The Michael Knowles Show - Backstage Premiere： RUN HIDE FIGHT

00:00:00.140 Hey, Michael Knowles here. The latest episode of Backstage is right around the corner.

00:00:05.220 This is a massive event for The Daily Wire. We will finally premiere The Daily Wire's

00:00:09.520 first movie, Run, Hide, Fight. Be sure to join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Clayton, Matt Walsh,

00:00:15.340 The God King, Jeremy Boring, and special guests as we discuss Hollywood and this fantastic new

00:00:20.800 film. Don't miss it. You know, if there's any chance that conservatives or free thinkers are

00:00:26.600 going to survive what's happening right now, it's by building our own institutions, making our own

00:00:31.640 movie, and redefining the culture, and I'm thrilled to be in the fight with you guys, and I love the

00:00:36.860 movie. Wow, I just saw Run, Hide, Fight, and I've got to say it's an intense movie, but it is exactly

00:00:41.900 what we need to take back the culture for conservatives. It is really well acted, a lot

00:00:46.780 of great tension, well done, well directed, great pacing. It's one of the most intense movies that I

00:00:52.540 have ever seen. I am not kidding. And just be prepared to have your heart pounding the entire

00:00:57.380 time as you watch Zoe kick some ass. Run, Hide, Fight, great movie. You got to see it. However, 1.00

00:01:03.280 now I have decided not to send my kids to high school. I'm excited to see what The Daily Wire is

00:01:08.200 doing. Moving into entertainment, we have to change the culture. It had me on the edge of my seat the

00:01:12.980 entire time. I can promise you it is unlike any other movie you have ever seen that has been made

00:01:18.500 by conservatives. Quite honestly, it's a game changer. This may be one of the first times there

00:01:23.700 is a conservative production for a piece of content that's actually worth watching. Do not believe

00:01:29.140 those elitist snooty reviews you've come to expect from Hollywood. This film is amazing. I don't think

00:01:35.800 I blinked the entire time that I was watching it. I just did not expect to be as emotionally impacted by

00:01:43.080 it as I was. I think it is a credit to the filmmakers and the actors how immersive and real

00:01:49.900 all of that footage feels. I was completely blown away. I made the decision during the movie that I

00:01:55.140 will be naming my firstborn daughter Zoe in honor of the coolest character in any movie I've seen in

00:01:59.900 a long time. You got to go see it. The action was crazy. Special effects were top notch. We conservatives

00:02:05.000 need to stay engaged in our culture and not surrender it to the far leftist in Hollywood.

00:02:11.760 So keep up the good work. And all I've got to say is you guys watch this movie. I would highly

00:02:16.340 recommend you watch this when it comes out. Go check it out. And I absolutely recommend that

00:02:20.560 you check it out. Check it out, everybody.

00:02:21.980 Welcome to the Daily Wire backstage, the Run, Hide, Fight premiere. Today's show is sponsored by

00:02:31.700 ExpressVPN. Stand up for your digital rights. Take action at expressvpn.com slash ben. That's

00:02:37.700 expressvpn.com slash ben because they never make it slash Jeremy. We're so glad to be with you here

00:02:44.060 for the premiere of our first feature film, Run, Hide, Fight. It's a monumental day for us at the Daily

00:02:48.660 Wire, a day we've been working on, honestly, since, well, since before we even started the

00:02:52.920 company, as far back as when Ben and I first started collaborating over a decade ago. And

00:02:58.260 every one of us here on this stage has been talking about doing something like this for about as long

00:03:02.320 as we've all known one another. Conservatives are severely underrepresented in pop culture.

00:03:07.060 And as our friend and mentor, Andrew Breitbart, once observed, politics is downstream of that culture.

00:03:12.240 For too long, we in conservative media have devoted, well, too much of our energy to criticizing art

00:03:16.500 and not nearly enough energy to actually making it. We focus our energies on the short-term political

00:03:21.160 conflicts in front of us. It's easy to do, but almost none of us spend our time and energies on

00:03:26.480 the generational cultural struggle that actually defines the Overton window in which our politics

00:03:31.160 take place. That's a recipe for long-term political defeat. So that's why we're here tonight to

00:03:37.220 celebrate an incredible movie and its incredible cast and creators. And I promise that we'll get to that

00:03:42.600 and give it all the time it deserves, which is a lot. But before we do that, there's something else that I want

00:03:48.160 to celebrate, and that's the commitment that we at The Daily Wire have decided to undertake. This year has shown

00:03:53.740 us more clearly than ever before that for the people, for all those people who seek to rule us, there's just no

00:03:59.740 limit to what they're willing to try to take from you. They'll take your money, they'll take your job, they'll take

00:04:04.600 your reputation, your right to assemble. I mean, unless that assembly, you know, actually aligns with what they've

00:04:10.160 decided is appropriate for you to believe. They'll take away your right to speak freely in public, on social media,

00:04:15.780 but perhaps the least obvious but most pernicious right they want to take away from you is just your right to be

00:04:21.460 entertained. They'll still let you watch their movies, of course, their TV shows, their news, their sports, but you'll have to

00:04:28.020 do it knowing that everyone who made that content, at least everyone at the top, hates you. You have to watch it

00:04:33.980 knowing that every dollar you spend on theater tickets, on cable bills, on streaming subscriptions is going to the people

00:04:39.540 that hate you, funding their hatred of you. Not only that, but they're going to spend every day on Twitter, every spare

00:04:44.800 moment, at every award show, and just about every second of every show that they make, reminding you of the fact that

00:04:51.420 they hate you. They'll let you watch it, but they won't let you enjoy it. That's what's changing here tonight. Tonight, we're

00:04:57.400 taking the first step on a long and long-awaited journey. And listen, we have big dreams. We have

00:05:02.800 big plans. We have delusions of grandeur, but we're not crazy. We're not going to change the culture with

00:05:07.640 one movie. We're not going to change the culture overnight. What this is about is the beginning.

00:05:13.400 You know, Netflix has something like 200 million subscribers. These people are working to make the

00:05:21.280 kind of entertainment that punches you in the nose. We're working to make the kind of entertainment that

00:05:24.960 you want, the kind of entertainment that you can enjoy, that speaks to you without speaking down to

00:05:29.360 you. No leftist sucker punches in the kind of content that we're making. Entertainment that you

00:05:33.360 can not only enjoy, but be proud of knowing that you helped change the culture. And ultimately, that's

00:05:38.200 the key. That's the commitment that we're making. We're going to do everything in our power to realize

00:05:42.300 the goals that we've set. But I won't lie to you. We need you in order to do it. Not just you. We need you

00:05:47.700 and your family and your friends and the people who say that they're friends of yours, but don't actually

00:05:52.160 like you and the family that has abandoned. We need all of them and their friends too,

00:05:56.180 or nothing is going to change. We need every single person who shares our values to be in

00:06:00.940 this fight. You have to demand that your voice be heard. You have to demand that we give attention

00:06:05.860 to your needs. And candidly, you have to spend some of your money. Hollywood has amassed an absolute

00:06:11.000 fortune against you. They have studios and networks and production companies. And we have

00:06:15.560 these four director's chairs. That's all we've got. These four director's chairs and a dream.

00:06:21.500 We need you to complete our mission. We need to compete. And we have to have your subscription

00:06:26.560 in order to do it. We need you to pay for the content from us the same way you pay for content

00:06:30.640 from the people who hate you. We need you to subscribe. As I said, Netflix, 200 million

00:06:35.280 subscribers. They're spending $17 billion on content this year alone. Shows like Cuties,

00:06:41.780 that's what gets their attention. Disney Plus has close to 75 million subscribers. HBO Max,

00:06:47.000 12 million subscribers. They have Peacock, and CBS All Access, and Showtime, and Starz,

00:06:52.060 and Hulu, and, and, and, and, and. If we're going to compete with them, we have to have you

00:06:57.020 in order to do it. So please, head over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and become a member

00:07:01.400 today. The more people subscribe, the more content we'll make. That's how simple it is. And the more

00:07:06.020 content we make, the more the culture will start to reflect our values and not just theirs.

00:07:10.320 Our politics will surely follow. I'm joined this evening by all my friends, screenwriter,

00:07:16.820 Andrew Klavan, screen actor, Michael Knowles, Hollywood aficionado, Ben Shapiro, also Matt

00:07:21.900 Walsh, and of course, the lovely Alicia Krause. Alicia, walk folks through what we have planned

00:07:27.180 for them for tonight. Good evening, gentlemen, and hello to everyone watching at home. I am so

00:07:32.020 excited to be able to join in for this big premiere tonight and want to welcome all of our viewers that

00:07:36.760 are joining us as well. I've seen on Twitter and Instagram today that some of you are even

00:07:40.300 having watch parties, which is super fun. I'm also excited to let you know that we will be

00:07:44.600 holding an extended The God King promised it would be an extended Q&A with all the guys tonight after

00:07:50.420 the movie. So for all of our members watching at home, simply type your questions into the live

00:07:55.480 chat box to the right of tonight's stream. And be sure for those of you who have questions but are

00:08:00.960 not yet members, go to dailywire.com slash subscribe to become a member and get access to the chat box

00:08:07.580 because we'd love for you to be able to ask all of your burning questions about Run,

00:08:11.880 Hide, Fight, and The Daily Wire's plunge into the entertainment world. And The Daily Wire

00:08:16.620 administration will be collecting those questions throughout tonight's event. So stay tuned until

00:08:20.980 after the movie for our special post-premiere Q&A. Thank you, Alicia, and roll opening graphics.

00:08:27.700 Well, thank you again for joining us tonight for The Daily Wire premiere of our first feature film,

00:08:46.160 Run, Hide, Fight. And, you know, it's probably important to say because we keep saying our first

00:08:49.680 feature film, our first feature film. We didn't make it. This film was made by people far more talented

00:08:54.900 than us. And you're going to get to hear from the creators of the picture, a few of them,

00:08:58.940 a little bit later after the screening of the show. We have the producer of the film,

00:09:03.600 Dallas Sonnier. We have Kyle Rankin, the director of the movie and writer of the film. They're going

00:09:08.440 to be joining us. The cast of this film, unbelievable. And it was a target of opportunity for us.

00:09:14.140 Candidly, we always thought that when we would get in the entertainment industry,

00:09:17.120 it would be with something that we made. Dallas approached us. He had this project and I was skeptical.

00:09:22.060 Ben actually called me and said, you know, Dallas has this film. We should look at it. And I thought,

00:09:25.900 eh, I don't want to make, I don't want to release somebody else's movie. Hollywood,

00:09:28.940 if they were making the movies that were right for our audience, what's our argument?

00:09:33.100 But Dallas sent over the picture and I was just blown away. The picture premiered at Venice,

00:09:38.020 had a great response there. And Hollywood just wasn't interested because the film, well,

00:09:42.460 just chock full, as you'll see here in half an hour, it's chock full of our values.

00:09:47.100 And so we decided to take a dive, to speed up our plans a little bit and to, and to leap into the

00:09:53.880 abyss. And here we are. Drew, I think you and I were probably talking about this before any of

00:09:58.480 these young'uns. I, you know, I remember making speeches about this at conservative gatherings and 1.00

00:10:03.520 getting this look. I used to describe it to my wife as the look she gives me when I explained to 0.57

00:10:07.760 her that when you buy something on sale, it still costs money. You know, a look that says, you know,

00:10:12.620 I always liked you and you're very cute, but I have no idea what you're talking about. And that,

00:10:16.800 and that really was the reaction. And now suddenly my phone is ringing and people are saying, what,

00:10:22.660 you know, you were saying something about the culture, but how do you spell that? And, and it's,

00:10:26.460 it's enormously exciting. It's, it's enormously exciting because we're dealing with people in

00:10:30.840 this room who understand that we don't win the culture by making conservative films or conservative

00:10:36.300 books. We make the culture, we take the culture when conservatives can make anything they want.

00:10:41.580 And that's, that's what we're starting here. And that's what, why we don't care about the

00:10:45.500 censorship. We don't care about any of that. We just want to let conservative artists work.

00:10:49.520 And that's how you change everything. Well, I mean, you know, Jeremy and I met now about a decade

00:10:55.400 ago, maybe more than a decade ago at this point. We were so young and so handsome. I know, right.

