to and now they feel indie. So the resources to make it were not huge. So it was very challenging and tough to kind of do that.
I think we were very fortunate that we had actors that engaged with the story and were very lucky in terms of the crew that we picked were pretty relentless and amazing getting an ambition for the film without much. And a lot of that had to do with Calgary. I think that that place just offered so much.
What’s it like being on the other end of this? You had a great premiere in Venice and it’s about to get released. What do you hope audiences take from this…
I think it’s about a story that not many people know yet. It speaks pretty directly to our current world, which is what makes it so confronting I guess. It’s a film that is a real ride and it has a kind of truth in it. It’s one that I’m proud of and been lovely hearing how people have sort of responded to it.
The Order opens December 6th, exclusively in theaters.
