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Jan. 17, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

59:44

Dallas Sonnier | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 110

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	If people want to watch movies like this and continue to consume content that isn't preaching a message to them and jamming a sort of a secular worldview down their throats, then they have to support a conservative economy.
	If you haven't heard yet, get your popcorn ready, because Daily Wire is now in the movie business.
	On this very exciting episode of the Sunday Special, I'm delighted to welcome Dallas Sonier, the producer of Daily Wire's first film, Run, Hide, Fight, the story of a young girl named Zoe who fights back against a group of shooters who take over her high school.
	Available now, only at dailywire.com.
	Raised appropriately enough in Dallas, Texas, Dallas grew up wanting to make it in the movies and eventually brought the movies to him, getting the hell out of LA and forming a production company right in his hometown, making Hollywood-level work outside of and unfiltered by Hollywood.
	Dallas started at talent agencies and management firms, repping major players in the entertainment industry.
	From there, he went on to found and co-found several companies and produced a staggering number of films over the last decade, including Bone Tomahawk, Dragged Across Concrete, The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, and Brawl in Cell Block 99.
	His newest company is Bonfire Legend, which has partnered with Daily Wire to bring you our badass new film.
	In today's episode, you'll hear all about how this team-up first started, plus the journey Dallas went through to make Run Hide Fight.
	And welcome.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
	Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Thousands of my listeners have already secured their internet.
	Join them at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
	Just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions at the end with Dallas.
	The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
	Head on over to dailywire.com, become a member.
	You'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
	Dallas, thanks so much for stopping by.
	Thank you for having me.
	Well, so we are about to embark on an excellent journey together.
	So for those who don't know, Run Hide Fight is now available over at dailywire.com.
	We're going to talk all about Run Hide Fight, where it came from, what the inspiration for it was.
	But I'll begin with with you, because people may not know you or your work.
	So how did you get into the film industry in the first place?
	Yeah, well, I grew up in Dallas, Texas and loved movies.
	I went to the movies with my dad as a kid.
	He would always let me see R-rated films, even when I was a little kid.
	And so I just became enamored with the industry and ended up sort of becoming a big fan of the Jerry Bruckheimer movies, Top Gun, Days of Thunder.
	And I realized there was a job called a movie producer and that there was a school that taught you film out at USC.
	So I just got enamored with that space and ended up sort of putting all my effort and energy into going west to California and being in Hollywood and going to film school and pursuing my dreams.
	And that's how it got started.
	Most people who have that idea, they get off the bus, they end up as baristas at Coffee Bean, and then they end up getting back on the bus and leaving.
	But that's obviously not what happened to you.
	So how did you end up actually fulfilling the dream of being able to produce film?
	Well, when I was a kid, I convinced USC Film School to let me in early.
	So I went as a 16-year-old over the summer and ended up with a semester of classes before I returned as an 18-year-old for undergrad.
	And when I got there, they had a producing program for graduates, but not for undergrads.
	So I worked with the film school and the business school, and we all worked together to create a new major called, at the time, the Business of Cinema, now called the Business of Cinematic Arts.
	And it's a big program now, and I was the first graduate to go through it, and it gave me all of the door openings to start my career in Hollywood.
	Okay, so what was the pathway of that career?
	So you finished film school and then, I mean, it's still a long jaunt from there to where you are right now.
	So you start out as an assistant.
	You go and you answer phones, and I answered phones for talent agents.
	So I answered phones for the agent of Charlie Kaufman and all of these different major writers and directors, and I learned the business by understanding that.
	Eventually, I became a manager A manager is an agent who can also produce.
	And so I became a manager, started my company, ended up partnering with a very famous legendary wrestler named Stone Cold Steve Austin.
	And with Steve as an asset, I was able to go out and raise a bunch of money and put together a film slate around Steve.
	And we went to Vancouver and we made nine movies in four years.
	Wow.
	So during this time, you know, you're working with us, which obviously means that you're a conservative because it's hard to get anybody else to work with us.
