It can be argued that now is a time when art and entertainment are increasingly banal, lifeless, and cater to ideology – or China – and movies are treated simply as vehicles for commodification. That innovation, creativity, and boldness – both in content and creation – are now unicorns. But that is where Dallas Sonnier, producer of the new film, “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” finds the greatest opportunity. Harkening back to a more honest and fun style of film, paired with a modest production model that demands creative solutions to filmmaking hurdles, Sonnier discusses the shift in movies and audiences and what the so-called big production pictures are missing that this film doesn’t.
Ben Domenech: Dallas, before we start talking about this movie, which was something that was important for you to do, talk about the decision to go in this direction — one that was a little fraught, just given the topic area and the fact that you were going to take a new and different genre approach to this, I would say, than perhaps you had before while staying in the same family. Walk me through a little bit about the decision processes that led up to deciding to make this movie.
Dallas Sonnier: You don’t hire me to produce a movie if you’re trying to make something for Hallmark, let’s say, and you don’t hire someone normal or reasonable when you’re going to make these kinds of movies. And so I am, in certain ways, built for this moment, just because of the movies that I’ve made and the career I’ve built, and learning how to make high-budget movies for low-budget money. And we always get nice big stars in these movies and the explosions look big. The part of my career I’m most proud of is building this type of movie-making. And so that’s how it gets made. Now the genesis of it was a conversation between me and Mike Richards, the new Daily Wire CEO, Ben Shapiro, and the writer-director of the original “Run Hide Fight” movie, Kyle Rankin.
The four of us got on the call, and we said, “Hey, we should really consider making another ‘Run Hide Fight’ movie. It does so well on the platform, and it’s so successful for us, and we want to go bigger and better.” And so that’s how it came about. And then we battered around some ideas, and Mike Richards was really inspired by the student protests at Columbia University, but most importantly, the counter-protest normal students, so to speak, who fought back and wanted to go to school and go to class and not be interrupted by this pro-Palestine nonsense. So that’s the genesis of the movie and how it came to be and how we go about it.
BD: The thing that you go into whenever you take on a project like this is the inevitable blowback that you get from throughout the industry. It’s not like there’s one studio or something that has really proven to resist this in this day and age of identifying the motives and the ideology and religion of the enemy within any of these contexts so blatantly. Now, when I was growing up, you and I know the era that we grew up in, they made no secret of anything associated with this. In fact, one of the best examples of subverting the trope is the deployment in “Die Hard,” where they just pick every random thing to associate with it. Spoiler alert, that’s not why they’re there. But I grew up with Schwarzenegger movies and with all these other things where it was absolutely blatant.
And then at a certain point it became totally toxic. How much of that was driven, in your view, by a desire to move on from Cold War-era attitudes, or by the simple money desires of Hollywood executives about the China market? Because those things seem to be the animating force at first, but why can’t we talk in this era of ever-present Islamic terror — about the existence of Islamic terror?
DS: Well, that’s actually two different answers, which is fascinating. So the Chinese portion of it, and trust me, on our slate, we’ll get to a movie where we attack the absolute blast.
And I would encourage you to speak to my friend Chris Fenton, who wrote the defining book on this. He was a producer on “Iron Man 3,” and you’ll hear what they went through to get it into theaters. But Hollywood went for China; this was about 10 years ago, and it just destroyed movies because they were so dumbed down and they were too afraid to offend anyone, but it got major box office in China. So that’s its own thing. And obviously we don’t really care about that because we’re building up the Daily Wire streamer. That’s our focus, that’s our business, and getting subscribers and making sure that we’re making great movies that the current members love. And so that’s the second part of this, which is naturally when The Daily Wire makes a movie, it’s going to feel very modern. It’s going to feel very much of the time. It’s going to feel more political. But when you really look at it, it’s an ’80s or ’90s action movie that’s a blast to watch and not worried about offending anyone. It doesn’t follow any quota systems or DEI lectures. It’s just a great movie. And look, everyone who came together to make the movie loves it, and we love it. And so the audience is already loving it, and the numbers have been off the charts. So this is the point. It’s like when you take off the filters, and you make something that’s artistic and exciting and entertaining, and you’re not dragged down by all the rules and red tape, it gets pretty rad. And so that’s the great benefit of making a movie with The Daily Wire.
