‘The Order’ Screenwriter Zach Baylin Says True-Life Domestic Terrorism Tale ‘Would Be Relevant Anytime It Would Have Come Out’
Zach Baylin knows the buzzwords already: “timely,” “prescient,” “controversial.” But the screenwriter behind such true stories as “King Richard” and “Gran Turismo” is also a student of history, so when it comes to his latest film, which follows the unnerving true story of a homegrown white supremacist militant group, he doesn’t get too caught up in the quickie designations. After all, he knows something about following a story beyond just cawing headlines and catchy descriptors.
Baylin’s latest, the Justin Kurzel-directed “The Order,” tracks the final days of neo-Nazi militant Bob Matthews (Nicholas Hoult), as he gathers together his eponymous terrorist group (a rag-tag assemblage of white supremacists) as they plot bank robberies, car heists, and government overthrow in the Pacific Northwest in the early ’80s. But Matthews’ aims are noticed by FBI agent Terry Husk (based on real-life agent Wayne Manis), and when Husk starts gathering his own team to take him down (including Tye Sheridan as a young deputy and Jurnee Smollett as a tough fellow agent), it all leads to explosive — and true — ends.
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A film about a group of disenfranchised men banding together to hit back at the perceived enemy through intimidation, violence, crime, and worse? For Baylin, “The Order” was an interesting story when it took place in the ’80s, a compelling one to write nearly a decade ago, and an absolutely necessary one to share in 2024. Relevant? Yes. Controversial? No.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
IndieWire: You’ve become a real go-to screenwriter for true stories of extremely different stripes, what is the appeal to those kinds of projects for you?
Zach Baylin: Some of it started with “King Richard,” because I really loved the process of researching that movie and the kind of excavation of those characters, and so I continued to do that. But I think that that kind of research had always been a big part of how I was developing stories. Even if things were fictional, I tended to draw from some nugget of something that had happened or an article that I had read.
With “The Order,” it was a really kind of slow discovery of the story, it wasn’t something that I was just flipping through the New York Times and saw a story and was like, “Oh, this feels like a movie.” It was a more deliberate effort to actually find a story about this subject, so it was a different journey to get there.
What was the impetus for you wanting to do a story like this, and then how did you go about finding this particular story?
Well, I had been talking for a long time with this producer named Bryan Haas, who produced the film along with Jude and Justin were producers on the film. And Bryan and I had been reading a lot about the militia movement in America. This was in like 2016, 2017. There had been a huge rise in the awareness about domestic terrorism and far right groups, and so we had been looking for a story in that world. We looked at Ruby Ridge a bit, and we looked at the Oklahoma City bombing, and through our research into Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, we found the story of Bob Matthews and The Order, because Bob had been a bit of an influence on McVeigh.
There was this link between those two events of domestic terrorism: the book “The Turner Diaries.” McVeigh’s plans for bombing the federal building are kind of pulled from “The Turner Diaries,” and he found “The Turner Diaries” because Bob Matthews had used them. That was how we became introduced to that story, and then we went and tried to find a huge piece of research that we could begin to base the movie on.
Bryan found this great book, “The Silent Brotherhood,” that Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, who were Denver Post reporters, had written. Then all these weird connections started falling into place, like that my wife’s family is from Denver, and they were all actually pretty close with Alan Berg, who was a Jewish radio host in Denver in the early ’80s who was assassinated by Bob Matthews and his group. I kind of just went down the rabbit hole.
In the course of your research, did you get a copy of “The Turner Diaries”?
Yeah, we had one and we had one on set. That was before January 6th; “The Turner Diaries” were found on the steps of the Capitol, I believe, during the insurrection on January 6, 2021, but we began researching the movie and I started writing in 2018, so it was still available, you could still buy it on Amazon at that point. So we had one, and then we had one that was used as something that the prop department reproduced for the movie.
One thing that was kind of surprising about it that it’s pretty childish and adolescent, and even though it has the ideology and the plans behind it, and everything is terribly hateful, it’s kind of written like a kid’s book. The fact that someone read that and was like, “This is a great blueprint of how to overthrow the U.S. government” is, in itself, entirely nonsensical.
It’s not an exact one-to-one, but as we see in the film, Bob Matthews is someone who preached a certain lifestyle and way to be and he did not live that. There’s something so striking about these people preaching things that they don’t adhere to, and then they’re also taking instructions basically from a children’s book. It’s sort of immature and pathetic.
There were points in developing the script that we had elements that almost felt farcical that we had to pull back because, obviously, what happened is so horrendous. It’s still in the film, but there is a point in which Bob and his group are taking an oath to join this so-called Silent Brotherhood, to commit themselves to these acts of treason and warfare, and they’ve decided they need a baby to christen over this ritual. The members were going around to their wives asking, “Can we use the baby?,” and the wives said no, and it just felt like this kind of comedy of errors of this group trying to find an infant. Some of those things didn’t end up feeling tonally what the movie wanted to be.