	So what were your, how did your politics play into this?
	And what were your, were your politics evident early or did you become more conservative over time?
	Well, so I grew up in a neighborhood that now houses the Bush library.
	George W. goes to my church and George W. lives 10 blocks from my house.
	So I come from a very traditional, conservative neighborhood in Dallas called Highland Park.
	And when I got to USC, it was definitely eye-opening for me to see sort of the more wide-ranging world views and things like that.
	I never changed.
	I went through college and my apprenticeship and becoming a movie producer always as a pretty open conservative.
	I avoided social media in the mid-2000s when it became a thing because I just never had time for it.
	So I was always openly conservative, but I wasn't necessarily projecting all of my thoughts and views onto all of my friends and their feeds and things like that.
	So I never changed, I was never shy about it, but back then there was more openness, there was willingness to have dialogue and things like that.
	I just made great movies.
	That was my focus.
	And then, obviously, things have evolved in Hollywood quite a bit.
	I mean, I know a lot of folks who work in Hollywood, and the mid-2000s, even then, there's a lot of dislike for anybody who supported George W. Bush, for sure.
	There are people who got blacklisted based on that alone, but it's become so much worse now.
	I mean, it is now to the point where, if you forget about supporting Trump in the last two elections, if you so much as express one iota of dissent from the prevailing woke line, Well, I haven't.
	I've just not dealt with it.
	I literally have just stayed pot, you know, sort of quintessentially me.
	can be on any other issues. So have you dealt with that shift? Well, I haven't. I've just not dealt with it. I literally have just stayed pot, you know, sort of quintessentially me. And so if you look at the movies that I'm best known for, starting out with Bone Tomahawk, Bone Tomahawk is a movie that is just a great movie.
	It does not project a political message.
	There is no agenda to making the movie.
	It simply exists as entertainment and as a great piece of content.
	And so I've always been very proactive in pushing the best talents possible.
	When I was a manager, I helped launch the careers of Greta Gerwig, Leslie Hedlund, Sean Christensen, Alex Timbers, who's one of the biggest stars on Broadway in the directing community.
	My clients were of all different shapes and sizes in terms of political views and world views, but I was always consistent in mine.
	And so when I started to make movies, I simply made the movies that I loved as a kid.
	Movies that I wanted to watch because as time went on, less and less movies were being made that I could even identify with as an audience member.
	So in a second, I want to talk to you about the gap that has emerged in Hollywood between what people want to make and what people actually want to see, because that gap has never been wider, I think, in the history of the movies.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	OK, so let's talk about politics and the movie making business right now.
	So it used to be that, you know, it was very obvious that Hollywood had a leftward lean, even from its content.
	Certainly executives have been left leaning for as long as I have been alive.
	But Hollywood used to try to cater to the audience a lot better than I think it does right now.
	Now, basically, Hollywood breaks down into two categories.
	There's the Three hundred million dollar superhero flick, which is designed to be a tentpole action film.
	And that brings in everybody of all ages.
	Or it is some unbelievably woke piece that is designed specifically for the critics or to win an Academy Award.
	And now if you want to win an Academy Award, you have to fulfill certain basic criteria about who is featured in the story, what the story is supposed to say.
	I mean, formally, they issued those those regulations this time around, which leads to movies like The Shape of Water being somehow Greenlit, made and then widely acclaimed despite being literally the worst piece of direct I've ever seen.
	So what exactly has happened to the movie industry to create the gap?
	And it's really an open gap now between the audience and on the one hand and the critics and people in Hollywood who are making these films on the other.
	Basically, Hollywood continues to move further left and further left, and I stay the same.
	And so by them moving left, they're quintessentially moving me to the right.
	And by me, I mean movies like mine, directors that make movies like mine, and audiences that so love the types of movies that we make.
	So again, I think it's more about the cultural shift than the actual movies themselves.
	But Hollywood is essentially creating this culture and they're constantly hijacking the narrative.