00:10:59.480 And so poor. And, and we met in my two bedroom condo and we were talking about making movies and how

00:11:05.560 difficult it was to get conservatives to understand that we actually need to challenge in the

00:11:08.800 culture. And over the preceding 10 years, we've seen as the culture has moved further and further

00:11:12.560 left, as more and more people are shut out of the, not only entertainment industry, but out of sports,

00:11:16.900 out of journalism, as we saw today, uh, and, and out of virtually every area of American life,

00:11:20.920 how there's a blue tsunami that has come and washed through all of our institutions. And we've been

00:11:25.820 talking for a long time about how we need to fight back on this level. One of the things that,

00:11:29.160 that I have to say here is nothing but love for our audience. I mean, seriously, nothing but love for

00:11:33.280 our audience, because what we're doing here is, is truly something audacious. I mean, because

00:11:37.020 there's, there's a gap that has always existed in the conservative mind between the stuff that we

00:11:41.280 say that we want to watch and then the stuff that people actually want to watch. And a lot of

00:11:44.440 conservatives, if you ask them, what kind of TV do you want to watch? And they'll say, well,

00:11:46.720 like a Hallmark film, right? Something that I can go to church and feel good that I've watched.

00:11:50.500 Remember the little house on the prairie?

00:11:52.000 Exactly. And then when it comes time to sit down with the wife or sit down with the husband and sit 0.68

00:11:56.320 down with the boyfriend or girlfriend, or then you just flip on Netflix and whatever everybody else is

00:12:00.120 watching, that's what you're watching. And you're giving your money to people who really despise

00:12:03.180 your values. Well, what we've decided to do here is start with a film that is about as edgy as any

00:12:08.940 film is. I mean, this is an R-rated film. It's got cursing. It's got violence. I mean, so be forewarned

00:12:13.200 if you're sitting there with your 11-year-old, this is not appropriate for your 11-year-old.

00:12:16.300 That's right.

00:12:16.480 And it's meant to be not appropriate for your 11-year-old, because the reality is that if you

00:12:19.480 want to win the culture, you have to start with teenagers. You have to start with young adults.

00:12:22.980 You have to start with people who are actually looking for that sort of material and are not going to be

00:12:27.940 put off by that sort of stuff. So we are starting with this deliberately edgy. And our audience has gone right

00:12:32.560 along with it. They understand what we're doing. The trailer to this film has well over 1.1 million

00:12:37.600 views on our YouTube channel alone. It's got another half million views between a variety of

00:12:41.620 other YouTube channels. People are responding because they understand not only what we're

00:12:44.980 trying to do, but the trailer is also really damned good because the movie is really damned good.

00:12:49.460 And that's what I think people on our side are beginning to understand. It's not just important

00:12:52.880 that we throw our message out to the winds and we pay for white papers and that we donate to

00:12:57.360 politicians, but that we actually spend money in the places where people are actually watching,

00:13:01.360 that we actually spend our time and spend our money and spend our attention where people are

00:13:05.160 actually, where people actually putting their eyeballs so that we can make a difference in

00:13:08.440 the culture. I think that you're hitting on something really important and, and something

00:13:11.420 that, you know, there's a risk that we're taking because we are challenging probably some people

00:13:16.660 in our audience. You know, the film, we're all friends with Kurt Cameron. He's not in the movie.

00:13:21.900 One of the things that we, that we said from the very beginning is if James Dobson approves of the

00:13:26.960 film, we probably failed because the sort of attitude that conservatives took up during the

00:13:31.360 moral majority, the eighties and nineties, uh, that, that is sort of carried through until today

00:13:35.740 is essentially don't participate in the culture at all. Kind of remove yourself, make content that

00:13:42.220 people should want instead of content that people do want. Listen, there's a missional quality to what

00:13:47.540 we're doing right now. We don't have a great value proposition. We have one and only one film,

00:13:51.540 and we're asking you to subscribe so that we can make more. So we understand it. That is a mission.

00:13:55.740 We're asking you to do something because you believe that it's good, but the, we're not asking

00:14:00.420 you to watch the film as part of that mission. The film demands that you watch it because it is

00:14:05.600 quality. It demands that you watch it because it's entertaining because of the, the power of

00:14:09.480 Isabel Mays, uh, performance as Zoe Hull in the film. I'd put her up against anybody in the

00:14:14.520 industry. It's terrific. It's a terrific film. It's a terrific performance. You're really going to

00:14:17.460 enjoy it. We're excited to present it to you. And we're excited that you're willing to come

00:14:20.000 along with us on this journey and spend your hard earned money with us while we spend our time

00:14:25.340 trying to present content that is actually going to change the nature of the cultural debate.

00:14:28.700 Because I think what everybody has learned over the last several years is that if we're going to

00:14:32.140 rebuild America, we're going to have to start from the ground up. And that begins with culture. I mean,

00:14:35.180 things have been raised to the ground and now it's time to start building, uh, and, and building

00:14:38.840 some alternative replacement institutions for all the institutions that hate our guts and want to see us

00:14:43.620 excised from the public debate. You know, when I first watched run, hide, fight, I was expecting

00:14:48.180 conservative propaganda and that's fine. I've seen a lot of conservative propaganda. So I sit down and

00:14:52.820 watch it. Some might say you make conservative. Some might say I make conservative propaganda and

00:14:56.620 I'm watching it and it's, and it's not that, you know, it's a real movie. I thought, why,

00:15:01.980 why is this a problem in Hollywood? And I thought, well, it's obviously not conservative propaganda

00:15:06.620 because it got into the Venice film festival. You don't get into Venice. You don't do well at Venice,

00:15:10.540 but the movie is politically incorrect. Yes. The movie doesn't tow all the woke party lines.

00:15:16.580 And I thought, my goodness, has the culture gone this far that they demand, the left is now

00:15:22.320 demanding agitprop. The left is demanding poster and slogan style. You know, I was actually, I was

00:15:27.720 just rereading Chairman Mao of all that. I was reading about political correctness, you know,

00:15:32.220 in Mao's reading there, a little light reading, you know, reading Mao's little red book.

00:15:35.980 He's trying to affect a leftist cultural revolution. And he says, we need good art,

00:15:40.860 but all you communists are making this crappy slogan poster art, you know, but we need good

00:15:46.400 art in order to inspire people. And he's, he's struggling with this issue because he's

00:15:51.020 obviously leading this ideological campaign. And I just, I'm so, so pleased that the first movie that

00:15:57.060 we're taking on is a real movie. I'm just so pleased it doesn't star Michael Knowles.

00:16:02.040 If the last week has taught us anything, it's that, well, you need to be using a VPN. You may say,

00:16:07.580 no, that's not the, that's not the takeaway. That's not the message. It's taught us, you know,

00:16:11.260 don't go to rallies. If you don't know who's up at the front, no, no, no. It's taught us that you

00:16:16.040 should be using a VPN. And here's why the left obviously wants to silence and remove voices that 0.99

00:16:20.820 they don't agree with. It's just that simple. Twitter, Facebook, they're supposed to be open

00:16:24.400 platforms that encourage people to express their opinions. Remember back when Jack Dorsey used to

00:16:28.160 say, Twitter stands for nothing, if not free speech. Yeah, that, that was, uh, that was right.

00:16:33.560 It stands for nothing.

00:16:34.060 Not anymore. So instead of letting social media sites revoke your practical ability to exercise

00:16:41.540 free speech, how about revoking their access to your data? That's how they make their money.

00:16:46.560 You could just deactivate your social media accounts, but that would be giving the left

00:16:50.060 exactly what they wanted in the first place. Instead, we use ExpressVPN. You ever wonder how

00:16:55.180 free to access social media sites make their billions and billions and billions of dollars

00:16:58.720 by taking your searches, your video history and everything you click on, and then selling

00:17:03.840 that information to ad companies against, uh, your valuable data. I mean, good for them.

00:17:08.460 It's a free market, but you're not free to give them your, I'm sorry. It's a free market except

00:17:13.360 for you because you don't actually get to say anything and you're not, you're free not to

00:17:17.120 give them that data. When you use ExpressVPN, you make yourself anonymous. You take your online

00:17:22.220 presence and you hide your IP address. That makes your activity more difficult to trace

00:17:26.500 and more difficult to sell to advertisers and ExpressVPN couldn't be easier to set up. You tap one

00:17:31.940 button on your phone or on your computer. Just like that, you're protected. ExpressVPN also encrypts

00:17:36.660 100% of your data to protect you from hackers and from internet bad guys. It's finally time to say

00:17:42.740 no to all the censorship, to say no to the voices that want to silence you on their platforms.

00:17:47.500 Take back your online privacy at expressvpn.com slash Ben. By visiting my special link and by mine,

00:17:54.220 I mean his, you'll get extra three months of ExpressVPN service for free. Again,

00:17:58.140 that's expressvpn.com slash Ben, expressvpn.com slash Ben because it's never slash Jeremy.

00:18:05.200 Protect your data today. Michael, uh, I said, I was glad this movie didn't star you. And of course

00:18:12.100 that's, that's, but you actually, before you became a political commentator, you,

00:18:16.860 you were an actor, a working professional actor, soulless, shouldn't be welcome in polite society.

00:18:22.380 Yeah. On the level of the lowest regs of society. Absolutely. Yeah. 0.99

00:18:26.020 That's right. So you probably have, once again, being paid for something you weren't good at.

00:18:29.480 Yeah. Wait a second. Hold on a second. You probably have a perspective that the rest of us

00:18:33.260 don't have, which is how difficult it is for an outspoken, you were working on campaigns at that

00:18:37.600 time. Yeah. Yeah. How difficult it is for an outspoken actor. Yeah. It was tricky. It was a

00:18:41.420 tricky thing because I was living this double life. So I had, I've been working in political campaigns

00:18:47.380 and in politics since I was 18 and, but I'd been working in plays in New York and some movies and

00:18:52.840 TV and stuff like that. And I just hoped, you know, thankfully, if you're in these kinds of

00:18:57.000 smaller things, people just, they're so narcissistic in show business anyway, they're not Googling you.

00:19:02.040 They're just thinking about themselves all the time. And so I remember I was in this play,

00:19:05.400 the last kind of big play I did was with these fairly well-known actors and actresses all to the

00:19:10.860 left of Lenin. Very nice. We had a great relationship, but I did notice I get a lot

00:19:17.040 of invitations. Go to this fundraiser for a Democrat, go to this left-wing organization,

00:19:22.040 go to this. And I, I knew, I knew that if I would go, I would have a much better shot at a role.

00:19:27.980 Friends of mine who did go got cast in this TV show or in this movie. And you have to make this

00:19:32.700 decision. Do you want to have integrity or do you want to live a life? I mean, this is,

00:19:37.240 even in my career, I had a film set up with, with a very well-known actor who, who was my

00:19:44.660 producing partner at the time. And we were taking this film around. We weren't set up. We were

00:19:47.700 taking it around all the studios and we, we took it to one of the, one of the most important indie

00:19:52.100 film studios in Hollywood. We had the best pitch meeting that I think I'd ever had up until that

00:19:57.060 time. I mean, we were, we weren't even negotiating over money. We were negotiating, negotiating over

00:20:01.000 dates. You know, when could we make this film? And that night, this was in, in 2007.

00:20:06.220 Uh, and that night I got an invitation to Barack, a Barack Obama fundraiser that the head of the

00:20:12.000 studio was hosting. This was, I didn't even know who Barack Obama was. This is how early in the

00:20:16.500 process, uh, all of this happened. And I just thought, well, I'm obviously not going to go to

00:20:20.900 some rando Democrat senators, uh, fundraiser. I'm just going to ignore the email. I'll just pretend I

00:20:26.700 didn't get it. Uh, I pretended I didn't get it. We had a meeting on the books to talk to the guy

00:20:30.140 again. Two days later, that meeting got canceled. Yeah. And at that point I still didn't, I thought,

00:20:34.560 you know, meetings get canceled, especially meetings with muckety mucks. Uh, so I called 1.00

00:20:39.100 in, you know, to see when we were going to get back on the books, never got a return call ever.

00:20:43.360 Yeah. Uh, it really is in some instances pay to play in Hollywood and it's not pay to play in the

00:20:48.100 sense that you give the studio exact money. He's got all the money. It's you support the things that

00:20:51.880 he cares about. And if you don't support it, you're not part of the club. Hollywood's a very

00:20:55.660 close knit community. It's a very small town, right? It's a big city, but a small town and

00:20:59.760 you're either a part of it or you're not. And they really, they really do look down their nose

00:21:03.160 at people in the middle of the country, which is why I want to ask the only person on this set who

00:21:06.920 doesn't actually hail from Hollywood or has spent any time in Hollywood. What does mainstream America

00:21:10.720 think? I'm not a screen actor or screen writer, but I'm a screen watcher. So I have that at least

00:21:16.300 I spent a lot of time watching screens. And the one question that I've gotten from people when we

00:21:20.660 announced this movie is, uh, you know, they, they want to know, well, do they have some of the,

00:21:25.540 do they have some of the PC stuff? Do they, do they feel like they have to do that? And what I

00:21:29.980 like about this movie is that it doesn't now it's, you said the movie is politically incorrect,

00:21:33.340 which it is, but you don't get the feeling like they're trying to be politically incorrect.