BD: So I asked a younger colleague to watch the movie and share her reactions because I wanted to hear what a true Gen Zer who didn’t grow up on those movies had to say about it. And one of the things that she said was that any irritation I would have about the style of writing related to Gen Z audiences is because of irritation at Gen Z audiences, as opposed to any defect in the movie. She basically was comparing it to all these different Netflix shows that I have never watched and said, “This is the way we talk now, and this is the way that this communicates that it may irritate you as an old, but that’s just the way it works.” Was that at all a factor in determining the language the student body would use in this movie?
DS: Well, sure. We wanted to make a movie that appealed to young people too, and to make a movie on a college campus, which is the hotbed of all politics these days. And so yeah, to have a young cast and then have them supported by Hollywood stars and things like that. We love that stuff. I mean, look, the Daily Wire audience is so much younger than Fox News and their audience. And so yes, we’re definitely building up the slate and trying to make enough movies so that we have a rhythm to it. And yes, the younger generation deserves their “Red Dawn” and their “Navy SEALs” and their “Toy Soldiers.” I mean, I’ve shown these movies to my kids and they love these movies. They just don’t get anything like that. So yes, absolutely.
BD: Just to circle back to the Islam question, there is real concern when you engage in a project like this that the threats that come through are more meaningful and more real than perhaps the long-distance threats of nation-states and the like. Now that may not always be true. There are plenty of documentarians and journalists and people like that who Russia has reached out and targeted over the years in places that are not Russia, despite their insistence on trying to have the same frequency of falling out windows in London. They have not achieved that same level, but it does seem to me that there is always an additional risk that comes when you’re seizing on this topic area. How much of a concern was that for the participants in this production? Did you have to work through their own concerns about this, just given that there’s a reason that there’s not a Charlie Hebdo that involves evangelical Christians?
DS: Sure. We cast the terrorists in the movie mostly from the stunt community. And so I joke around a lot as a proud conservative and as almost a right-wing filmmaker at this point. I joke around that we can’t name our favorite conservative chef because they don’t exist. Conversely, you can’t name your favorite liberal stuntman because they don’t exist. And so when you’re leaning into a really tricky role that has a lot of action and violence and things like that, the trick is to cast a stunt person and then help them get the performance. And so we were unbelievably blessed with that group of guys.
And many of them are Christians, and many of them are ex-Muslims and things like that. So that was fascinating. And then Stephen Hailo, the main bad guy, he was just a discovery straight out of casting, and his agent really didn’t want him to do the movie and tried to talk him out of it. And to his credit, he said, “No, I’m doing this.” And he absolutely crushed it. And I think he’s going to go on to have a huge career and this will be a big launching pad for him. So it’s very, very hard to cast these movies, but we keep doing it and we’ve got a great team. So far so good. And we’ve got two movies in the future, one’s finished and one’s about to start shooting.
BD: One of the things that you obviously have to do is, as you mentioned, get in the rhythm — that you’re basically doing what amounts to being a startup studio. You describe it slightly differently, but it seems like that from the outside. Rhythm is really important. Timing is very important. Shot selection is very important. What kind of editing process or approaches do you use when you have that type of compressed scenario where you don’t have the wild budget and ridiculous overtimes that are allowed in major Hollywood, and particularly, I should say, not even Hollywood, but Netflix productions that seem to be out of control in terms of their valuation? I had no idea until this last little flare-up that Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia” is going to go over $300 million just for production before you even start the promotion campaign, which is laughable from my perspective for a Netflix movie or what was intended as such.
What do you do when it comes to establishing that rhythm that makes sure that you’re getting the most out of the time that you have?
DS: Well, it’s a mindset. So you have to come into it knowing that every single decision is a battlefield. So you can’t go to the person whose house you’re renting and ask them, “What do you charge?” You have to go to them, and you have to pitch them the movie. You have to find out. Sometimes, believe it or not, they’re Daily Wire fans. And so you have to whisper, “It’s a Daily Wire movie,” and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, we love Ben Shapiro.” And so it’s like, okay, great. So then you say to them, “Hey, look, we need to shoot in your house. This is the situation. We’re really professional. We’ll be there from morning to night. We’ll get you in the Airbnb nearby. And this is the amount of money we have. And can you make this work?” It’s that mindset in everything.
It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting for the crew. It’s exhausting for the producers, but this is how we treat it because we treat these movies like they’re literally Ben Shapiro’s personal dollars or Matt Walsh’s personal dollars because it’s such a small company and we have to win. We have to keep the budgets low because the movies have to make money. And so that’s the other thing that we bring to the table is that mindset of just making everything a negotiation because we don’t have enough money for any of this stuff. But we pull it off every time.
