Director Jeremy Saulnier on the set of Rebel Ridge.Allyson Riggs/Netflix/Netflix
The last time that Jeremy Saulnier released a film, the director of some of the most nerve-rattling and brutal American thrillers of his generation emphasized the importance of having a Plan B.
“As an independent filmmaker who’s self-funded two of my movies, there always has to be a Plan B, because I don’t trust the industry enough as much as I rely upon it,” Saulnier said in 2018, when he was at the Toronto International Film Festival for the premiere of his supernatural-spiked hair-raiser Hold the Dark.
Yet in the years since that conversation, Saulnier has had to cycle through Plans B, C and D to get his follow-up, the electrifying and muscular thriller Rebel Ridge, to audiences.
Initially set to roll in 2020, the Netflix production about a mysterious stranger who gets into a turf war with corrupt cops in a small Southern U.S. town, was stopped dead in its tracks by the pandemic. After regrouping the production a year later, star John Boyega abruptly dropped out in the middle of production.
A year after that, rising British actor Aaron Pierre – best known to Canadian audiences for his standout performance in Clement Virgo’s 2022 drama Brother – stepped in for Boyega, joining a cast that includes Don Johnson as the local police chief and AnnaSophia Robb as a helpful legal aide. And now, two years after shooting wrapped for real this time, Saulnier’s film will finally make its way to fans hungry for a fresh batch of kills from the director of Murder Party, Blue Ruin and Green Room.
Ahead of Rebel Ridge’s release Sept. 6, Saulnier spoke with The Globe and Mail about a journey as challenging and overwhelming as the ones that his own characters tend to encounter.
You’ve said, “We came back three years in a row to make this movie.” Can you walk me through the challenges?
Rebel Ridge was the fastest script-to-screen trajectory that I’ve ever had. But then the pandemic unfolded, and the film wasn’t a concern. We regrouped in 2021, but just out of respect for everyone involved, I’ll say that version didn’t work out. And it ended up being for everyone’s mutual benefit. When we came back in the third year with Aaron, there was a lot of time to set things straight and to correct course. That’s not just me retroactively making things sort of seem rosy. This was the correct and only way that I could dream of realizing this movie.
You once described Green Room’s Anton Yelchin as possessing a “delicate balance of tragic vulnerability and intense physicality.” Aaron seems to be an evolution of that – he has an intense physicality, but almost no trace of vulnerability. Or only one that comes out when his character is facing the ultimate threat.
It’s in the casting phase. After connecting over Zoom to explore the idea of him coming on board, I knew two minutes in that he was the only one who could play this character. He’s a big guy and imposing to a twerp like myself, but he’s completely disarming. He has a Zen nature to him. And he was in about 132 of 135 scenes, so it was an ordeal and he was a hero to all of us.
On casting, Don Johnson seems with this role to have mastered the art of playing crooked cops, twisting his Miami Vice image through this, Dragged Across Concrete, HBO’s Watchmen …
I was shooting a commercial in Mexico City when I saw him in Watchmen and knew that I had to make it happen. There’s that gravity of Miami Vice, too. The show is known for the music, the suits. But as a child in the ‘80s watching it, I remember seeing my first ever unhappy ending, when a drug dealer gets away on a pontoon plane. “Dad, he’s getting away!” That Michael Mann aesthetic was what I wanted to tap into. The dialogue in this film, there’s a lot to chew on, but we also kept it quiet sometimes, to get that simple gaze between Don and Aaron.
Your other films have all led up to shocking acts of violence. But this is a slower boil. The pyrotechnics are the interactions between the characters.
The thesis of this movie was how can you play dialogue like action set pieces. How can you build that tension and light that fuse and let it burn? Cutting those scenes was so much fun because if you ground it and humanize it all, that charge is created. We created the energy of live theatre sometimes.
This is the first of your films that you’ve also edited yourself. Why take that on?
I started editing in high school, and I’m deep into the technical side of things. And while I had an amazing editor on Hold the Dark, it was cathartic for me here. I’d been through so much on this film that I wanted to sit with it, comb through every frame. On set as a director, there’s lots of pressure. I don’t sleep well. In the edit room, I’m sitting there alone above my garage. And when you crack the code of marrying two shots together, I was vocally erupting in joy. I didn’t high-five myself, but I could have.
Rebel Ridge is available to stream on Netflix starting Sept. 6.
This interview has been condensed and edited.