00:21:37.660 They're just telling a good story. And I think that's what people want. They just want,

00:21:42.400 just tell a good story. And yeah, there, there are some aspects of it that if you're into the PC

00:21:46.680 stuff, you'll like, like the, the, the protagonist is a woman. Uh, but you don't get the feeling

00:21:51.680 like they, they felt like we, Oh, we got to put a woman in this, this role. It's just,

00:21:55.100 she was the best for the job and it works too, because there's this father daughter relationship.

00:21:59.780 Uh, so the way I always look at it is you want, you know, you can have a movie with a great message

00:22:04.800 or you can have a great movie with a message also. Yeah. Uh, and I think that this is the latter

00:22:08.880 where there is a message, but it's also just a really good movie. And so you just sit down and

00:22:13.260 you enjoy it. And at the end of the day, you can, you can go back and reflect and think about what

00:22:18.180 you learned from it, but that's not the point really. Yeah. I actually think great art doesn't make

00:22:21.340 you like the artist. It makes you like yourself. It makes you more like who you are.

00:22:24.520 Yeah. It exposes you to ideas. It gives you things to contemplate. I talk about all the

00:22:28.140 time. Uh, I'm sure he doesn't love it. Uh, who am I kidding? He's never watched any of

00:22:31.800 this or heard of me. Uh, but like the Don Henley's music helped me kind of make my way when I was

00:22:37.160 a teenager and figure out who I was now who, who that music helped me become. Isn't more like

00:22:40.840 Don Henley. I mean, Don Henley and I probably don't agree on much of anything, uh, politically

00:22:45.380 or religiously. Uh, but he was asking questions that were interesting to me and I asked them too.

00:22:51.120 I may have come to different conclusions, but that, that art helped me do it. And that's

00:22:54.420 that what's I think is what separates art from propaganda. You know, this film is filled

00:22:59.260 with our values. It exposes people to things that we think are important. Um, I think people

00:23:04.640 of good faith could watch this movie and come to different conclusions than we have on some

00:23:08.280 of those issues. And I don't think that that's something, something to be feared.

00:23:11.040 No, that's, that's right. I mean, art is, art is an experience. This is one of the reasons

00:23:14.340 I've never minded watching atheist art or left wing art. I like it. I like being inside

00:23:20.040 the mind and inside the vision of people who see things entirely different, differently

00:23:24.460 than I do. But now because of these restrictions, there's basically no way that anyone can get

00:23:29.780 inside our minds. There's no way that they can experience what it is we see because look,

00:23:33.840 the fact of the matter is there, there are nice people on left and right, you know, in the

00:23:37.060 in real world. And there are artists on left and right with talent who can express those

00:23:40.920 visions, but we're not allowed. And the stuff that you're saying about pitch meetings is

00:23:45.420 absolutely endemic to Hollywood. I mean, I've been in lots of pitch meetings and they start,

00:23:51.960 the pitch meetings start out with a conversation about how awful George W. Bush is or, you know,

00:23:56.700 how wonderful Obama is. And if, as I frequently do, you know, I've got a big mouth and if, you

00:24:01.640 know, I would frequently say, well, I'm kind of on the other side of that issue. That was

00:24:05.240 the end of the pitch meeting. And so that creates the atmosphere where everything dies that

00:24:08.640 we want to say. When I was a wee lad, you know, a young actor in a very prestigious

00:24:12.620 acting studio, very, very serious place. This was not where we were just gabbing about politics

00:24:17.220 or whatever, but it came out somehow. Someone saw something I put on Facebook. This was years

00:24:21.260 and years ago. It came out that I was conservative. We all kind of giggled about it. And the acting

00:24:25.580 teacher called me aside at the end of the class. He goes, Michael, this is just, I'm just giving

00:24:31.100 you a little professional advice. It was a professional, you know, conservatory.

00:24:34.000 Never, never admit that. Never say that. Never admit that. And I sort of laughed at her. She

00:24:40.720 goes, it's not funny. Yeah. And she wasn't a conservative. She was a liberal too. She 1.00

00:24:45.460 goes, never. But she was helping you. And she was helping me. She said, never say that.

00:24:48.620 You won't work. I know, I know conservatives who have said that to actors, you know, conservative

00:24:54.400 actors who said, pulled people aside and said, you know, my friend, you know, keep your mouth

00:24:58.420 shut. A hundred percent right. And I think that most Americans are feeling that now. I don't

00:25:01.980 think that it's just relegated. I think what started off in Hollywood and was relegated

00:25:04.560 to Hollywood and the universities, unfortunately has now spread through nearly every aspect

00:25:08.360 of society. I mean, you dealt with some of it today.

00:25:10.420 Well, yeah. I mean, I trend, the new rule is that in 2021, I will trend every single day.

00:25:15.780 I'm going for the three-peat tomorrow. So I trended yesterday over something dumb. And 0.92

00:25:18.980 then I trended today because I wrote the playbook for Politico, which is very bad. I'm not,

00:25:23.180 I'm not allowed to do that. 225 news journalists got on the line to rail at the editorial team

00:25:28.740 for being, for, for allowing me to write, which is kind of ironic.

00:25:32.460 And they didn't even invite me to the call.

00:25:35.160 They're the objective news journalists, right? You're objective journalism in media saying,

00:25:39.480 how dare the op-ed page print something that we disagree with? Well, hold on. Aren't you

00:25:42.900 the objective news journalists? That's right. I mean, that's, that's kind of insane. You're

00:25:46.300 the ones who are just supposed to be covering the facts and here you are.

00:25:48.520 It is one of the great revelations. One of the great revelations of 2020, uh, is that

00:25:53.160 journalists now oppose the first amendment.

00:25:55.160 Oh yeah. Oh yeah. The people for whom the first amendment was essentially created are

00:25:59.580 now the people most against it. In fairness, it was a traumatizing article though. I watched

00:26:03.980 it and I barely could emotionally, I read it. I could barely emotionally recover. He was

00:26:07.340 literally shaking. I was literally, I'm still shaking right now. But this is the thing we've

00:26:12.220 been as conservatives progressively locked out of every single institution, every single

00:26:15.960 one. And so when people say, how do we fight back? The answer is you can't fight back in

00:26:19.460 one area. Conservatives have basically abandoned every institution and they say, okay, but we'll

00:26:23.240 give money and then we'll vote. And it turns out that that's not enough because where people make

00:26:26.880 up their minds, where people are shaped is in the culture. And you know, all this is very

00:26:30.340 highfalutin, but we should just remind you that conservatives can make a kick-ass content. This 0.87

00:26:33.720 is a kick-ass film. You're going to love the film. It's great. And you are going to be doing

00:26:37.560 something good by not only watching it and sharing it with your friends and giving us your membership,

00:26:42.180 you're going to be helping to change all of that because these institutions have to be open

00:26:46.360 and they're not going to open of their own accord. Alternatives have to be built.

00:26:49.480 Replacements have to be built. And you're part of that by watching tonight. Again, it sounds like

00:26:54.200 an NPR fundraiser, but it is. I mean, we need your help. Just like NPR requires both your tax

00:27:00.220 dollars and your donations to propagandize to you on the left, we actually do need your help to

00:27:05.200 produce the kind of very expensive content that this movie represents and get the message to your

00:27:09.140 kids in a way that they're actually going to want to watch. And we're going to be producing a

00:27:12.280 wide variety of content. That's our hope. That's our dream. This is just the camel's nose in the

00:27:16.300 tent, which is why you're going to see, I predict over the next week, people react,

00:27:19.480 with extraordinary, extraordinary viciousness with regard to this film, with regard to us,

00:27:24.520 with regard to the producers. There's going to be an attempt to quash the film, just like there's

00:27:27.860 an attempt to quash everything else in American life right now that crosses the woke left. And

00:27:32.540 it's time for us all to stand up together and not only say no, but to fight back by building all of

00:27:37.380 these alternative institutions. That's why, listen, I'm not primarily an entertainment guy. I love

00:27:42.560 entertainment. I've seen every Oscar-nominated film since 1933. I'm a TV addict. I wrote a book,

00:27:48.140 a 400-page book on television called Primetime Propaganda. I'm very into this stuff. But that's

00:27:53.220 not primarily what my job in life was to do. Jeremy started off in Hollywood. Clavin started off in

00:27:58.180 Hollywood. Noel started off off-Broadway, off, off, off-Broadway. Off Brooklyn, actually. It was in

00:28:03.120 Staten Island. Yeah, exactly. And the local repertory theater in Cleveland, Ohio. But the bottom line for me

00:28:10.140 is this. If you are into politics, if you care about our values, you have to go where the eyeballs are.

00:28:15.060 You have to go into every institution. You have to go into corporate America. We got to build

00:28:18.000 alternative institutions, right? We can't let Amazon web services dominate, you know, ownership

00:28:22.240 of the means of distribution. We have to go, we have to build an alternative source of media. That's

00:28:25.580 why Daily Wire exists. It's why our podcasts exist. We have to get into the universities and we have to

00:28:29.600 provide alternatives. We have to provide apprentices. But most of all, the easiest way for people to

00:28:33.520 engage and the thing people engage with most, this is what people forget. The single thing that people

00:28:36.980 engage with most in this country above politics, above church, above anything is entertainment. If you just

00:28:41.600 look at their clocks, people spend hours and hours and hours a day engaging with the kind of content

00:28:46.780 that we are the first to provide on the right. And we're really proud of that. I think you should

00:28:51.320 be proud of that, too, because you're part of the project. So the film is coming up in seven

00:28:54.180 minutes and 50 seconds. It's that precise. They just told me in my ear. In seven minutes and 46 seconds,

00:28:59.540 we're definitely going to show you the first film that we're releasing, Run, Hide, Fight. But first,

00:29:04.160 I want to talk about our friends over at Bravo Company Manufacturing. True story,

00:29:07.520 we moved eight weeks ago, maybe, to a red state after, for me, a little over 20 years

00:29:13.340 in the People's Republic of California. And listen, I love California. I think it's a

00:29:16.780 beautiful state, beautiful weather. And it used to be the center of the world. That's why we lived

00:29:20.820 there. It was the center of the cultural world. It isn't any longer. So I'm happy to be, I was happy

00:29:26.280 to be there and now I'm happy to be out. One of the first things that I did, though, when I got out,

00:29:29.780 was started thinking about how do I acquire the firearms that I was not allowed to own when I was in

00:29:35.580 California? I think you have a responsibility to own firearms as a man in this country because we

00:29:40.900 have the right and the right is only protected by the expression of that right. I think you,

00:29:44.860 therefore, also have a responsibility to own a rifle. When the founders wrote the Constitution,

00:29:49.480 the first thing they did was make sacred the rights of the individual to share their ideas

00:29:52.540 without limitation by their government or by Twitter. The second thing they did was secure the

00:29:57.440 right of the individuals to protect that speech and their lives with force if needed.

00:30:01.860 Owning a rifle is a heavy responsibility. Building rifles is no different.

00:30:05.580 Bravo Company Manufacturing, or BCM for short. They build a professional-grade product that's

00:30:10.760 built to combat standards. That's because BCM believes that the same level of protection

00:30:14.540 should be provided to every American, regardless of whether or not you're a private citizen or a

00:30:19.600 professional. The people at BCM assume that when a rifle leaves their shop, it will be used in a life

00:30:25.160 or death situation by a responsible citizen, a law enforcement officer, or a soldier overseas.

00:30:30.860 I take it very seriously, and I can tell you that since moving to Tennessee, I've purchased some rifles

00:30:37.700 from Bravo Company Manufacturing. These things are absolutely fantastic. The mid-16 that they produce

00:30:44.020 is as capable a weapon as made by any manufacturer out there. The people at BCM feel that it's their

00:30:49.800 moral responsibility to Americans to provide tools that will not fail the end user when it's not just

00:30:55.760 a paper target, but someone coming to do you harm. BCM also works with leading instructors of

00:31:00.680 marksmanship from top levels of America's Special Operations Forces, from Marine Corps Force

00:31:05.920 Reconnaissance to U.S. Army Special Operations Forces, connecting them with other Americans. These

00:31:11.100 top instructors teach the skills necessary to defend yourself, to defend your family, and to defend

00:31:15.740 other people. That's what the Second Amendment is all about. It's not about hunting, Second Amendment.

00:31:20.880 I mean, the idea that you couldn't use a gun to get food wasn't even a concept at the time of the

00:31:26.320 founding. That's not what the Second Amendment is about. It's about your right to protect yourself,

00:31:30.000 to protect your loved ones, to protect your neighbor, and to protect your rights. To learn

00:31:33.320 more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, head on over to bravocompanymfg.com, where you can discover

00:31:39.000 more about their products, see some amazing videos, some special offers, some upcoming events.

