"You really can’t do it alone as a filmmaker. You need to align yourself with people who share your taste and understand the film you are trying to make."

SOVEREIGN's writer/director Christian Swegal joins for a Hopeful Conversation

Ted’s note: SOVEREIGN recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, and I got to see it in Los Angeles a few days later. I’ve long been a fan of the anti-hero tales, and have also made first features a bit of a study so I was eager to see it. SOVEREIGN delivers excellently on both fronts, and it made me eager to talk further with the director and encourage him to share with all FilmStack. Welcome Christian Swegal!

Ted: SOVEREIGN is really an impressive achievement, particularly as a first feature. The pacing, the tone, the composition, the script, the choices, and the level of performance -- you are firing on all cylinders. I have to suspect that you and your team did some significant prep work to get on the same page and find the cinematic language you wanted to use and when. Can you tell us about that?

Christian: We knew from the beginning that we wanted to tell the story as simply and directly as possible, without editorializing too much. There’s a great cookbook by Alice Waters called The Art of Simple Food, and it was something I anecdotally referenced early on. Her philosophy, to paraphrase, is to respect the ingredients and present them as simply and elegantly as possible. A carrot should taste like a carrot, a pear like a pear, etc. In a way, we took that same approach with each element of the film. The photography, the wardrobe, the music, the edit. We wanted everything to feel elemental, direct, and straightforward, all in service of creating a film that felt fundamentally honest.

Visually, that meant no dollies or drones. We kept everything either locked off on sticks or handheld. In terms of the edit, it was much more a process of subtraction than addition, distilling each scene to the essential shots. Our editor, David Henry, did an incredible job with that. For the score, our composer, James McAlister, limited the number of instruments so you could clearly hear and distinguish each one. You could hear breaths, efforts, fingers on strings. It gave the music a raw, tactile quality that I loved.

Every department worked together under this ethos. Given the absurdity of the subject matter at times, and the extremes of the characters, I felt that overt stylization would have tipped the tone into parody or something insincere. All of the drama, the humor, the horror came from the text, not from the presentation.

You and your producer Nick pulled together a terrific cast, even for the smaller roles. And it all felt authentic to the world -- not just names coming in to satisfy the distributors or financiers. The relationships all seemed real -- not just plot points. I could feel the love and the life they lived before this story began. What was the work you did before shooting with them? Was there a consistent note you used to center them? A rehearsal period?

Unfortunately, due to the length of our shoot, we didn’t have time for rehearsals, but we did spend a lot of time talking about the script and the characters and their motivation in each scene. That was really the heart of the process. Our casting director, Barbara McCarthy, did an amazing job. Having actors of this caliber place their trust in me as a first-time director was a gift.

Nick Offerman wasn’t just the lead of the film, he was also a true leader on set who set the tone for everything. The rapport he built with Jacob Tremblay and Martha Plimpton was genuine, and that affection comes through in the film. Nick, Martha, and Thomas Mann had worked together before, and Nick and Jacob became very close during the shoot. The same was true of Dennis Quaid and Nancy Travis. There was a just trust and familiarity among the cast that made my job so much easier.

I really think my greatest value to them was in understanding the text and the psychology of the characters, since I wrote the script. If something felt off or out of context, I could help guide it back on track. But often it was simply a matter of repetition and exploration. Their instincts were so sharp that very little correction was needed. Each actor had their own process, but for me, it was a joy and a real gift to watch them work.

It's based on a true story. What obligations do you feel we have as artists and humans to meet the actual people involved, and where should we have more artistic license? How were you able to apply that here and did you find any particular challenges?

The challenge in this film was certainly how to respect the victims, which I believe we did by choosing to respect their privacy. It’s a difficult line to walk. I think it’s essential that we tell true stories like this; I believe they are important. But we also have a responsibility to do so in a way that is thoughtful and avoids re-traumatizing anyone.

In this case, we made the decision to fictionalize every character except for the Kanes. Even then, we were careful not to delve too deeply into the hypothetical personal lives of the police family. While that storyline is fictionalized, I believe it still speaks to universal truths about fatherhood, masculinity, and the systems that shape both. That was the space where we tried to be honest, and that is where the film ultimately finds its focus.

The film is the tale of a character getting caught up in extremist beliefs. He's also seemingly having some mental health issues. Do those two things always go hand in hand? How do you work to balance both the conviction and the delusion? And am I wrong to feel that we all -- particularly now in America -- are walking such a challenging line? Speaking both for your characters but also for the world at large, what do you feel is driving that compulsion and why does it feel like such a perfect fit to explore with cinema?

My personal entry point into this film was witnessing someone in my life who became consumed by conspiratorial anti-government beliefs due to a mental health issue, specifically a condition called delusional disorder. I don’t believe that’s always the case, but I do think mental health is often part of the equation, and something that we, as a society, need to address with greater compassion and urgency.