BD: But is that in some cases something that you actually feel like is, even as it is a limiting mindset, something that can spawn more creativity or force you into a situation where you have to make a choice where other directors would be able to just shoot all sorts of different coverage and do everything the studio wants them to do, et cetera?
DS: Yes. Absolutely. I’ll give you a great example. We do almost everything practically in camera. So we don’t use CGI animals, we don’t use CGI blood, we don’t use CGI muscle flashes. It’s all real. And so, believe it or not, what happens is when a new crew member comes and works with us, it takes them two or three days to catch up and understand, oh, they’re not going to just use a CGI thing here. They’re not going to use a CGI band-aid.
BD: Welcome to the wonderful world of squibs.
DS: We use so many squibs that we actually, our squib provider ran out. So we’re a squib maker’s best friend. But anyway, so essentially when it’s all practical, it forces you to figure out how to do it there, and you can’t be lazy and just fix it in post. So yes, it is a great boundary with guardrails that we work from.
BD: The approach that you have when it comes to identifying the priorities of The Daily Wire audience and what people want when it comes to tuning in, I’m just curious about that as something that you work with on a gut level, meaning before you even survey around or ask questions or focus group anything, what is your gut definition of the defining characteristics of the films and of the streaming content that they want to see that they’re not getting from the gigantic swath of everything that’s out there?
DS: I think that while I have been a dyed-in-the-wool conservative since I was a young person — grew up in Dallas, Texas, in the Bush neighborhood and things like that — so what I will say is my taste in cinema and Ben Shapiro’s incredible knowledge of movies and The Daily Wire’s real understanding of their own audience, what their limits are, what they’re interested in, what they care about, what they need to see on screen to rally behind — real heroes, American traditions, Western civilization — these are the things that matter. So by just having such an alignment in our own personal values and then also a real commitment to cinema, it brings it all together. I think that’s where it stems from. And then, of course, over time we can build out the tent to be bigger and bigger and bring in the libertarians and bring in the center-left and all those kinds of people to just make this one big awesome happy family.
BD: The thing that I think is interesting about this, just as a corporate phenomenon within the world of the conversation that we see play out at the industry pubs and everything like that, is there’s this attitude of maximal screening of people who have the ability to say, “We’re just going to pump as much content out as we possibly can. We’re printing money.” They don’t really seem to care what they do with it. And they throw money at all these projects that are sometimes crazy. Recently I was listening to an episode of “The Town” from The Ringer and Puck, which I really like to listen to because it reveals, I think, a lot about the industry’s insights, but also its blind spots. And one thing that came up was that they mentioned a movie, a streamer movie that came out that had some major stars — I forget the name — which is perfect for this example, that had actually cost an obscene amount of money.
Nobody knows how many people watched it because it was on Netflix. And the idea that something like that could just come and go, with no memory whatsoever of it, is astounding, given the amount invested in it. When you’re trying to make something like this, is part of the goal to create something that is word-of-mouth memorable where you’re saying, I’m trying to make a piece of content, a movie in this case, or it could be a documentary, et cetera, that seizes on people’s minds enough that they remember it and they talk to their friends about it as opposed to the vast majority of the stuff that comes out of streamers today?
DS: You’ve hit on one of the most important questions in the entire business and for Daily Wire in our movies. First and foremost, the movies have to be made for The Daily Wire audience, for Daily Wire Plus; they have to start there. They have to generate subscriptions. They have to appeal to the existing members. And that is always our first and most important goal. But as you can see, we’re driving the cycle, crushing it on Amazon Prime right now with no monetary backing. And that’s not a shock. It’s that we made something really great, and on its own, organically, if you put it out to the masses, they’re going to love it because we do great work. And so that’s the thing. So it’s really about building up The Daily Wire, Daily Wire Plus, as a destination streaming site for movies and series and documentaries and all kinds of awesome stuff that they’re doing. And then it’s expanding the audience at the right time, figuring out how to roll it out to the rest of the world. And that’s incredible. And the truth is that these movies, they always do really well on the streaming sites once they get past the gatekeepers and stuff like that. So I’ve had dozens of examples; the biggest one being “Dragged Across Concrete,” my Mel Gibson movie from just before COVID, got no love. And then it hits Netflix, and it stayed number one for a week. And then the second example is I actually made Armie Hammer’s first movie back before “Citizen Vigilante.”