00:31:43.140 That's bravocompanymfg.com. If you need more convincing, well, go watch those videos. You can find out

00:31:48.720 even more about them and the awesome people who create their products at youtube.com slash

00:31:53.280 bravocompanyusa. There's no slash Ben. There's also no slash Jeremy.

00:31:58.160 You should go and get it. So guys, we're just four minutes and 40 seconds away from

00:32:03.820 the Daily Wire premiere of Run, Hide, Fight. I don't say the world premiere, because it actually

00:32:08.280 premiered in far more prestigious locales than this at the Venice Film Festival. A lot more people are

00:32:14.720 going to see it tonight. A lot more people are going to see it tonight, and almost none of them

00:32:18.440 speak Italian. It's like one. Yeah, one. A lynch. What I want people to be prepared for going into 1.00

00:32:26.320 this film, and we've talked about it before, but I want to speak a little bit more explicitly about

00:32:29.880 it. This film is meant to challenge your notions of what it means to be conservative entertainment.

00:32:37.180 This isn't a movie that you're supposed to watch. It's a movie that we think you will want to watch.

00:32:42.060 It's going to challenge maybe some of your sensibilities about what content should be. The movie is,

00:32:47.560 it's not rated R because that's an MPAA standard, but it's TVMA for mature audiences. If you're

00:32:54.560 watching this with, as Ben said, if you're watching this with your children, this is not the film for

00:32:58.840 them. Please change that plan. Send them out of the room. This is a film for young adults and adults 0.99

00:33:03.720 that deals with incredibly difficult subject matter and puts very real people into very difficult

00:33:09.960 situations, and we get to see the kind of decisions that they make in it. That said, it does

00:33:13.760 contain our values, and we're very proud to present the movie to you. We wanted to push the envelope

00:33:19.960 in a way to define the new terms of what we're trying to do. Listen, every film that we produce

00:33:25.660 will not be TVMA. Every television series that we go on to produce, we have a TV series in development

00:33:31.460 right now. We have feature films in development right now. Some of them will be rated much lighter

00:33:36.980 than this. Some of them will appeal to a younger, more family-friendly audience, but we wanted to

00:33:42.220 come right out of the gate and say, this is kind of the outer boundary of what we think can be

00:33:47.440 competitive in the world of entertainment because, again, we want to make things that people want to

00:33:51.320 watch. We want to compete for people's time and money when they think about what kind of entertainment

00:33:55.900 they want to engage with. So please bear that in mind as you watch the film. That's in no way an

00:34:01.380 apology. We're proud of the film, and we were very deliberate in choosing this to be the first film

00:34:07.160 that we were going to release, and we took all of this into consideration when making our

00:34:11.000 determination. It's probably not what you might think of as like a Christian film, but it's more

00:34:18.300 like if you were to actually make a film about the Bible, which is about real people who went through

00:34:21.960 real challenging and difficult situations with varying degrees of success.

00:34:26.560 And this, we could not be prouder, again, of the film. And again, we couldn't be prouder of our

00:34:32.960 audience who's come with us on this journey. I mean, we started this company literally in a pool

00:34:36.300 house, and now this company has over 100 employees and is producing mainstream entertainment,

00:34:43.140 expensive mainstream entertainment for you to enjoy and for you to spread to your friends.

00:34:48.940 We'd love your help if you've not already become a member, if you're already a member.

00:34:51.940 Thank you so much for joining us on this journey. And again, we're ecstatic to bring this to you.

00:34:58.340 It's the culmination of a journey for a lot of us and just the beginning of another journey that I

00:35:01.900 think is going to allow us to really challenge moving forward into a new and difficult era.

00:35:06.880 We're going to have to challenge on every front. I keep saying that over and over, but it's true.

00:35:09.860 There is a wall, and we have to start beating against that wall with any hammer we can find.

00:35:13.740 And this is a big hammer, and we are just beginning to beat away at the wall that the left has built

00:35:18.000 for us to keep us in.

00:35:19.360 It's also essentially a tech play, because what we're trying to build is an SVOD platform,

00:35:23.140 a streaming video on demand platform like HBO Max, like Hulu, like Netflix, like Disney+.

00:35:29.720 We have a long way to go to catch up with those guys in terms of the quantity and quality of

00:35:34.420 their entertainment.

00:35:35.760 We're bringing on all sorts of new entertainment, right? We've got Candace's show coming,

00:35:38.620 and we're going to be producing new content with me, and all sorts of brand new stuff.

00:35:42.060 So it's an exciting time.

00:35:43.120 It is. So head over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.

00:35:46.200 Thank you for joining us here this evening for the Daily Wire premiere of Run, Hide, Fight,

00:35:51.520 the first feature film that we're offering, directed by Kyle Rankin.

00:35:54.720 You're absolutely going to love it.

00:35:56.380 It's a legitimate piece of art.

00:35:58.040 We couldn't be prouder to be here.

00:35:59.380 Couldn't be prouder to have you with us on this journey.

00:36:02.320 So sit back, relax, enjoy the film.

00:36:04.240 We'll be back right after to discuss the movie with you.

00:36:06.960 We avoided spoilers.

00:36:08.900 Oh, my God.

00:36:09.700 You're serious about your film watching.

00:36:14.500 In a movie theater, that would cost you $400.

00:36:16.780 Let's do this thing.

00:36:17.540 Here we go.

00:36:18.340 This is high school.

00:36:19.680 Nothing that happens here matters in the real world.

00:36:24.860 Get down on the ground! 0.75

00:36:26.940 Very disturbing news out of Vernon Central High School.

00:36:30.580 Zoe, take a shot. 0.99

00:36:32.860 Is it safe to say that this might be our guardian angel? 0.91

00:36:37.300 Do you want more people to die?

00:36:39.860 Isn't it ironic that after all your hard work, people aren't going to remember you?

00:36:45.520 No.

00:36:46.520 They're going to remember me.

00:36:53.000 Well, welcome back to the Daily Wire backstage and the Daily Wire premiere of Run, Hide, Fight,

00:36:57.940 the first feature film that we're releasing as part of our new entertainment initiative.

00:37:01.880 We are joined now by the film's producer, Dallas Sonnier, and the film's writer and director,

00:37:08.380 Kyle Rankin.

00:37:08.920 Guys, congratulations on an awesome film, and our condolences on having to release it with us.

00:37:15.220 Thank you.

00:37:16.480 It's a terrific film.

00:37:18.040 We had over 70,000 people watching the film live.

00:37:21.380 Probably got up to 100,000 by the time it hit its peak.

00:37:25.680 And so far, all the comments just overwhelmingly supportive.

00:37:28.940 I think one thing that happens on our side of the political conversation is if anyone talks

00:37:33.820 to us at all, we're fairly happy.

00:37:35.940 So we appreciate you guys sharing your talents and sharing your film with us.

00:37:40.720 Talk to us a little bit about how the picture came to be.

00:37:43.740 Yeah.

00:37:45.180 Kyle wrote a script, and it was really well received by a lot of people in Hollywood,

00:37:50.960 including a bunch of big studios.

00:37:54.180 And the way it's been told to me by his agent was one of them was about to make a big offer

00:38:00.520 to put the movie into development and production.

00:38:04.720 Parkland happened.

00:38:05.960 They backed away like Homer Simpson into the bush.

00:38:10.240 And that's when I get the phone call, as when I always get the phone call.

00:38:14.720 When the script is great, the agent is confident, but they need someone crazy enough to make it.

00:38:21.200 And so that's when I read the script.

00:38:23.180 And I read it, and I just loved it.

00:38:25.900 It had such a connection to some of the personal tragedies in my own life.

00:38:30.520 And I basically put my whole career and my company and my reputation as a producer...

00:38:40.640 I heard you mortgaged your house.

00:38:42.440 I have mortgaged my house for movies before.

00:38:46.800 But in this case, I literally raised money for the movie to do it as independently as humanly possible

00:38:53.140 because I knew we couldn't have any input from Hollywood,

00:38:57.080 from big Hollywood mainstream producers.

00:39:00.840 And I was able to sort of create a sandbox for Kyle

00:39:04.860 to give him as much creative control as humanly possible.

00:39:07.560 And I think that's why the movie is so good.

00:39:10.180 It's a really daring piece of subject matter.

00:39:12.100 I mean, obviously, so daring that it didn't find a home in Hollywood

00:39:16.340 despite the quality of the script and what went on to be the quality of your directing.

00:39:20.840 What gave you the sort of confidence to tackle something like this as a writer?

00:39:25.540 Probably my wife reminding me, you know, she would say to me that I kept bringing it up

00:39:31.960 and talking about different scenes.

00:39:33.280 And this one percolated maybe for five or six years before.

00:39:36.800 And I was a bit scared of it.

00:39:38.640 You know, I was worried about it being taboo or being seen as, you know,

00:39:43.820 disrespectful to victims of shootings and that kind of thing.

00:39:47.780 And I would see different movies released that tended to follow the shooters

00:39:51.200 and, you know, their horrible family lives.

00:39:54.220 And those were received well.

00:39:57.080 And I didn't really understand that.

00:39:58.240 I was kind of like, why are we following the perpetrators?

00:40:00.460 I didn't, that didn't jive with me.

00:40:03.080 So, yeah, it just felt right.

00:40:04.940 And she gave me the confidence to, you know, to dive in.

00:40:10.080 It is one of the beautiful things about the film is it's not sympathetic to the shooters.

00:40:14.380 One of the things that drew Ben and I to the movie when we first watched it,

00:40:17.700 and we're trying to decide does it make sense for our platform,

00:40:20.220 is that The Daily Wire was one of the very first publications in the country

00:40:23.700 to announce that we wouldn't publish the names of school shooters or mass shooters generally.

00:40:28.360 Because so many of them are after notoriety.

00:40:31.260 And in some ways we feed that.

00:40:32.780 Which is one of the themes of the film.

00:40:34.300 I mean, obviously a huge theme in the film is how social media tends to generate

00:40:38.480 this kind of horrific behavior and reward this kind of horrific behavior.

00:40:42.500 How much were you thinking about that when you wrote and directed the film?

00:40:47.060 A bit.

00:40:47.740 You know, I wish I could take credit for, you don't know,

00:40:51.720 and I don't know if you feel this too, Drew,

00:40:53.100 but you don't know where your ideas come from sometimes.

00:40:56.440 You know, I remember waking up at like two or three in the morning

00:40:59.260 and just crawling on the bedside table.

00:41:01.200 They're not going to remember you.

00:41:02.920 They're going to remember me.

00:41:04.180 And then falling back, you know, I don't know where the heck it came from,

00:41:07.440 but I was sure glad that it came.

00:41:10.420 And when I'm writing something, you know, you very much just get,

00:41:13.700 you're thinking about it all the time.

00:41:15.140 And it's always, it's a program running, you know, in the background kind of thing.

00:41:18.540 And so I guess they're gifts, and I'm just thankful that some of those lines come.

00:41:26.760 Drew gets all of his ideas from me.

00:41:29.260 It's a little different.

00:41:30.080 It's true.

00:41:30.380 I creep into his bed and take the notes off of me.

00:41:33.800 I could have sworn I scrawled something.

00:41:36.520 Did you, I have run into myself the absolute lockdown on the idea of school shootings,

00:41:43.520 which is just a kind of groupthink in Hollywood.

00:41:46.900 They'll make a movie about the Holocaust, which was pretty bad.

00:41:49.820 You know, that's a bad thing.

00:41:50.880 And school shootings are a bad thing.

00:41:52.820 But for some reason, school shootings were absolutely taboo.

00:41:55.680 And they would tell you out of the gate, don't do it.

00:41:58.400 Had you run into that before you wrote the script, or did you know?

00:42:01.300 No, I think in my ignorance, I didn't talk to enough people who said no.

00:42:04.600 Yeah, like I said, my wife encouraged me, and I kept the idea very secret.

00:42:11.220 I also, I didn't want to present the, I didn't never, I knew I didn't want to pitch the idea,

00:42:14.900 because then someone can just dismiss it out of hand.

00:42:16.660 I'm like, I want a really great script that someone, that gets someone turning pages.

00:42:22.740 My manager gave me a great piece of advice, and he's like,

00:42:25.980 I know you're going to direct it, but write it for a director that you admire.

00:42:29.020 So I kind of wrote it with Catherine Bigelow in mind.

00:42:31.300 I just thought it should be great.

00:42:32.380 So it was cool to any screenwriters out there.

00:42:36.360 It's just a cool thing to, I'm like, I want Catherine just turning every page.

00:42:39.740 I'm like, where is this going?

00:42:41.140 And that was really fun.

00:42:42.520 And I found that, yeah, I fell in love with it along the way, too.

00:42:46.860 So Dallas, the casting of the movie, how did that go?

00:42:49.520 Because there's a lot of people in this film that people have seen,

00:42:52.580 there are a lot of people people haven't seen.

00:42:54.140 And some of the newcomers are just, they blow you away with the performances.