	So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to just hold the line, right?
	I'm trying to plant the flag in the sand and say, these movies should be continued.
	These movies should continue to be made.
	They should exist and we should celebrate them No matter what any of the critics are thinking or pushing back on, but I think you got to go backwards.
	So when I got to Hollywood, you know, I was inspired by the Jerry Bruckheimer's of the world, the Robert Evans of the world.
	Nowadays, they would be considered populist producers.
	Uh, back then they were mainstream and they were pushing these amazing movies and celebrated.
	When I got to Hollywood in the early 2000s, it was starting to become extremely corporate, right?
	So there wasn't, there was an insecurity from anyone who had a maverick attitude and you started to become company men and women in that space over time.
	The corporate fear of getting called out or cancelled by the extreme left voices and as the rise of social media and Twitter and things like that, over time the corporations became so afraid that they started to simply make Whatever movies the left wanted them to make and was demanding of them.
	And so that, it's the corporatization of Hollywood combined with the advent of social media and the extreme voices on the left pushing Hollywood completely far to the left where I don't even recognize it anymore.
	So what do you think the relationship between politics and film should be?
	Because there's some films that are overtly political and are pretty good.
	Most of the ones that are overtly political seem to suck pretty wildly.
	And that seems to be true on both sides.
	That folks on the right who seem to want only altar calls don't realize that the altar calls tend to not be very good movies.
	And on the left, increasingly, they're making altar calls.
	So we just have this competing series of altar calls.
	Well, what should the movies be doing?
	How should politics play into the movies?
	Well, anytime you bring politics into movies or even art, it tends to sort of poison the opportunity there to change hearts and minds, right?
	So, people can argue with me that art is always political, or whatever.
	Movies have always been political.
	That may be, but when it's so overt, and when it's so one-sided and so partisan, and the community is 97% one point of view, It almost becomes a joke onto itself, right?
	It becomes a parody of itself.
	And so I think Hollywood is in its own parody moment right now.
	And so I think the more we can push politics out, that would be better for the movies.
	But it's not possible.
	It's not possible.
	They won't let it happen.
	And to make movies for the audiences that my movies tend to cater to, or the ones that they tend to love, you're going to have to draw a line in the sand and pick a side.
	And that's what's happening right now.
	I didn't start this fire, right?
	I've always been the same.
	I've always been doing my thing.
	As they come after my movies and my worldview and the way that I operate as a movie industry and as a small business owner, Continuing to push my movies into a narrative, I'm going to fight back.
	And I'm sick of it.
	And I won't let it happen anymore.
	So I'll either continue to try and work with them, Or I will continue to make my own movies more and more independently over time.
	And if that's the case, great.
	So, as you've been working independently, you've still been able to work with a bevy of big-name stars, ranging from Kurt Russell to Vince Vaughn to Thomas Jane in Run, Hide, Fight.
	These are all people who are well-recognized.
	Has it provided an obstacle for you in terms of Hollywood and people you've been able to work with?
	So I don't really see obstacles.
	I don't really acknowledge them.
	So I'm a run into the burning building kind of guy and figure it out as we go along.
	So if there are people putting up obstacles in front of me, I'll figure out an end around or I'll just run right through them.
	I don't really care.
	I don't really operate that way.
	And that is the only way this will work.
	If you have this mentality where you're going to get this movie made no matter what.
	So with Run Hyde Fight in particular, I raised all the money independently.
	I put the whole movie together with literally no help.
	Keep in mind, I mean, this is a great script, and it attracted great cast, and it was never easy.
	Even going back to Bone Tomahawk, I had to mortgage my house to get the movie made.
	I had to sign a personal loan that I guaranteed that I could not pay back if it had all gone south.
	So the amount of risk I'm willing to take to push forward and continue to making these movies Whether it ends up sort of making the obstacles bigger and bigger over time, so be it.
	I won't change, and I'm happy, and I'm doing my thing, and I'm loving it.