That said, a healthy skepticism toward government is not only understandable and rational, it’s necessary at times. In my view, the deeper issue is the erosion of trust in official sources of information and in our core institutions: government, healthcare, finance, and media. People have lost faith in these systems, and often for valid reasons.

In my research and experience, I found that most people drawn into these movements share one thing in common: they feel deeply let down or betrayed by the system. Their grievances are often real. They’ve lost their homes, faced predatory lending, been denied insurance in bad faith, or gotten trapped in the bureaucracy of the IRS or the justice system. These aren’t imagined injuries for them, they’re lived ones.

The problem is that, in the absence of a compassionate or functional response from institutions, people like Jerry Kane step in with answers and bad information. That’s the danger. For people drawn to these movements, it’s often about pain, disillusionment, and a search for hope and justice that gets hijacked. I think it’s very easy to write off or “other” those who fall into this bucket, but the beauty of cinema its ability to place us inside someone else’s experience. I think that’s why stories like this can feel so challenging, because they ask us to look closer.

Nick Offerman delivers such a great performance. They all do, but as he is the anti-hero lead, he's riveting and carrying on from all that he delivered in "The Last Of Us". He's part of this great tradition of comedic actors embracing dramatic roles quite successfully, but even with that, I can't help but feel the pressure you must have experienced of having the conviction of the choice and resting so much of the movie on his shoulders was intense. When did you know it was going to work? And did your understanding change along the way? Was there a scene he nailed? Was it before you started shooting? Was it in the edit?

Nick has long been one of my favorite actors, and although I’m biased, I truly believe this is one of his most stunning performances. I was confident from the start that he would do an amazing job with this role, but even with that confidence, I was blown away by what he delivered. It exceeded anything I had hoped for or expected. I think that speaks to his work ethic, his preparation, and his incredible depth as an artist.

That said, I can only imagine how nerve-racking it must have been for him to take on a role like this, especially with a first-time director. I’m incredibly grateful for his courage and trust. Early in the shoot, there was a scene in a car between he and Jacob. When I saw the warmth and chemistry between them, I knew we had found the heart of the movie. That connection was the most important part to me. I also remember seeing Nick in the white suit for the first time, delivering his sermon. It was thrilling to watch. Those were long, difficult scenes, and I still don’t know how he did it.

I was so grateful to get to see your "slow burn" film, as it is a narrative approach that goes a bit against the grain these days, but I have always loved and want more of. Yet, financiers, distributors, the platforms... they all want it all explained from the get go... they want us all to anticipate the ending it the first five minutes... they want explosions and other spectacles and don't trust the audience can embrace an unfolding. How did you and your team find the courage to go with this approach, particularly with your initial feature? Were there specific things that inspired you? Were there discoveries you made along the way that convinced you it was the right way to go? I imagine it also required you to lose some things along the way. How did you decide?

I think it was mostly a process of trial and error, and then eventually surrendering to the shape of the thing it wanted to be. In the script phase, even before casting, I tried to accommodate those market pressures and kept coming up short. I experimented with bringing in Dennis’s character earlier or moving the police shooting to the midpoint of the script. But every time I imposed that structure, the film lost its emotional thrust and ultimately felt less engaging. It wasn’t for lack of trying; it just wasn’t the right shape for this story. When I finally let go of those external expectations, it led me to the structure we have now.

Fortunately, I was working with a producer, Nick Moceri, who shared that value and believed in the film. Together, we fought to stay true to the vision. You really can’t do it alone as a filmmaker. You need to align yourself with people who share your taste and understand the film you are trying to make. Because we made this independently, we had the freedom to make the version we believed in. But I’m learning that those pressures are always there, at every step of the process.

Property, the self, community, the things that pull us together and pull us apart. These are all hot button issues and they always will be, yet in many ways your film feels SO timely, like a report from the front. In many ways it is easy to get caught up in the urgency, and thus the world and the issues that revolve within. Often filmmakers fall prey to the "message" of such things, and can abandon the "cinema" along the way. For me your film falls into that special category of the select few that keeps the cinema at the core and doesn't feel to take sides -- other than humanity, that is. It feels honest. I am curious about the discussions you had amongst the team about this and in exploring the cinematic possibilities in the prep, how you settled on how to express it (if you did).

We knew from the beginning that, even though this was a film dealing with political subject matter, we wanted to make an apolitical film. At its heart, it’s a story about fathers and sons, and about the need for empathy. It’s easy, and kind of seductive, to make a film about a message and forget about the characters and the emotional journey. There are themes in this film that I care deeply about, and there’s sometimes an inclination to grab the microphone and lecture. But that wasn’t our goal here, and we resisted that temptation throughout.

We also knew there were no easy answers in this story. For the film to feel honest, we had to acknowledge the complexity and the nuance. Nothing is black and white. I don’t presume to have the answer to these complicated issues, but I do believe I can raise questions, and I hope this film does that. I hope it provokes conversations around these topics and challenges people to engage with them through a lens of empathy and compassion. Some viewers may feel that’s a heavy lift, but for me, those are my favorite kinds of films. Hopefully, the emotional journey of the story reinforces that.