00:42:58.340 I mean, the guy who plays the villain is unbelievable,

00:43:00.140 and obviously Isabel's unbelievable. 0.99

00:43:01.460 Where did you come up with these folks?

00:43:03.260 Yeah, I mean, it's all started with Thomas Jane, who has become a friend of mine.

00:43:08.160 He was a big fan of the movies we've made, like Bone Tomahawk and Brawl and Cell Block 99,

00:43:13.240 Dragged Across Concrete, the Zoller movies.

00:43:16.020 And so he really anchored the cast.

00:43:18.160 And once I had him, I was able to propel some of the money conversations and things like that.

00:43:24.240 He validated the cast in the movie to other cast members, especially younger people.

00:43:30.740 We have the greatest casting director in the world.

00:43:33.080 His name is David Guglielmo.

00:43:34.840 Don't steal him from me, guys.

00:43:37.760 But he's terrific.

00:43:39.260 And he set up auditions, brought Kyle in the room, just like a traditional casting session.

00:43:44.580 But we had already had our eye on Isabel for a while.

00:43:47.800 She had come in on other movies of ours, and we saw a real talent in her.

00:43:52.040 Oh, yeah.

00:43:52.420 And so we were excited when Kyle responded so positively to her, and she quickly became Zoe.

00:44:00.420 What has Eli done before this film?

00:44:02.120 So Eli Brown, who plays Tristan, the villain, he has been on a couple of sort of the younger teen shows.

00:44:14.200 He's about to be on the new remake of Gossip Girl.

00:44:18.400 But really, so many of these kids were extremely young.

00:44:22.100 Their credits were not very deep in terms of their IMDb's and things like that.

00:44:26.900 A lot of newcomers, things like that.

00:44:28.440 But we just put them all together, and we gave them some time to sort of get to know each other and become friends.

00:44:34.060 And they would hang out in the hotel together every night and stuff like that.

00:44:37.300 So there's a real camaraderie, and they're still all best friends.

00:44:40.120 They're all texting and tweeting each other tonight.

00:44:42.900 So they're really proud of this premiere and really happy.

00:44:45.840 Can I ask, you've made a couple of pictures that I just have really enjoyed.

00:44:49.720 Bone Tomahawk, you mentioned, and the Cell Block 99.

00:44:53.440 Really enjoyable film.

00:44:54.900 But those are films you must have known coming out of the block.

00:44:58.240 That you were going up against the Hollywood wall of political correctness.

00:45:03.440 Did you know that?

00:45:04.640 Or were you, you were saying that you were surprised you actually kept it to yourself.

00:45:10.680 But you must have known that you were going up against the wall.

00:45:12.860 Yeah, I don't keep it to myself.

00:45:14.940 That's one of my strengths and greatest weaknesses.

00:45:17.600 I, you know, I grew up in the 80s on the Jerry Bruckheimer movies.

00:45:23.800 And although I wasn't around, I was very inspired by Robert Evans and, you know, reading Kids Days in the Picture and all those, and those great movies that he oversaw.

00:45:32.240 And so I stayed the same.

00:45:35.600 The world went left, right?

00:45:37.560 I stayed here.

00:45:38.900 And so I'm simply making the movies that I grew up loving and continue to love as an audience member.

00:45:43.340 But what it has, what it, there cannot be a compromise.

00:45:48.700 And so my goal is to set up the production and the financing in a way with foreign sales and a domestic deal and certain, you know, formulas on what the marketing and the budget's going to be.

00:46:01.420 So that I can transfer absolute total creative control over to the filmmaker.

00:46:07.280 That is, that is the way it was done, in my opinion, correctly in the past, long ago in the past.

00:46:14.280 And the corporatization of Hollywood has really messed that up.

00:46:17.620 So I think there's been some great stuff out of Hollywood over the past several years.

00:46:22.660 But really, to me, I seek his movie, not my movie, ever.

00:46:28.540 And I think that's my, that's my flag in the sand.

00:46:31.120 That's very smart.

00:46:32.160 Yeah.

00:46:32.640 Yeah, our first telephone call, you said the magic words where you're like, I have no notes.

00:46:37.240 Let's just make your script.

00:46:39.260 That's a lie.

00:46:40.060 Now, now I can't use it anymore.

00:46:43.640 Yeah, that's effective.

00:46:45.120 You subtly make your notes over time.

00:46:48.200 I got my eyes on you.

00:46:50.260 So we're going to speak to Elisha Krauss, who is talking to our DailyWire.com subscribers and taking their questions throughout the night.

00:46:57.800 We want to be sure and answer some of their questions there.

00:46:59.660 We made it possible for us to release the film.

00:47:02.660 If you're not a member, you could head over to DailyWire.com slash subscribe and become one right now.

00:47:07.820 The more people subscribe, the more films we're going to make.

00:47:10.480 We think that this is the next frontier for the Daily Wire and definitely a part of the political fight from our point of view.

00:47:17.760 It's not what you guys got into it for.

00:47:18.940 But from our point of view, it's a part of the political fight that we're waging that we need to bring some balance into the culture.

00:47:24.100 And that's what we hope to do.

00:47:25.380 Do we have you, Elisha?

00:47:27.260 Yeah, I'm here, guys.

00:47:28.280 Thanks so much.

00:47:28.940 And I hope that everybody enjoyed the premiere as much as I did.

00:47:31.800 First question, if I can toss it over to Dallas.

00:47:34.420 Somebody wants to know if this film was meant to carry a conservative message from the start,

00:47:38.920 or did the storyline and messaging just kind of happen naturally?

00:47:42.540 And maybe Kyle could, you know, give feedback on that, too, since he's the guy that wrote the script.

00:47:47.100 Sure.

00:47:48.200 I am a proud, openly conservative movie producer, and I never intended to be that vocal about it, but such is life, and I'm enjoying the ride.

00:48:02.780 I never would make a movie for political purposes.

00:48:06.140 I feel like movies have been political for generations, but I feel like when things get overtly political or agenda-pushing,

00:48:15.600 I tend to believe that it hurts the artwork.

00:48:18.560 So, again, my goal is to keep everything level playing field, focus on the movie itself, make great entertainment.

00:48:27.120 If the audience...

00:48:27.960 It's not propaganda.

00:48:28.860 Yeah, there's no propaganda in the movie.

00:48:31.000 There was never...

00:48:31.600 Our intention was to make a great movie, and that's what we did.

00:48:34.420 So, if the marketplace or the audience determines that the movie is more conservative in its values or matrix or DNA, then so be it.

00:48:49.280 That's fine with me, but it's not a goal of mine to make conservative movies, per se.

00:48:55.780 Somebody has to be a conservative filmmaker.

00:48:58.100 I am who I am.

00:48:59.200 I think the themes in the movie are big human themes.

00:49:05.580 And to my mind, they're above politics, or as you guys might say, they are upstream, maybe, of politics.

00:49:11.220 But I wanted to write something about bravery and selflessness and self-reliance and putting others ahead of yourself.

00:49:20.480 Something that I love about the movie is it's not just Isabel's Zoe.

00:49:27.080 If you watch the movie and just look at all the bits of bravery, you know, there is the woman in the cafeteria.

00:49:32.920 The lunch lady is actually one of my three favorite moments in the film.

00:49:36.440 Yeah, mine too.

00:49:37.160 It's such a selfless moment, and she delivers it very well.

00:49:39.860 Yeah, and I love her friend outside when she's like, a lot of them don't know.

00:49:43.480 She's like, okay.

00:49:44.020 It's like, what?

00:49:44.560 Yeah, you're just going to come with me on this potentially deadly mission.

00:49:48.420 I love that.

00:49:50.940 Like Mr. Rogers would say, you know, look for the helpers.

00:49:53.480 And I think a lot, I believe in the human spirit, and a lot of people are out there ready to be heroic if given the opportunity.

00:50:00.500 So I wanted to highlight that.

00:50:04.260 I mean, personally, I don't know.

00:50:07.740 I'd love to start a third political party called The Contrarians.

00:50:11.560 You'd be in the right place.

00:50:12.620 We can't agree on a time to meet, though.

00:50:17.620 But, you know, this is one of the things I actually loved about the film.

00:50:20.680 I have no idea how you vote.

00:50:22.320 I don't want to know.

00:50:23.140 I don't care.

00:50:24.080 I really don't care.

00:50:25.220 But I just don't want voices silenced.

00:50:28.820 I don't want characters cut out.

00:50:30.740 I want all the people who are in this country and in this world to be on the screen.

00:50:35.600 And that's what you did.

00:50:36.420 You gave us all the people.

00:50:37.460 And that's all I think real conservatives are looking for.

00:50:40.060 I took a great screenwriting course, you know, 20 years ago.

00:50:43.400 And the first, the instructor said, you know, write three pages about a real pet peeve of yours, something you really feel strongly about, you really hate, and you wish people would stop doing.

00:50:52.240 And I think, you know, mine was on, you know, three pages on littering.

00:50:54.720 And we all showed up ready to turn it in.

00:50:58.240 And the instructor was like, okay, I don't even want to see them, but now write three pages about the other side.

00:51:05.000 You're now pro whatever you just wrote.

00:51:06.980 And I was like, what?

00:51:07.660 And, you know, the instructor was trying to teach us to, I do think it shouldn't matter.

00:51:14.280 And I will never be one of those Hollywood people that talks my personal politics because I would like to be, you know, above and between them and see all sides.

00:51:24.000 Because then that exercise taught me that when I had people, you should be able to steel ban all sides as a writer so that you can have people arguing and going in different, shooting off in different directions the way people do.

00:51:35.440 And I'm far more interested in the gray of life, not just the, everyone is so scared of the gray.

00:51:43.360 And I think we need to lean into that.

00:51:47.400 Alicia.

00:51:48.680 All right.

00:51:49.240 The title font of the film, according to another Daily Wire member, they said was very Red Dawn, which, of course, is another iconic movie about high schoolers versus bad guys.

00:51:57.780 Was that intentional?

00:52:00.640 Oh, I don't know about the title font, but I love John Milius.

00:52:03.460 I love Red Dawn.

00:52:04.420 I remember watching with my brothers, you know, those paratroopers coming down in the back of the history class.

00:52:11.720 I mean, would John Milius even be working today?

00:52:15.140 He's amazing, and he should be, but the atmosphere is...

00:52:19.960 Well, I mean, they remade Red Dawn, and then they wouldn't even make it to Chinese, right?

00:52:23.020 They made it to the North Koreans just to please the Chinese movie market. 0.95

00:52:25.440 That's right.

00:52:25.760 They shot the film with the Chinese.

00:52:27.140 With the Chinese, and then they went back and they revised all the footage. 0.68

00:52:29.540 They thought, what if a country whose entire adult population is starving somehow invaded the life of the state?

00:52:36.500 I do think, though, that, you know, first of all, I love the internet, because only on the internet does someone connect the font choices from this film to another film.

00:52:48.020 Yes, really.

00:52:48.240 And what I love about it, too, is that it's probably true on some unconscious level where we've all been informed by the art that we've consumed over time.

00:52:57.540 And there is a connection between this film and Red Dawn.

00:53:00.200 True.

00:53:00.440 Maybe on some far-off level...

00:53:03.860 On the Jungian, Jordan Peterson.

00:53:05.840 Jordan Peterson would definitely do more worth it.

00:53:08.520 Alicia.

00:53:08.840 All right.

00:53:10.280 Can you guys name a couple of your favorite movies that have inspired you as filmmakers?

00:53:17.520 Sure.

00:53:19.000 Night of the Hunter.

00:53:21.880 I love...

00:53:22.640 I tend to really cleave toward things in the 70s, and I think because the studios gave the filmmakers the keys and said, maybe you guys know better.

00:53:30.440 And then, you know, in the late 70s, they ripped them out of their hands.

00:53:35.060 But there's, you know, five easy pieces.

00:53:36.940 I do think when you're...

00:53:39.600 I don't watch a lot of modern things.

00:53:41.160 I tend to go back to the seminal things.

00:53:43.760 And before I did shot this movie, and I gave a list to Isabel and to Ollie, who plays Lewis.

00:53:51.800 You know, things on there like Deliverance and Dog Day Afternoon.

00:53:55.540 A lot of things that these young actors had not seen.

00:53:58.820 And it was so fun because Isabel, I remember we were in the ravine when she was the final scene with Tristan, with Eli.

00:54:06.740 And she's like, oh, I watched Deliverance this morning.

00:54:08.480 And I think we were like in this freezing ravine.

00:54:11.380 And I was like, it's awesome.

00:54:13.260 You know, it's so fun.

00:54:16.080 One of the most enjoyable moments of 2020 for me, and I know it was a terrible year for almost everyone,

00:54:21.500 but it's like maybe the best year of my life.

00:54:23.720 You know, business did well.