	So what's your advice for conservatives in Hollywood?
	So I know hundreds of conservatives who are still working undercover in Hollywood.
	I know very big-name conservatives in Hollywood who I've gotten together with, like we got together originally, you know, wearing baseball caps and a coffee bean.
	You didn't care, but I'd warned you, just like I warn everybody when I get together with them, that if ever a photo is snapped of us, that it becomes, A major issue, just as I've warned every other Hollywood person who's ever come on this show.
	So, what's your advice to Hollywood people who happen to be conservative about what they should be doing there?
	As I become more vocal with my world views and things like that, it's actually opened up a lot of doors for people to come and find me.
	So I've been getting phone calls from actors, directors, even executives and things like that saying, you know, here, I'm stuck in LA, right?
	I want to work with you.
	I love your movies.
	Can we make a movie together?
	But then there's also the people who call me and say, I'm too afraid, right?
	I've got a mortgage.
	I've got kids in private school.
	I rely on my salary.
	What do I do?
	And I'm so frustrated right now.
	And what I tell them is, you have a choice.
	You have the proverbial Robert Frost poem.
	You have to pick one of the two routes.
	And you can go into the Hollywood route and they will pay you for your conformity.
	They will pay you for your hard work and your commitment to their system and their agendas and everything like that.
	You can go completely independent, but if you go independent and you come out and you wave the flag and show yourself, they're going to come after you in a way that most people cannot handle, right?
	It's the attacks are so brutal and they're so often and they're so constant.
	Keep in mind, when I am with my family on the weekend or when I'm in the office building my company, My enemies are on Twitter attacking me 24-7, and I can't keep up with that.
	So I have to tune it out and just keep going.
	So the advice I give to anyone in Hollywood who is conservative and confused about what to do,
	is you have to understand the ramifications of emerging out with your thoughts and hopefully we can take enough time to build a real competitive industry, a real conservative alternative to Hollywood that will allow people to make enough money to feed their families and have good jobs and build this industry up in a way that really five years ago these movies wouldn't have been political at all.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about some of the controversy that had been trained on you, specifically controversy surrounding Synestate and the other companies that you were the head of.
	We'll talk about that in just one second.
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	Okay, so obviously there were a couple of big controversies in the last year in which the media had these reports in Dallas Magazine and in the Daily Beast regarding Sinistate.
	It ended with some real conflagration at your company.
	Maybe you can talk about that and lay that out for folks who missed it.
	What actually happened there?
	So we talk a lot in the conservative entertainment industry about unity and we talk about, you know, is art political?
	Do movies become political?
	You know, I was trying to create a company that was all things for everyone.
	So CineState made movies across the board.
	We made extremely liberal movies under the Fangoria banner, a famous horror iconic logo, and then we made more conservative films or at least You know, sort of less woke, more based movies outside of the Sin Estate label, and then even created Rebeller, which was sort of our response to Fangoria, which is great.
	I thought I could house it all under this one umbrella and everyone would get along.
	And what a joke that became, because no one wanted to get along.
	They didn't want to be associated with the other side.
	They didn't want to find shared common ground and resources.
	And so it was the great experiment gone wrong.
	I pushed back at first, and then I just said, OK, let me take a break.
	I'm going to let this die out, and I'm going to come strong in the new year.
	I've got a new company called Bonfire Legend.
	It's representative of my ethos as a movie producer.
	I'm rocking and rolling.
	I'm as excited about making movies as ever, and I'm as confident in my decisions then and now to keep going.
	So let's talk about your movie-making strategy.
	So one of the things that you've done that's very different is, of course, you've produced all of the films that you've made on these incredibly low budgets.
	And your entire movie strategy has been very different from the Hollywood movie strategy, which is you spend $20 million on a movie, and because you have hundreds of millions of dollars out there in investor capital, you can afford to blow $20 million on a movie, and if it fails, it fails.
	And you can throw out $150 million on Dr. Dolittle, and if it fails, it fails.
