The director of the box office hit movie Sound of Freedom is distancing the film from QAnon, saying in a new interview that he was troubled when subscribers to the conspiracy theory began using the film to advance their beliefs.
Director and screenwriter Alejandro Monteverde has given few interviews in recent months but told the Los Angeles Times he wants the world to know Sound of Freedom was intended to be a noncontroversial movie that attracted people from every political view.
The film is the surprising hit movie of the summer and is approaching $175 million in domestic gross.
Asked to comment on QAnon adherents using the film as a "rallying cry" for their beliefs, Monteverde said, "It's heartbreaking, and it hurts me."
"The minute they started labeling it with conspiracy theories, it discredits the purity of the work. A lot of times, I'm like, 'Wow, all this headache would have gone away if it was just based on fiction. None of this would have happened.'… If you're telling me that there is all these conspiracy theories in the film, terminologies, that I'll see symbols of pizza and the names Q or Z, or whatever – no. There's none of that."
Part of the QAnon theory claims that well-known elites in the U.S. are involved in a secret child trafficking ring where the children's blood is harvested for the chemical adrenochrome.
Monteverde asserts the film has had bipartisan support, even if that is not recognized within the mainstream press.
"You cannot arrive too close to $200 million [at the box office] with just a conservative market," he told the Times. "You know what movies make that are faith-based? Like $80 million. But you don't get to $200 million if you don't cross over and become a bipartisan film. Now, we're going to see what happens when [it's released] internationally, because the politics are here. If, internationally, we come back with a big price tag, then you can't deny that. These same conspiracy theories do not exist in Mexico, Argentina, France, [or] Italy. I'm going to Colombia for the premiere, so I can't wait to see what's going to happen. I want to keep it humble. But I'm feeling excited."
The director said his goal was to make a film that creates a conversation on an "important subject matter."
"My hope was that this film creates dialogue at the social level about a subject matter: human trafficking," he said. "And that's what's happening."
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Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Fred Hayes/Stringer
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