00:54:25.440 My marriage did well.

00:54:26.260 I adopted a kid.

00:54:27.040 I had a great time in 2020, other than just all the chaos.

00:54:31.340 The end of the world.

00:54:32.020 Other than that, nothing else matters.

00:54:34.400 It was good for you.

00:54:34.880 You know, that's the important thing.

00:54:36.320 Yeah, yeah.

00:54:37.480 But one of the great moments was that our friend John Voight had stopped by our office.

00:54:41.780 And sometimes John would just like stop by and bring you a treat, like a nice cheesecake or something.

00:54:46.460 Hey, lad, I brought you a cheesecake.

00:54:48.220 Hey, John Voight, thank you for the cheesecake.

00:54:50.680 Anyway, and we got to visiting about Deliverance a little bit.

00:54:54.120 And John started pacing out, moving furniture around the break room at our office in L.A.

00:55:00.480 And explaining to me how they staged sundry shots in the film to let the camera just be so voyeuristic.

00:55:08.500 Let the camera just sit here and all the action plays out in front of the camera with no movement.

00:55:13.100 And he reenacted three scenes from Deliverance in which he played all of the roles.

00:55:20.060 And I just sat in the break room and thought, holy crap, what an unbelievable life we get to live. 0.72

00:55:27.520 He played the Ned Beatty role? 0.98

00:55:28.980 Yeah, he played all of them.

00:55:31.440 Fabulous.

00:55:32.400 You know, I'm interested in the films that you reference are all 70s films, which was this amazingly creative.

00:55:39.400 I mean, you go back, you probably don't agree with this, but I go back and I look at Five Easy Pieces, which I loved at the time.

00:55:45.580 And I think like, this is another planet that they're making.

00:55:47.880 They would never make that movie today.

00:55:49.320 What about the films before that?

00:55:51.140 Because I happen to love movies just like this, small, tight thrillers that work.

00:55:56.020 I mean, but the ones that I go back to are films like The Killers with Burt Lancaster and Sterling Haydenfield.

00:56:02.440 I can't remember the name of the film where he robs the racetrack.

00:56:05.020 I don't remember, but it's just a great, great movie.

00:56:07.680 Stanley Kubrick.

00:56:09.400 Yeah.

00:56:09.700 Yeah.

00:56:10.020 What the heck is the name of that?

00:56:11.020 Is it called The Heist?

00:56:11.360 That was one of his.

00:56:12.500 No, it's not.

00:56:13.300 Something like that.

00:56:14.160 But anyway, do you go back to those or that before you just think like that's another year?

00:56:18.860 I mean, my wife and I, we were watching North by Northwest because it just came out on a new Blu-ray just last night.

00:56:24.440 You know, so we, yeah, any, if you named some of your favorites, they'd probably be mine too.

00:56:29.440 I'm not great at always having a list in my head, but how about you, Dallas?

00:56:34.740 Yeah, I mean, I've done a major deep dive over this year into the late 60s, early 70s because it's been so inspiring to me and sort of building my company and brand and things like that.

00:56:46.280 And there's a fascinating Criterion Collection called America Lost and Found the BBS Story.

00:56:52.200 And BBS stands for three producers who made Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Last Picture Show, and so on.

00:56:59.160 And they worked with Jack Nicholson.

00:57:01.080 And so I highly recommend this.

00:57:02.980 The movie that's inspired me the most, so my favorite filmmaker of all time is Michael Cimino.

00:57:07.120 Just the excess of his filmmaking, but also his storytelling and writing and things like that.

00:57:13.560 He's known, obviously, for Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate and things like that.

00:57:17.240 But his masterpiece is actually a very unknown film starring sort of a pre-surgery Mickey Rourke called Year of the Dragon, which is co-written by Oliver Stone.

00:57:28.760 And just do yourself a favor.

00:57:30.820 There's your homework.

00:57:32.080 That movie is a masterpiece.

00:57:34.060 Okay, I actually don't know that film.

00:57:36.300 1984, 85.

00:57:37.140 Yeah, okay.

00:57:37.680 I know of it, but I've never seen it.

00:57:40.260 Alicia.

00:57:41.420 All right, I just have to ask a question.

00:57:43.200 It's a girl from southeastern Oklahoma.

00:57:44.820 Are you a paying subscriber?

00:57:46.880 Yes, I am, thanks.

00:57:47.840 And so is my mom.

00:57:49.320 It's a girl from southeastern Oklahoma.

00:57:51.960 My ears perked up a couple of times when you mentioned a place where I have been a time or two.

00:57:56.620 Broken Bow.

00:57:57.300 I mean, how the heck did you know about Broken Bow?

00:58:00.140 We were searching for a state and I really just wanted to be right in the center of the country.

00:58:09.120 I wanted the culpability to kind of be on everyone's shoulders because it's an American problem.

00:58:15.880 So I thought, let's go right into the center of the country.

00:58:18.160 And then my family, I'm from Maine originally.

00:58:19.940 We have a camp in Maine and I don't even know if you would say camp for just like a cabin on a lake.

00:58:27.680 But I just, I picked Broken Bow.

00:58:29.380 Just, I just pointed at it when I was writing, found it on a map.

00:58:33.440 Yeah, we vacation, we vacation there every year.

00:58:37.980 Lots of people from the Dallas-Fort Worth area do, despite the Red River rivalry, we will take your money.

00:58:43.320 So next question comes.

00:58:44.920 We also love our members' money and we'll get back to their questions right now.

00:58:48.080 Have there been any people that are criticizing this film as exploitative?

00:58:52.020 You guys kind of touched on that a little bit in the top, but a Daily Wire member wants to know.

00:58:57.960 In the press that I've seen so far, I thought that that would be the number one criticism of the film.

00:59:04.040 I actually haven't run across a lot of accusations of exploitation of you.

00:59:08.200 I would say there's a beautiful, there's a beautiful effect of us releasing this movie with the Daily Wire.

00:59:18.080 In that I think it found the audience it was always intended to find in many ways.

00:59:22.740 Audience that wouldn't be offended by it, that could handle it, that didn't need a safe space to watch it.

00:59:27.620 While I think we hope that more people will come to the movie and be open to it and things like that, the voices on the extreme left have not been open to the movie.

00:59:41.240 In fact, they've been almost resistant to it.

00:59:44.500 In reviewing, when they review it, I don't want to ever single out an individual review because I don't like it when filmmakers do that.

00:59:52.700 But I saw a systemic sort of system in the reviews where it felt very much like a concerted effort to sort of review the subject matter and perceived politics rather than the actual movie.

01:00:08.240 I've made 35 movies. I know I've made some great stuff and I've made some doozies and this is a great movie and to get the critical reaction.

01:00:20.240 I'll say from the point of view of the political space that we occupy, if it ever seems like there's a conspiracy on the left to create a unified talking point, there isn't.

01:00:31.780 Because there doesn't have to be. Because they've done such a great job of populating every single piece of the, every single institution that makes up the culture with people who think exactly the same.

01:00:43.660 You know, like in the early Obama years, you'd have these listservs and every now and then you'd find out, oh, there's some listserv and every journalist in Hollywood is, or in New York is on them and they all conspire around.

01:00:54.040 They don't have to do that anymore.

01:00:55.280 They just wake up, say exactly what you think and every other journalist will say exactly what you think.

01:00:59.060 Well, then that's worse because then they're all thinking the same way.

01:01:01.920 Oh, yeah. This is the, this is the, I'm very proud of myself because this is the first time I'm reading nothing.

01:01:05.320 I'm just reading no review. I haven't read a single review. I'm trying not to read any comments.

01:01:10.240 We premiered in Venice and the audience really loved it. It was a beautiful night and, you know, we're having champagne on the Lido and it was a dream come true.

01:01:18.160 And then, oh, I heard some reviews are starting to drop and I just felt an arm on my shoulder. Don't read any of them.

01:01:23.920 Okay. And, you know, and you can, you know, on Google, it'll say whatever, we have a 14% rotten and I, rotten tomatoes thing.

01:01:32.180 And I'm like, that's just patently false. I mean, this young cast is so incredible.

01:01:37.680 That's just incorrect.

01:01:39.040 Again, that's one of those things on rotten tomatoes where you can really see this massive gap, particularly with films that are perceived as political between what the critics say and then what the audience says.

01:01:47.360 Yeah. And you see this routinely. Yeah. I mean, you'll see it on everything from The Last Jedi where the audience really didn't like it, but the critics absolutely loved it and called fans toxic because the fans didn't particularly like it.

01:01:59.060 Right. To Wonder Woman 1984, just the last couple of weeks where people were like, this is not very good.

01:02:04.060 But the critics like, yeah, but it's super important. And so we're going to pretend that this movie is actually awesome, even though it's not good.

01:02:09.040 The first Wonder Woman is a good movie. Wonder Woman 1984 is not a particularly good movie.

01:02:12.320 But it feels the same way with regard to this film, because the film is just it is a it is a good film.

01:02:18.420 And as far as the kind of accusation that it's exploitative, listen, everybody, everybody at The Daily Wire is super sensitive to the idea that anything would be done to glorify school shooters.

01:02:28.580 Again, one of the things that we were we were what I was very personally, extremely early and hard on the idea that we were not going to print their names in The Daily Wire.

01:02:38.920 We're not going to give them any sort of attention in The Daily Wire because that's precisely what they're looking for.

01:02:43.160 One of the things that drew me to the film was that the film is making exactly that point in many ways, which is the more attention these people are looking for attention.

01:02:50.140 The more attention you give them, the more of these you're going to see.

01:02:53.180 And so we need to actually deprive them of attention. We need to treat them for the villains they are.

01:02:56.680 It can't be all about, you know, their tough childhoods, as you were suggesting, or the sort of crippling circumstances they went through.

01:03:02.520 Look how tough life is for them. The focus in this film is really on the victims. It really, really is on the victims.

01:03:07.020 The film also talks about the people who perpetrate these events in a more honest way.

01:03:13.300 I mean, it's funny because it's fundamentally a piece of entertainment, right? It's a piece of fiction.

01:03:17.360 It's not a documentary. And yet it has a more honest take on the people who perpetrate these crimes than most even news articles or documentaries that you see.

01:03:27.760 I mean, you very, very rarely hear about the prevalence of people who hear voices.

01:03:34.460 You'll find, if you go around looking on the Internet, you will find these stories.

01:03:38.160 And it's in so many of these mass shootings that people claim to hear voices that it's always buried down on, like, paragraph 30 of the story.

01:03:45.040 Because I think the media doesn't know what to do with that information.

01:03:48.780 We have a very secular media. We have a very sort of cynical media.

01:03:55.100 They don't know how to touch things that they don't fully understand.

01:03:59.780 The desire for notoriety, another huge component of it.

01:04:04.140 Also, the sort of cult-like draw of Tristan as a character for these weaker-minded people around him,

01:04:09.700 which, all the way back to Columbine, was such a, you know, the untold story of Columbine, I think,

01:04:15.120 is in some ways the power of the one shooter to really draw in the other and do his plans.

01:04:20.920 So in that way, you really took kind of an unflinching look at the evil that you were saying.

01:04:25.920 Yeah, it is funny. I've always thought about the fact that when people hear voices, the voices never say,

01:04:32.300 you're a great guy. Go out and be nice to me. Why is that?

01:04:36.840 Alicia.

01:04:37.200 All right. What did each of you guys take away from the movie after your first viewing?

01:04:44.280 Well, in some ways, this is a question for the three of us.

01:04:47.940 Right, because you guys made it.

01:04:49.140 But I actually think the more interesting answers are going to come from the two of you.

01:04:53.260 There's nothing so surreal as watching your own film.

01:04:58.260 Oh.

01:05:01.360 Well, there was no first. I mean, I was there with every edit.

01:05:04.740 Yeah, of course.

01:05:05.260 Going frame by frame. So I don't know when a first time was.

01:05:08.860 So you didn't have an editor do an editor's pass and then you came in and saw the rough assembly for the first time.

01:05:14.100 You were there at every step of the way.

01:05:16.320 Yeah, I mean, I have an awesome editor, Matthew Lorenz. He's great.

01:05:19.640 I collaborated with him just like with every cast and crew member.

01:05:23.260 But yeah, I get into it and we both do.

01:05:27.740 What was your experience watching it with an audience for the first time?

01:05:31.480 Yeah, Venice was amazing and I did something in Venice.

01:05:34.440 Tonight, a bunch of your employees were watching it and I tend to leave the room and just walk around.

01:05:40.740 Because I can't, you know, I love the movie. I adore it and I will defend it until I know the day I die.

01:05:46.960 But I don't I don't always want to be in the room when it's I perfected it so that it can go have a life.

01:05:53.840 And it is no longer mine. It's no longer Dallas's.