In putting this together —really any first feature together — there must have been so many challenges, times when it felt like it would never happen, or that it collapsed, or the wrong people came in before you found the right collaborators. How did you face those challenges and how did you find your way through?

We faced just about every major challenge you can imagine on this film. Financing issues, viral outbreaks, lightning strikes, births, deaths. It was absolute chaos at times. None of it would have been possible without my producer, Nick Moceri, who fought every single day to bring this project into the world. The role of the producer is absolutely essential. Without a strong guiding hand, both creatively and logistically, the movie simply doesn’t get made.

We struggled to secure a senior lender, and that only came together a few days before production. We lost two full days out of our 25-day schedule to storms and lightning strikes. As a result, we had to shoot the final shootout of the film in just one day. That was, without question, the hardest part of the entire process.

My wife went into labor back in Los Angeles during prep, and I flew home for the birth of our daughter just four days before filming began. Later, during the director’s cut, my father went into the hospital and passed away.

To say we ran the gauntlet on this movie is an understatement. But in spite of everything, or maybe because of it, I’ve never been prouder of anything in my life. The relationships and collaborators I found through this process will hopefully last a lifetime.

Wow. I feel for you, Christian.

Movies are long term commitments for all involved, but mostly for the director and producer. They change us in all directions. Sometimes we grow. Sometimes we heal. Sometimes we discover something new about ourself. Can you share some of your transformation creating and sharing the film has delivered to you?

This film was deeply personal for me, as was the process of making it. It marked the realization of a lifelong dream to direct a feature, and it told a story about fathers and sons during a period of personal transition in my life.

Sharing the film with audiences has also been incredibly moving. Seeing how thoughtful and emotionally attuned people have been in their responses reaffirmed my belief that viewers are hungry for stories like this. It’s a beautiful thing to create something so personal and specific, and then watch people from completely different backgrounds connect with it.

The process was also one of discovery. You can enter a project with a script, a mood board, and a plan, but your voice really emerges through the thousands of small decisions you make along the way. What shoes does a character wear? Do we hear birds or traffic outside? Do we cut in for the close-up or hold the wide? You make a million of these choices, and together they reflect your taste and instincts in ways you can’t fully predict. I was surprised by what those decisions revealed about me as a filmmaker.

It also deepened my understanding of how vital collaborators are. Your producer, your cast, your department heads—and now, as I’m learning, even your distribution partners—all shape the experience. Filmmaking is intensely collaborative, and it’s essential to surround yourself with people who support you, both personally and professionally. Feeling safe and supported by your team is something I now value above almost everything else.

Now knowing what it took to get the film made and at the level you did, what would you tell the version of yourself from five years ago? Would you change the order of any steps or prepare in a different way?

We were very lucky that this film came together as quickly as it did, especially for an independent production. There were definitely things we got right, and a few I would approach differently next time.

One of the things that worked in our favor was creating a strong sense of urgency and inevitability around the project. We were adamant from the beginning that this film was going to get made, even if we had to shoot it with puppets in my garage. That’s an exaggeration, but not by much. We were determined to make the film at whatever scale we could. That level of commitment gave people the confidence to join us.

From a preparation standpoint, there are definitely areas I would handle differently. I would make sure locations were scouted and locked as far in advance as possible. Oddly, I didn’t realize how foundational that was to the production machine. We had several locations fall through or change during the shoot, and that created a lot of unnecessary stress.

I would also put even more focus on authentic local casting. I think we did a strong job there, and I’d like to push it even further in future films. Some of my favorite scenes are ones with non-actors sharing their real stories. That blend of performance and reality adds a texture that I’m excited to explore further.

More broadly, I would probably spend more time refining the shooting script and hopefully be a bit more economical with my coverage. I would also remind myself that if a film doesn’t feel personal and urgent, and if you don’t have the emotional energy to tell it, then it may not be the right one to make. For me, this film luckily had all of those ingredients.

Christian Swegal is an American screenwriter and director. His debut film, Sovereign, starring Nick Offerman, Jacob Tremblay, Martha Plimpton, Thomas Mann, and Dennis Quaid premier at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. It will be released theatrically by Briarcliff Entertainment on July 11th. Prior to this, Christian collaborated with director Werner Herzog to develop the series Fordlandia for AMC. He is a graduate of USC School of Cinematic Arts.

SOVEREIGN opens in the United States on July 11th, both in theaters and to rent or own digitally. It had it’s world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Briarliff Entertainment is releasing it in the US, and Concourse Media is handling the international sales.

Check out the website: https://www.allnightdiner.com/sovereign

And The Penske’s Hollywood Reporter’s review: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/sovereign-review-nick-offerman-dennis-quaid-jacob-tremblay-1236255397/

And EW’s “exclusive first look”: https://ew.com/sovereign-first-look-nick-offerman-jacob-tremblay-jerry-joe-kane-exclusive-11732915