	And, you know, it's really been about the amount of money you blow is almost irrelevant to the final product or to what you're attempting to do.
	And now the market, it looks like, is going to come back into place and people are going to be really hurting in the near future because of the death of theaters, which I want to ask you about.
	But what is your strategy?
	Your strategy has been different.
	And how does it relate to kind of the changes in technology we've seen in consumption?
	So any of the movies we've made should have been made on a 5x multiple budget.
	So Bone Tomahawk was made for $1.8.
	It should have been made for $10 million.
	The great wizardry of my movie producing style is that we make these movies for what they're supposed to be made for.
	That's a phrase Hollywood doesn't understand.
	That's a phrase the movie industry doesn't understand, even the independent space.
	There's so many people losing money on independent movies because they come in, they spend a bunch of money, they don't have a marketing plan, they don't have a distribution plan, they don't know their audience, they make it for tons of millions of dollars, and then they lose everything.
	Sometimes that's a mortgage payment.
	Sometimes it's a tax write-off.
	It depends on the movie.
	I don't like losing my movie investors' money.
	I like a batting average where I can say we've returned the investor's money over and over again on our movies pretty successfully.
	And so what we do is we go out and we figure out the value of the movie, right?
	We go out and we figure out the foreign sales value, the domestic sales value, what the actor's value is.
	We bring it all together and we come up with a budget based on that.
	Now, someone joked to me the other day that that is the Jeb Bush of moviemaking, right?
	No one wants to vote for Jeb Bush with his, you know, quiet ideas and, you know, thoughtful proposals.
	You know, everyone wants to be, you know, bold and brash in their moviemaking.
	But the truth is, like, that's how we keep this sustainable.
	By making movies that make money over and over again.
	So, I make the movies as small as can be, so I have total freedom, which I then transfer to the director, a great cast, I can trust my own instincts on it, and if we fail, no one loses their house.
	So in one second, I want to ask you about the movie that we have released together over at dailywire.com.
	Become a member so that you can check that out.
	Run Hyde Fight.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Let's talk about Run, Hide, Fight, because that is what has brought us together.
	So I remember us meeting.
	I think that you basically texted me or emailed me out of the blue and said that you had listened to the show.
	And I, of course, was aware of your movies.
	And I knew about Bone Tomahawk, of course, and I knew about the Vince Vaughn flicks that you'd done.
	And we ended up getting together at basically a coffee bean, as I always say, the coffee bean where all great business gets done.
	Take it from there.
	The rest is history.
	Yeah, I found a mutual friend who knew us and reached out to you because I was so happy you were liking our movies and promoting them without any sort of push on our end on your show, Standoff at Sparrow Creek and Brawl in Cell Block 99.
	So I was so happy, and so I had to get to know you.
	And so yeah, so we met, and what was so interesting was we talked about movies, we talked about politics, and then at the end I said, you know, we need to make a movie together.
	And you were so great, you said, yes, let's do it.
	And I said, you know, I'm going to figure some stuff out.
	I'm going to bring you some things.
	You go, look, if you don't want to put our name on it, I totally get it.
	I understand we can bring, you know, and I was like, are you kidding?
	We're going to put your name all over it.
	You know, you're going to become an executive producer on it.
	Now, over the over the year, we sort of stayed in touch here and there.
	And Run Hyde Fight was not originally a Daily Wire movie.
	But what happened was, I recalled that conversation, and I recalled the feeling I had when I was speaking to you, that I could trust you, and that I felt a kindred spirit and someone who was in the fight with me.
	And so I was so excited, and in fact, and God has his ways, the response to the movie from the critical community, which was so perverted and the ultimate challenge is in selling the movie to a traditional Hollywood distributor open the door for me to contact you again and say literally I think you should come on board this movie and distribute it and then the rest is history.
	So let's talk about the critical response.
	We're going to try and do this whole conversation with no spoilers so that people actually become members just to see the movie, because that, of course, is how we all get paid.