01:05:56.340 Dallas's. It will go out and unfortunately, like a child, be judged and run into people who are mean to it.

01:06:01.820 And that'll really annoy me, which is why I won't read anything.

01:06:05.880 I care for it deeply. But now it is it is everybody's.

01:06:09.680 One of the things I watch films, there's always a part of my head that's picking scripts apart.

01:06:15.420 And I watch especially thrillers, which is a genre I've worked in a lot.

01:06:19.660 And I'm always watching a movie rooting for the writer.

01:06:23.320 I'm always thinking, like, go ahead, go. You're almost there. Just keep going.

01:06:27.760 And that was one of the things that I took away from it. It works, you know, like it's it's not a small thing.

01:06:33.800 Films don't work. So many films don't work. And this film works.

01:06:36.880 And I was just really happy as you got through it.

01:06:40.380 It's I know this is not what most people are taking away from a movie, but I can't help it.

01:06:43.800 I watched the movie and I just think, like, I can see so many ways you can go wrong here.

01:06:48.460 And yet you're on that line and you're keeping to that line.

01:06:51.580 And it's a wonderful thing to see.

01:06:53.320 It is just technically. Yeah.

01:06:55.240 So for me, there are a couple of things that pop out of me.

01:06:58.420 So one is Isabel May's performance is just terrific.

01:07:02.200 I mean, she's just first rate. And I think that for the vast majority of people who watch it, because the camera is so in love with her.

01:07:07.440 I mean, she's just amazing on screen that that is the that that will be sort of the surface takeaway. 1.00

01:07:13.660 But then the second time, actually, is kind of when I get more of the message.

01:07:17.520 The first time you're just watching to see the plot and you're drawn into it.

01:07:19.960 Now, the second time where we were kind of popping in and out tonight, like watching various scenes, there was one scene that popped out of me.

01:07:25.520 And that's the scene where Tristan is asking one of the girls who's religious about free will.

01:07:32.180 And she drops a little sermon about free will.

01:07:34.180 And I thought that's something you will never see in any of the film.

01:07:37.440 Like, really, you're not going to see it.

01:07:38.760 I mean, that's the point that she makes about free will, where she says that bad people are allowed to be bad people so that they can be judged.

01:07:45.080 That is as good a 30 second explanation of free will from a religious perspective as I can imagine.

01:07:51.800 And it also is a theme running throughout the film, which is you're going to be judged for your own behavior and that you're going to need to be held accountable for that behavior.

01:07:59.360 So I thought that that was it's a beautiful and I think will be an underappreciated scene because it's kind of off the beaten track of the film.

01:08:06.300 It's not the conflict between main characters, but it really is wonderful.

01:08:09.020 The film does have a sense of justice.

01:08:10.820 The character Kip, it's a wonderful thing you did as a filmmaker where you let him be redeemed, but he still has to die.

01:08:19.660 He did do the thing and you wouldn't be satisfied to watch him come through this.

01:08:26.620 It's only one example.

01:08:28.080 My big takeaway when I watch any film, I like paternal relationships portrayed well in film.

01:08:37.560 My favorite, it's not a film, obviously it's a miniseries, but Lonesome Dove is my favorite thing that's ever been shot.

01:08:45.540 And it's because it's the relationship between two men.

01:08:47.820 And I love those kinds of relationships.

01:08:49.660 My favorite moment in this film is the scene in the chemistry lab when Isabel is being just beat to a pulp and her father saves her.

01:08:59.740 And I love it.

01:09:00.260 I love everything about the scene.

01:09:02.200 I love that she's inventive with the gas, that she's still being inventive about how to protect herself.

01:09:10.240 I love that I actually thought when they're just about to obviously be in a physical confrontation, I thought this movie is about to lose me because they're about to give me the obligatory scene in which an 85 pound girl takes on a six foot two, 200 pound man and somehow beats him.

01:09:26.420 And no, I mean, she gets pummeled because in boxing you're not allowed to fight someone five pounds at you because that's how the world works. 1.00

01:09:35.360 And then for her father to be there in that moment, almost as a, like an angel.

01:09:40.380 I mean, he's beyond her experience at that moment.

01:09:43.240 She doesn't know that he exists.

01:09:44.520 And then he's there to save her.

01:09:46.120 It's just the most beautiful moment to me.

01:09:47.580 Yeah.

01:09:47.860 And I, you have three children and I have three children.

01:09:51.460 I think any parent would, yeah.

01:09:53.500 Would I take that shot? 0.98

01:09:54.800 Absolutely. 0.52

01:09:55.800 100%.

01:09:56.000 I love that scene as well.

01:09:58.380 And then the scene that you mentioned, I, I, I, I attend this men's spiritual men's group in Los Angeles and I'm like the youngest member by like 30 years.

01:10:06.900 It's really interesting.

01:10:07.580 Uh, and that, that got brought up, you know, basically why does God allow, uh, bad things to happen to good people got brought up one night.

01:10:15.940 And, and one of the guys was like free will.

01:10:17.640 And I, I didn't fully understand the conversation to be honest.

01:10:20.840 So I, uh, my wife is religious.

01:10:22.840 I am, uh, I'm not practicing any religion.

01:10:25.900 I came home.

01:10:26.420 I said, what does this mean?

01:10:27.680 Can you please explain the world to me, honey?

01:10:29.380 And she was like, oh, and she's like, I think, yeah, she basically just dropped that line on me.

01:10:34.080 And she's like, God allows the wicked to do their wickedness.

01:10:37.280 Like if he's judged and I just like, that's going in verbatim.

01:10:40.900 And I, I almost fell over, um, but I do, it annoys me that even though, you know, I, I was raised as a Catholic, uh, my dad, uh, didn't attend.

01:10:51.880 You know, my mom would kind of drag us every Sunday and I'd, I'd be like, I want to be whatever dad is.

01:10:56.700 Cause he gets to mow the lawn and stay home.

01:10:58.320 I want to do that.

01:10:59.360 Um, uh, but it annoys me that Hollywood is, they have forgotten that this is a religious country completely there.

01:11:06.540 I mean, if you put religion in a script, I have seen that, uh, Drew and you were mentioning like, oh, that's taboo.

01:11:12.060 I mean, why, why is, uh, even though I'm non-practicing, I'm starting to kind of revisit the Bible and be like, uh, there's a ton of wisdom in here.

01:11:19.300 And some amazing, uh, ideas and quotes and things that now are inspiring me that I'm kind of approaching it on my own.

01:11:26.240 And so that is a lesson that Hollywood could learn to kind of revisit some of that stuff. 0.72

01:11:31.260 And, and fatherhood, you know, back to the other scene, uh, you know, the generation in which I grew up, every single father who's been represented in my lifetime is just a doddering boob. 0.84

01:11:42.580 Who's being bailed out by his wife or his children who are much smarter and much more capable than him.

01:11:47.460 And I feel like Thomas Jane gives a great performance in this, uh, as a father, who's, you know, probably not been physically present for a lot of Isabel's life.

01:11:57.560 Uh, and probably hasn't been emotionally present either.

01:12:00.560 And yet this tragedy has almost given him the opportunity to, to be probably the father he always should be, you know, and out of that, out of that pain, he's emerged as something more complete.

01:12:10.640 So that's a really beautiful, yeah.

01:12:13.160 Did you, these actors, guys like Thomas Jane treat Williams, I treat Williams, I see on blue blood.

01:12:17.980 So I assume he's a conservative, uh, but, uh, I don't think treat Williams is a conservative.

01:12:23.980 Don't slander treats.

01:12:25.120 Oh, I'm sorry.

01:12:26.340 I just wondered, don't end people's careers.

01:12:29.380 Well, that's what I was going to ask.

01:12:31.120 That's what I was going to ask.

01:12:31.980 Do they hesitate at all to be in a film with that might tar, you know, what I love.

01:12:36.980 Oh, sorry.

01:12:37.580 Yeah.

01:12:37.840 I mean, go ahead.

01:12:38.420 What I love about Thomas Jane is he's like, I think he said, let's ruffle a few tail feathers.

01:12:43.380 Like, yeah, let's see.

01:12:44.660 He wants to do things that scare him.

01:12:46.840 Uh, treat, uh, maybe is similar.

01:12:49.600 You know, they, uh, I heard a lot of like, I'm, I'm scared about this script.

01:12:54.440 I'd like to do it.

01:12:55.240 And all of the young cast too, when, when we knew, when we narrowed it down, I took them into another room and just gave them the speech of like, I don't know how this is going to be received.

01:13:02.680 You're just starting your career.

01:13:04.300 Go home and really think about it.

01:13:06.580 Um, uh.

01:13:08.420 And they, they all, you know, some of them didn't need to leave the room for like, no, I want, I don't care.

01:13:12.640 I want to do it.

01:13:13.220 But that, I, I, I'm more worried for, uh, I can be canceled.

01:13:17.120 I don't really care.

01:13:17.780 But I am worried about these amazing guys that are, and gals that are just starting their careers.

01:13:22.220 Yeah.

01:13:22.760 I, I honestly think that while we know that the industry can blacklist people, we know that the industry can cancel people.

01:13:30.560 These kids are too talented and, and it's not their fault that they wound up on the Daily Wire.

01:13:34.980 You know, they, they, uh, they gave their best effort to a film and we happen to be the ones who came along to, to release it.

01:13:43.180 And, you know, maybe some of them, I don't know the politics of any of them.

01:13:47.360 Maybe some of them share our politics.

01:13:48.560 I'm certain a lot of them don't.

01:13:49.920 Uh, and, you know, one of the things that Ben and I talked about when we first acquired the film was, you know, if any of these kids feel like they have to speak out against us in social media, we can't respond.

01:14:02.340 Like, yeah, they, they didn't sign up for this.

01:14:05.280 They're, they're hugely talented.

01:14:07.180 God bless them.

01:14:07.720 And I hope they all have great careers.

01:14:08.840 I, I think based on what they delivered in this film, they will.

01:14:11.820 They have been along since the beginning for the ride, right?

01:14:15.740 They, they came and made the movie against all odds with us, right?

01:14:19.680 Fought every day on set, you know?

01:14:22.140 Uh, they came with us, uh, you know, into post-production.

01:14:25.900 It helped, you know, do these amazing performances that got the movie into Venice Film Festival.

01:14:31.540 It came, we brought them to Venice.

01:14:33.940 They saw the movie get absolutely slaughtered by the critics, but absolutely applauded in the room.

01:14:44.440 Uh, and they came along with us for the ride as we ended up doing a deal with Daily Wire and not a single one of them complained.

01:14:53.740 In fact, I don't think they're, they're, they're necessarily, um, you know, this is, this is not what they certainly signed up for, but also they were so impressed by the way that we carried everything through together.

01:15:07.640 Um, and so ultimately the movie above all, and the movie is in great shape.

01:15:14.400 The movie reached more people tonight than it ever would have any other way.

01:15:19.400 And it will continue to reach more people.

01:15:21.740 The trailer numbers were off the charts.

01:15:23.580 So this is a, this, this is a chance of a lifetime for all of us.

01:15:27.860 Um, and I'll just say this about Isabel May, you know, she is a, uh, such a talented actress, but an even better human kindness and happiness.

01:15:37.940 She's so such a happy person lives by this amazing strict moral code, but very private about it.

01:15:44.240 And I just adore her.

01:15:45.600 And I think whether you believe in divine intervention, luck, or fate, hers is to be a giant, giant, giant movie star.

01:15:56.020 Yeah.

01:15:56.540 She might not even want that, but it is, it is, it is, it is her destiny.

01:16:00.600 And I'm excited that we could all be a part of it, you know, early on.

01:16:04.180 I really think that people are going to look back in 10 years and they'll be like, all these names were in that film.

01:16:08.720 Like really, there's so many talents.

01:16:10.680 You know, that's, that's the most moving thing that anybody's said to me.

01:16:14.220 Tonight, that the actors didn't balk because it, it didn't even, it's, it's unfortunate.

01:16:21.360 Being an artist, as you know, takes a lot of courage.

01:16:24.820 It means you're, you're, you're betting your life.

01:16:26.640 You're betting your life.

01:16:27.700 You know, you, most artists are intelligent enough to go to law school or to do something else.

01:16:32.360 And they're, they bet their life on what they do and what they love.

01:16:35.500 And to have to also have the courage to stand up against small mindedness and censoriousness and, and, and deliver what you have to deliver.

01:16:44.220 The talent that you've been given by God, that's a beautiful thing.

01:16:47.680 And if you found actors who are willing to do that, then you have laid the foundation for a genuine movement, I think.

01:16:54.900 Dallas, Kyle, thank you guys for spending time with us.

01:16:56.980 We're going to bring Matt and Michael back on to close out the night.

01:17:00.200 And Alicia, if you'd tell everybody at home how they can continue to support this film and the future entertainment projects from the Daily Wire.

