Sound of Freedom, this summer’s surprise hit movie about a U.S. government agent who takes down a global cabal of child sex traffickers, has attracted a ton of attention due to its box office success and the eyebrow-raising liberties it takes with portraying child trafficking.
The star of the film, Jim Caviezel, is also a longtime disseminator of QAnon conspiracy theories, but in a new interview with Variety, writer-director Alejandro Monteverde insisted that calling Sound of Freedom a QAnon film is “so ridiculous.”
“I was like really sick,” Monteverde told Variety of his reaction when the press dismissed his film as far-right propaganda. “I was like, ‘This is all wrong. That’s not true.’ It was heartbreaking when I saw all this polemic and all this controversy going on.”
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Monteverde added that “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.”
To that end, he told Variety that he initially conceived the film as a completely fictionalized narrative about widespread child sex trafficking. His plans changed, however, when he was introduced to Tim Ballard, a former Homeland Security agent and the founder of Operation Underground Railroad, an anti-sex trafficking organization. The movie subsequently became a story about Ballard himself, with Caviezel signing on to play the former agent.
OUR’s messaging shares many characteristics with the QAnon community’s conspiracy-fueled fixation on the existence of a massive global network of pedophiles. During the height of the pandemic, Ballard was quoted as saying that child sexual predators were responding to stay-at-home orders as though it was “harvest time.”
Monteverde said he has now chosen to distance himself from both Caviezel and Ballard, who have been outspoken about their right-wing politics and even attended a Sound of Freedom screening hosted by Donald Trump.
“There’s people that are too close to the film that are in politics,” he said of Caviezel and Ballard. “So it’s like, I love you, but I have to keep my distance.”
“All I wanted [to do with the film] was to present a question about the problem: human trafficking, child trafficking, child sexual exploitation,” he added to Variety. “How bad the problem is. We shot in 2018. In 2019, it was a completely finished film [before QAnon became a phenomenon].”
Since being released on July 4, Sound of Freedom has pulled in an impressive $173 million at the box office in the U.S. and Canada.