	But the movie was produced a couple of years ago, right?
	Just a year ago.
	A year ago.
	And then it comes out at Venice.
	And the response from the critics is absolutely as vicious as it can possibly be, essentially.
	So what drove that?
	And what was the critical response?
	Well, so I've made 30 plus movies.
	I know what a good movie is.
	Run Hyde Fight is a great movie.
	It is great.
	I know it.
	And so when I went to Venice, I never understood that the critics were going to Attack the movie based on a perception of politics and a subject matter issue, right?
	Now they'll hide it under the guise of creative whims or this or that or they didn't like the movie or the writing or whatever.
	But I call BS on that.
	Now, it's tricky because I hate when directors are kind of like, you know, lashing back on critics.
	But this was not one critique.
	This was a common thread amongst all the critics.
	And so I'm lashing back at the overall narrative placed on these reviews, which was subject matter.
	And you don't review subject matter, in my opinion.
	People can argue with me on that.
	Made a great movie, was destroyed by the critics, yet the people who've seen the movie, and in fact, Ironically, the Daily Beast movie critic in Italy wrote us our best review.
	Because they aren't biased.
	Their experience watching the movie is not perverted by years of hating Donald Trump and hating conservatives and all of these things.
	Look, that's the hand we're dealt.
	We're going to cry about it, or are we going to do something about it?
	And so that's why I was thinking, if I release this with a traditional distributor, I don't need a crystal ball to see what's going to happen to us.
	It's going to happen anyway.
	Might as well call Ben and do it with him.
	So let's talk about the subject matter.
	So it's obviously controversial subject matter.
	Obviously, the basic plot premise of the film is a school takeover by school shooters.
	And we at Daily Wire are intensely focused on not encouraging school shootings.
	The entire film, in my view, is a diatribe against school shootings and the media coverage of school shootings.
	We were one of the first sites in America Well, the subject matter is very personal to me.
	mass shooters under any circumstances because we don't want to give them publicity.
	And that is, in fact, one of the angles of the film is that one of the great evils of our society is giving attention to these folks because that's what they seek more than anything else.
	Maybe you can talk about the subject matter and angle of the film.
	Well, the subject matter is very personal to me.
	So I have lost both of my parents to domestic gun violence in separate instances.
	Almost unfathomable to even say it out loud.
	It's a sentence that doesn't even make sense.
	My mother was killed in her home in 2010 by her husband as she was packing her bags to leave him and divorce him.
	My dad was killed in 2012 by a hit man in Lubbock, Texas, hired by the ex-boyfriend of the woman he was dating at the time.
	Totally unrelated.
	Both of them caught completely off guard in their own homes and killed, where you should be the safest.
	And so I have carried that with me, that feeling of loss, tragedy, sadness, for so long.
	And I was looking for a movie that I felt I could put some of that energy into.
	So when the script for Run Hyde Fight came my way, I was so excited about it.
	It was about to be sold as a spec script to a major studio, and then Parkland happened.
	And then they pulled out.
	Of course, that's when I get the call.
	That's when I get the call for every script, is when everyone else passes, but they know it's a good script.
	They just need someone bold enough to be willing to make it.
	So, I said, this script deserves to be made.
	I'm going to take the personal responsibility of the movie, even beyond the director, even beyond the actors, even beyond my producers, and everything like that.
	Because I have lived with the personal tragedy of losing not one, but two parents to violence, gun violence.
	And so I'm going to take the responsibility.
	I'm going to shelter the movie and we're going to make it in my system.
	With independent money so that I can make it totally unperverted, right?
	No one can touch it.
	I'll shield it from all the external influences.
	And that's what we did.
	The movie's great.
	It's important.
	And I think it's going to shock some people.
	The lockdown procedures, the idiocy of the reactions and the way that schools have to react and the policies there.
	If we do anything with this movie, if we can just shine a spotlight on the policies and make them better around the reactions to school shootings and keeping our schools and our children safe, Then I'm thrilled.