01:17:07.120 Absolutely.

01:17:07.860 As the God King Jeremy Boring said earlier in the show, this is a film that we want everyone to watch and see.

01:17:13.260 And if you didn't watch it live tonight, it's not too late.

01:17:16.700 You know how sometimes pre-COVID you could go to the movie theater?

01:17:19.440 Well, now on the comfort of your couch, you can be sure to become a Daily Wire subscriber and be sure to sign up over there.

01:17:25.620 So if you missed tonight's live stream, it's not too late.

01:17:27.980 Because you'll be able to watch the film on demand at the Daily Wire website, mobile app, or streaming apps like Apple and Roku TV.

01:17:36.040 But only if you're a Daily Wire insider member or above.

01:17:40.180 So, as Jeremy stated earlier, politics is downstream from culture.

01:17:44.040 And tonight was the Daily Wire's first step in taking back the culture.

01:17:47.900 And we believe that conservatives can be in this fight without making stereotypical or boring or Christian-y type content.

01:17:54.200 We can make stories that spark conversations that the left doesn't want to have.

01:17:59.000 And Hollywood only wants to stand unchallenged on their moral high ground.

01:18:02.680 And they have owned entertainment for a very long time.

01:18:06.020 But the Daily Wire is going to change that.

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01:19:03.360 But another great thing about a membership is that community in the chat box that you can get to know.

01:19:07.440 It's so much fun, along with discussions from Daily Wire writers and talent, like all of our podcast hosts and even little will be.

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01:19:18.300 Be a part of that Daily Wire community.

01:19:20.160 Make sure you become a member because we are going to try to answer as many questions as we can because we couldn't do this and we would not be here at this exciting digital movie premiere tonight if it wasn't for all of you.

01:19:30.520 Thank you, Alicia.

01:19:32.920 Fellas, we're rejoined now by Bearded James Bond and our waiter.

01:19:37.640 I'd love to hear from the two of you what you thought about the film tonight.

01:19:41.400 Well, first of all, I think Michael and I have done a really good job tonight.

01:19:44.280 We did great.

01:19:45.940 Some of our best work all year.

01:19:47.300 I thought, just to echo everything that's already been said, really, but first of all, it's escapism.

01:19:52.580 So, it's a movie that you watch and it's just entertaining and you feel like you're in it and you forget that you're watching a movie, which is what movies are supposed to be, but so often they're not these days.

01:20:00.800 And I also like that, you know, the bad guy, Tristan, was a really interesting character, but he's not the most interesting character because it's so hard, it seems like, to write a good guy who's also compelling and who you want to know more about.

01:20:18.960 And there's layers to the good guy or good girl in this case.

01:20:22.280 So, that's what I like.

01:20:23.400 It's a movie where there's virtue and heroism and the good guy wins, but the good guy's also interesting.

01:20:28.960 And it's just a compelling, compelling film.

01:20:32.400 You know what I like about it is that the quality is good.

01:20:36.060 And I know this seems like a basic thing, but how many of us, how many, we know a lot of people in Hollywood and we've seen a lot of movies that were made on a shoestring and, you know, they'll say, well, look, yeah, maybe the writing was bad and the shooting was bad and the acting was really bad.

01:20:50.140 And, you know, the editing was god awful, but, you know, the idea was really good.

01:20:54.340 So, give us credit for it, right?

01:20:55.860 You say, that's not how movies work.

01:20:57.060 And you watch this movie and it works.

01:21:00.600 It fits together.

01:21:01.520 It's good.

01:21:02.420 Very often, you know, acting can suffer.

01:21:06.240 I thought the acting was really, you know, and it's like, I'm sure, Drew, when you watch movies, you watch it, I imagine, largely for the writing.

01:21:13.460 I do.

01:21:14.020 And I watch it primarily for the acting.

01:21:15.900 It's the only thing I know anything about in movies.

01:21:17.860 And the acting was excellent.

01:21:19.740 Particularly the protagonist performance was just stellar.

01:21:23.680 You know, it was just a really excellent performance.

01:21:25.720 And I'm just so pleased after, you know, there's a lot of schlock that's come out of Hollywood and even out of people who want to do something in culture.

01:21:33.980 And I just felt this was really, really strong quality stuff.

01:21:37.500 Yeah, to be honest, when I heard about the movie, I was terrified that it would suck.

01:21:40.780 Like, I was really worried that we'd have to pretend to like a movie that was bad, especially doing this right now.

01:21:47.820 But it really doesn't suck at all.

01:21:50.040 It's a very good movie.

01:21:51.160 You heard it here, folks.

01:21:52.280 It really doesn't suck.

01:21:53.480 That's my quote for the movie.

01:21:55.040 That is his highest.

01:21:56.200 Coming from Wolf.

01:21:56.880 It doesn't get better than that from Wolf.

01:21:58.060 But it is certainly true that I have been at movie premieres where I have been friends.

01:22:04.860 Drew knows this.

01:22:05.880 I have been friends with people who made the movie.

01:22:08.320 And then I have been roped into a situation as a quasi-famous person where they ask for an endorsement on camera of the film.

01:22:17.540 And I somehow have...

01:22:18.380 And they literally just shove a camera in your face.

01:22:19.460 They literally just put me up against a step and repeat.

01:22:21.520 And then they put a camera in my face.

01:22:22.620 And like, so what did you think of the movie?

01:22:23.960 And I'm friends with all the people who made it.

01:22:25.080 And I'm like, well, it really got its point across.

01:22:28.440 Yeah, it had cameras.

01:22:29.260 Right.

01:22:30.600 It really was like on a big screen.

01:22:34.040 Noel Coward used to say he would go back and say, darling, good just isn't the word.

01:22:42.980 Yeah.

01:22:43.340 It is an absolutely true statement that the unfortunate reality is the majority of things that you engage aren't great.

01:22:51.860 Right?

01:22:51.920 And so to be able to be a part of something that is great, that is both a quality film and a film of quality, it has quality values, it has a quality story, and it was delivered with quality is a pretty special thing.

01:23:06.000 Every time that anyone pulls off a film, even if it's a terrible disaster, in some ways they just have my, if nothing else, they have my sympathy, because it's such a brutal thing to produce a film.

01:23:19.380 I imagine that when you see a woman with like five kids, and you know that after each and every one, she thought, I am never doing that again.

01:23:27.580 But in the end, having a kid is so much better than having a kid.

01:23:33.220 It's the same with making a movie.

01:23:34.660 Like, having made a movie is so much better than making a movie, which is just like fire and brimstone, desolation coming your way from every direction.

01:23:43.060 Anybody who makes it through has a certain amount of my respect, but to make it through and actually deliver something of quality, it's an incredibly special thing.

01:23:50.840 Listen, we're the ones who, you know, are in on the film, so what our audience thinks is actually what matters, and so once again, we're going to tell you that if you really enjoyed the content, if you want your friends to know about it, if you want your family to know about it, then we would really appreciate your membership and joining the broader cause of getting us into the entertainment business so we can compete with the much bigger players who will spend literally 100 times the budget of this film on making a movie that is 100th the quality and also hates your values.

01:24:16.740 You know, the other thing that you said that is actually important is if you're completely disappointed in this film, if you don't like it at all, if you object to it, shut up.

01:24:29.440 And this is a funny thing.

01:24:30.640 No, seriously, this is a funny thing.

01:24:32.380 I believe in speaking your mind, but as you just said, when you're going up with your friends, you do something kind, you know, and you don't lie, you don't say this is a great movie.

01:24:42.000 But if you love this film and you had objections to it, that's great.

01:24:45.560 We want to hear it.

01:24:46.240 We want to talk about it.

01:24:47.060 That's what movies are for. 0.99

01:24:48.000 They're disgusting.

01:24:49.360 But if you just feel like, oh, my God, they cursed and I don't want to know it, your opinion is not that important. 0.99

01:24:55.520 Just keep it to yourself.

01:24:57.060 No, seriously, I'm absolutely serious.

01:24:59.360 This is a moment when The Daily Wire is doing something beautiful.

01:25:03.120 It is doing something beautiful.

01:25:04.820 We're not going to always be right.

01:25:06.320 We're not going to always do the best.

01:25:08.340 You know.

01:25:09.760 Give us a break.

01:25:10.560 Give us a break.

01:25:11.180 We're happy to hear your opinion if you like the film and you had objections and you want to talk about it.

01:25:15.600 That's wonderful.

01:25:16.720 But if you're just going to run us down, you know, keep your opinion.

01:25:20.080 The good news is that just looking at Twitter, the comments are like 100% positive.

01:25:25.420 That's great.

01:25:26.200 Which is amazing because the comments are never 100% positive about anything, especially if, you know.

01:25:31.020 So it seems like.

01:25:32.360 Wait, people say mean things on Twitter?

01:25:34.120 Why was I not informed of this thing?

01:25:35.800 Not to you, of course.

01:25:36.980 No, no.

01:25:37.320 I mean, I've only had positive experiences on Twitter ever.

01:25:40.480 It's a wonderful place.

01:25:41.400 It is true that we've taken quite a risk here.

01:25:43.100 Not only a risk of money because it's quite expensive to get involved in a project like this by the economic standards of a company our size.

01:25:50.600 But we've taken a risk with our audience because we are challenging them.

01:25:52.900 We're challenging them to actually watch art, to watch entertainment from their side that they would readily accept from the other side.

01:26:04.920 And this is one of the problems that you often run into when you speak to a largely ideological audience.

01:26:11.660 They will not give us the same level of grace that they will give people who hate them.

01:26:18.120 So they'll all go watch Marvel movies that have themes that they don't like or that have language that they don't like.

01:26:24.060 But they don't care because they don't feel invested ideologically.

01:26:29.380 They'll watch something that we produce.

01:26:31.180 They'll say, oh, it had bad language or it had nudity in it or it had violence in it. 0.95

01:26:35.880 And they will feel that somehow that was a betrayal of them when watching something even...

01:26:42.800 Game of Thrones.

01:26:43.800 And what they don't know, what they don't realize is I was advocating for much, much more nudity.

01:26:49.220 I mean, you remember, knock down drag outs.

01:26:52.220 We had to cut Michael's nude scene out of the film.

01:26:55.220 Out of this program.

01:26:56.740 We had to cut it out of this program.

01:26:58.560 It's like, put on your tuxedo.

01:27:00.020 You know, we talk about challenging the audience.

01:27:02.000 The truth is that we wouldn't have done this if we didn't trust that the audience was going to understand what we're doing.

01:27:07.160 Because we know our audience better than anybody else.

01:27:09.260 And our audience knows what we're doing.

01:27:10.520 Our audience is sophisticated.

01:27:11.820 They are smart.

01:27:12.760 They recognize exactly what the challenge is.

01:27:14.740 And they recognize that if nobody moves into the space, then the space will remain unoccupied, but not for long, because it's being occupied by the left.

01:27:21.860 That's right.

01:27:22.180 And you can't say, oh, why have we lost the culture?

01:27:25.820 And then penalize anyone who actually tries to get involved in the culture.

01:27:28.740 Right.

01:27:29.020 And I don't think our audience...

01:27:30.300 The evidence demonstrates very strongly over the last couple of weeks that thanks to your support, that is not the case.

01:27:35.060 That you all understand what we're doing.

01:27:36.260 And we really, honestly, thank you to you guys.

01:27:38.240 We really, really appreciate that.

01:27:39.840 We appreciate your grace.

01:27:40.880 We appreciate your adventurous spirit in coming with us on this journey.

01:27:43.760 And we're counting on you to help us, allow us to do more of this sort of stuff.

01:27:48.260 Yeah.

01:27:49.740 I made a piece of content one time, and somebody ideological came up and said, I'm so disappointed that you had this bad language in your film.

01:27:58.220 And I thought, you just don't know me at all.

01:28:01.380 How could you possibly be disappointed?

01:28:04.600 I'm a bad, bad man.

01:28:07.400 Well, thank you guys for joining us for the Daily Wire premiere of Run, Hide, Fight.

01:28:11.200 But this is, we hope, the first of many pieces of entertainment content that we're going to bring to you.

01:28:17.520 Entertainment that you watch for the sake of entertainment, not for the sake of the mission.

01:28:21.700 We want to make content that you want to see, not content that you think you're supposed to see.

01:28:25.620 And with your help, we're going to continue doing just that.

01:28:28.360 We'll be back probably to talk about politics here in a few weeks.

01:28:31.120 But thanks for going on this adventure with us tonight to talk about something that's more important than politics.

01:28:36.180 Something from which all politics actually eventually stems, and that's culture.

01:28:40.660 We'll see you guys next time.

01:28:41.520 We'll see you next time.

01:29:11.520 Exclusions do apply.

The Michael Knowles Show - January 15, 2021

Backstage Premiere： RUN HIDE FIGHT

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