Again, the distributor got a little cold feet and didn’t do much about it. And then it hit Amazon Prime and it went to number one. So it’s like, this is not a surprise. This is just the market speaking, and with the right amount of momentum and distribution and marketing and publicity and all the great things we’re doing, we’re going to get there.
BD: There are limits to what you can do at the budget level that you’re at. That does obviously come into play. But we’ve seen this enormous success this past year, something that really snuck up on the industry, of seeing these YouTubers and the success that they’ve had with pretty fairly modest — I mean, above obviously where you’re operating — but modest by the test of the industry movies that are mostly in the horror genre. I’m a big fan of horror movies, as you know. That’s one reason I think of your movies as horror-suspense movies for the most part, in terms of genre. I know horror is a genre you have difficulty working with in the Christian and religious space, which speaks to much of the Daily Wire’s readership and subscriber base. That’s just frank. I disagree. I think “The Exorcist” is a phenomenal movie. I think “The Witch” is a terrifying movie in a way that is evocative of classic paintings and work that is meant to distill actual fear, that kind of thing. How, if possible, can we break Daily Wire into the horror space or at least the horror-adjacent space in a way that tells a story that would appeal to that audience? Is that possible?
DS: Well, first and foremost, the renewed filmmakers generation who are finding success online and then bringing it to the cinematic world or even the studio world, they really resemble the late 1960s, early ‘70s renaissance of Coppola and Spielberg and Dennis Hopper, all those great guys. And that’s so exciting.
BD: Curry Barker is definitely the Dennis Hopper out of that.
DS: I saw “Obsession” twice in theaters and I’ve watched it twice on 4K Blu-ray since it arrived. It’s the movie of the year, and there’s not even a close second, but it’s fabulous. The thing is, we’re going to have to make a horror movie that appeals to conservatives. I think abortion is an amazing topic for us to dive into. I’ve got some ideas on that. But the thing is that conservatives have to understand we’re going to put you out of your comfort zone, and there are going to be movies that you can watch that are going to appeal to you that aren’t necessarily going to test your limits. That’s just not us. We’re going to push. And so we’re just slightly different. Wonderful Christians are working on all these movies, myself included. We take our faith very seriously and we would never do anything to purposely stand on a religious front from that sensibility, but we’re just following our own guidelines and our own faith. And I think that shows through our movies.
BD: I would love to see that become a genre that is part of The Daily Wire and to prove that. I think that’s something that’s a plentiful genre to mess with, especially when you consider all the old horror-tinged mystery books and things like that that were written by Christian authors and that I still have the collective classics of. There’s a reason why Dorothy Sayers had the kind of impact on this stuff and ran the mystery club of all these people who were both Christians and would work in this space. I would love to see that happen.
Last question. I’m sure that there are lessons whenever you work on a project that you take away from the experience that are positive and negative. And you’ve run through a lot of the positives about this one.
What’s one thing — it doesn’t have to even be a negative — but just one thing that you took away from this project that maybe gave you a little more insight into whatever you’re going to do next or what you want to try next or maybe attempt to pull off that is you stretching your own creative juices or figuring something out along the way that maybe you hadn’t figured out before or hadn’t been able to execute before?
DS: I think Michael Knowles correctly, but jokingly, described me as the connoisseur of violence. And that is true. And listen, I’ve got a personal history that just makes me sort of interested in that world. But in terms of losing my parents and things like that, you just create this armor and things are less sensitized. But I think that I would like to see Daily Wire have a comedy. “Lady Ballers” was so fun to make. We need more of those. The best way to mock something is to make a comedy movie. And then I would love to see us make a “Goonies.” We should make an awesome Christmas movie. We should make an awesome “Goonies” movie. These are the places I really want to bring Daily Wire into — stuff like that. And so we’ll get there over time.
In terms of challenges on set, it’s everything. Our talent bench is so short because even the conservatives in Hollywood are too afraid to come out of the closet even now, which is just sad. But we’ve built this amazing crew of very conservative — fairly conservative crew. And we’ve been just keeping them on the movies and rolling from one to the next. So everything is a challenge, from money to talent to locations to all of it.
But we see it as a mission, and we’re doing it for the Daily Wire subscribers and for our cinema legacy.