	Beyond that, it is a wildly entertaining movie, and I don't believe that you cannot be entertained and watch a movie like this.
	So, as we talked about, the critics universally savaged it.
	I'm fully expecting that upon release of the film, there will be a second wave of critical hatred for the film, which is, again, one of the things that has happened not just to your film, but it's happened to nearly any film these days that does anything that crosses the woke.
	I mean, I recently had a conversation with J.D.
	Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, about how the critics went after Hillbilly Elegy.
	What do you think is the answer to that?
	because the idea behind Hillbilly Elegy was that you might want to take some of these rural white folks seriously and the critics had decided in the meantime that no you know after the movie got greenlit now was not the time to take rural white folks seriously we couldn't do that anymore and they decided to just burn it all the way down so what do you think is the answer to that because we are seeing this this vast gap emerge between what the critics think about films and what the audiences think about films Hillbilly Elegy has 20-some percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
	It's got an 85% approval rating among audiences.
	I'm sure that Run, Hide, Fight will have a 0% or a 5% or a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the audience ratings are gonna be above 90%.
	What in the conservative community should we, and the more mainstream community, should we be doing about this?
	I would love to take Biden at his word for unity, but it's never gonna happen.
	It's not happening.
	So I really believe that it's possible for both sides to work together, to get along and to make movies and work in the same workplace.
	I totally believe it's possible.
	But I also think we're entering into probably an eight year period.
	of tribalism and people sort of going into their own corners and I think that if people want to watch movies like this and continue to consume content that isn't preaching a message to them and jamming a sort of a secular worldview down their throats Then they have to support a conservative economy.
	And by that, I mean everything.
	A conservative Hollywood alternative.
	Any of it, right?
	So I think ultimately, you know, it has to... I don't like it.
	I didn't want this to happen.
	I thought I was going to be, you know, living in L.A., running a movie studio by now.
	And here I am, you know, In my own independent lane.
	But in a way, I'm happier now than I ever would have been there.
	And I know those people.
	They're still my friends.
	They're unhappy.
	They're insecure.
	They're confused about the lockdowns and living in California under Gavin Newsom.
	They're confused about all this.
	They're moving to Texas.
	They're calling me.
	Even my sort of lovely liberal friends.
	And I'm encouraging them, get out.
	And it's across the board.
	If your company is pushing a critical race theory on you, get out of that company.
	If you're going to a college and your professor is pushing an agenda on you, speak up and push back.
	Now, I know I have a privileged position because of my stature and my financial situation and things like that, so I understand it's tough.
	But I promise you, we will create enough infrastructure on the other side of the fence to give landing pads and places to work and make movies for people who don't want to work in that industry anymore.
	And I'm still in the industry right now.
	I've got a movie at New Line that they say they're going to make this year.
	I sold a movie to Netflix.
	It's coming out in a couple of months.
	I've got a movie with the folks who made John Wick.
	I mean, I'm still in the business, right?
	I talk to the agencies all the time.
	So I'm still one foot in, one foot out.
	But if I had to choose today, I'm out and I'm going this direction and I'm so excited about it.
	I think it's going to be a big move.
	So let's talk about the changes to the market and also how we prepare conservative audiences for having to think this way.
	Because I think conservative audiences have never really thought seriously about engaging in the culture in this way because there really have been no alternatives.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so one of the things obviously that we are focusing on as we shift into entertainment at Daily Wire is trying to let conservative audiences know exactly what you're talking about, that you have to stop thinking about entertainment as just a thing you do in your off hours the same as everybody else, because the entertainment community is not thinking about you that way.
	The entertainment community very often sees you as the enemy, they see you as the bad guy, and they are looking to both preach to you and insult you at the exact same time, and so you're going to need to Engage with with entertainment the way the left engages with entertainment Which is that unless you are the intransigent?
	Group of people who wish who want to see the stuff you want to see you're not gonna get to see any of that stuff How do we convince conservatives that you know without making overt conservative altar calls?