In some ways, it’s fortunate and in some ways, it makes it almost scarier that, if [these plans were] in more capable hands, what could happen. That was also something that was unique, and maybe uniquely dangerous about Bob’s group, is that a lot of the people who joined and then became violent bank robbers and murderers had not been criminals before. He was able to turn people who probably had other paths ahead of them if a better influence had come along. That’s part of the idea behind the movie, was trying to understand how people can become corrupted by these charismatic ideologues who are really narcissists.
It really is these turning points in your life that push you in one direction or the other, and if you have the support systems to help you overcome adversity and take you in the right directions, then you’re not going to be so susceptible to going down the path of hatred. That was really important, collectively as filmmakers, to make sure that we were depicting a real place that felt like it was not good or bad. It was a place where a lot of different things could be fostered.
What was most useful in your research process?
Once I had sort of identified what the story I wanted to tell was, I immediately saw it as this kind of old school crime thriller, and I think that’s because one of the first sort of clips that I found about Bob and the group was about this heist that they pulled off in Ukiah in ’84. At the time, it was the biggest armored car heist in U.S. history. It was incredibly choreographed, a pretty sophisticated crime. So my entry point creatively was like, “There is a heist film in this.”
But then Bryan optioned the book “The Silent Brotherhood,” and it’s this incredibly well-researched, kind of totemic piece that followed the creation of The Order and the entire investigation afterwards, so I really based the movie on that book. And once Jude and Jurnee and Tye came on, we did a lot of interviews with other FBI agents, just to make sure that we were getting the authenticity of the time period and the police work right.
There very much is a heist film in this!
That was really the objective of the film. You don’t want to make something that you feel like is a homework or a history lesson, and I don’t think the movie is all. If you strip away all the other stuff, it’s a really just a taut, propulsive crime thriller. We talked about “The French Connection” a lot and “Prince of the City” and a lot of Sidney Lumet movies and “Heat,” and the kind of just good genre action movie that they used to make in the 1980s and early ’90s. Just taking aside anything that’s like controversial about the movie, those are just hard movies to get made now.
You have two great stars to help, though. Jude also produced this one, right?
He’s so good and he still is so inquisitive and creative. There’s no cynicism about the job. He really loves being an actor and telling stories. I would make anything with him. He is just phenomenal. I worked in the art department for a really long time, as I was trying to get my writing career going, and I was in the prop department on this movie that he did in New York called “Side Effects,” the Steven Soderbergh movie. And so when I first met with him about “The Order,” I had to be like, “We’ve worked together before actually. I handed you a briefcase one time on the street.”
And then Nick, what a year for him, with this and “Nosferatu” and “Juror #2” all arriving in the same period of time.
He’s incredible in all three of those, and they’re so different, and such different, like wildly different types of films and directorial styles. I believe he came to Calgary where we were shooting the day after he finished shooting “Nosferatu,” and then he left us and went immediately to Clint Eastwood’s movie. And they’re so wildly different. And Nick is such a sweet, soft-spoken, funny guy that the range that he shows in those three movies is just amazing.
Justin was giving him and Jude assignments throughout the course of prep and development. Jude’s were like, drink a bottle of whiskey a day and follow people around as an FBI agent. And Nick, he said that during his downtime while they were shooting “Nosferatu,” he had to be reading all of this crazy horrifying white supremacist literature and stuff. And he showed up on day one [of “The Order”], and he was in it, had the voice, he had audio tapes that he was listening to.
As someone who started working on this almost ten years ago, what is it like for you to watch the news now, with even more stories about these kinds of groups and a rise in the sort of ideology Bob Matthews was into?
In some ways, surreal, but in some ways, now, not surprising. I found it all incredibly surprising when Bryan and I started looking into this stuff. I think 2016 was a real rug pull in my life, it changed the way you looked at the country and how people were perceiving things. It felt, at the time, “This is a very urgent story that should be told. It is about the origins of domestic terrorism and we need to get it out as soon as possible.” And that was 2018 maybe. And then events kept happening and it was like, “OK, well it needs to come out right now.”
Frankly, I really wanted the movie to come out before the election. I thought that both for like, cynical and commercial reasons, I thought it would make sense, and also I thought it was timely. I think it has a different relevance now in a different way. I see Bob’s character as someone who is an ideologue, who has really poisoned the minds of people who are disenfranchised, and that reads differently to me now.
It would be relevant, I think, anytime it would have come out, unfortunately. And it reads maybe differently [now]. But I was thinking about this earlier today, there’s nothing controversial in this movie: white supremacy and racism are bad, that shouldn’t arrive in a controversial package. I hope that the kind of takeaway of what people see in the marketing of the film is true, is that there’s a real just old-school action film within this that happens to be about something that’s incredibly dangerous and problematic. But I don’t find that controversial.
I wonder if people would feel differently about it if it wasn’t a true story. I think there’s something weird that happens when it’s a true story and all of a sudden there’s a value placed on it.
Yeah, I think there is too, you feel like it says that there’s a specific demographic or point that it’s trying to make, when I think instead it’s just, “This happened and we looked at it as filmmakers that were like, let’s tell this story incredibly accurately.” And it is a time capsule, but it is a time capsule that feels, I think, in the way Justin made it, unfortunately timeless, because these events keep happening.
Vertical will release “The Order” in theaters on Friday, December 6.
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