	You still are gonna have to engage with a different type of entertainment and put your money where your mouth is if you don't want To see Hollywood take over the entire culture. It's never in our nature as conservatives to Rally together because we are so individualistic And it's not in our nature as conservatives to fight back because we're worried about protecting our family and conserving, right?
	So what we have to realize is that you're in the middle of a culture war now.
	And a culture war now leads to a political war later.
	And it is coming for you.
	The cavalier executives in Hollywood hate you.
	They hate your kind.
	They hate your churches.
	They hate your guns.
	They hate all of it.
	They are hell-bent on pushing their narrative and destroying anything that doesn't totally serve their agenda.
	So, You have to fight back.
	And there's interesting ways you can do it because not everyone has the platform that you have or the movie producing career that I have.
	So, what do you do if you're just a person who loves movies and loves freedom of speech and loves America?
	Well, a few things.
	You support the companies that support Us, right?
	So, I do it all the time.
	I didn't watch an hour of NBA, basketball, or the NFL season this year.
	I'm the biggest sports fan in the world, and it hurt not to be able to watch my Dallas Cowboys on Sunday.
	But I turned it all off.
	And for one second, not a second, Conversely, I made a bunch of purchases this year.
	Simply Safe, Black Rifle Coffee, the Pearl Source.
	I'm all in, right?
	So you can make these, you know, real commitments to promoting the conservative companies that share your worldview.
	Because ultimately, it ain't politics.
	It's worldview.
	It is secular worldview versus biblical worldview.
	It is, you know, sort of an individual freedom versus groupthink and thought police and all these different things.
	We've got to fight back because if we don't, it's just going to keep going and keep going.
	It's just creeping in and we're beyond creep now.
	It's overwhelming.
	So I just said enough and I ripped off the mask and said, let's go.
	Let's go do this.
	So one of the things that I'm really optimistic about is, again, the change in the level of technology that is necessary in order to do this.
	It used to be you had to have not only a movie studio behind you, a big movie studio with tons of money, but you also had to have a distribution system that would put your movie in 300 theaters.
	Now, 1,000 theaters or 2,000 theaters.
	And now it seems like movie experience, because of COVID, it was already dying.
	Now it looks like there's just been a stake put through its heart, which means that the entire Hollywood system is about to crumble from within.
	I mean, so much of their budget is reliant on spending oodles of money on a big tentpole film they can then put out in theaters and make $150 million in a weekend.
	And now they can't do that anymore, and they're having to falsify statistics about how much money they're making off individual movies on Netflix.
	If you watch 30 seconds of a movie on Netflix, it's exactly the same as you spent 20 bucks at a theater to watch a Marvel film.
	So I think that's opening up some real opportunities, and I think they're moving into a space in which you're the pro and in which you are actually the 400-pound gorilla.
	They say it takes 60 days to break a bad habit and 30 days to make a new habit.
	We're so far beyond that timeline in terms of COVID and the way that we see the world and the way that we operate on a daily basis.
	I believe that movie theaters are done.
	I think that back in even March, when Universal sort of messed with the windowing between the time a movie comes out in theaters and when it comes out online or on VOD, I think that was the death nail to theaters.
	Even back then, I felt it.
	And now, months later and months later, these movie theaters, they're so in debt.
	They have hundreds of millions of dollars of debt.
	Insurmountable debt.
	And people don't want to come back to movie theaters right now.
	They just don't.
	There's too much fear.
	I myself have seen six movies in theaters, and every time I go, I'm the only person in the movie theater unless I went with someone.
	And so it's over.
	Now, that's good and bad.
	I'm going to miss movie theaters.
	I'm a movie theater guy.
	I'm a physical media, you know, by the Blu-ray kind of guy.
	Like, I'm traditional in that sense.
	I love going to the movie theater and having a full audience and the popcorn and the whole experience.
	But the truth is, my kids, they don't.
	They don't even know what it is.
	They've gone to movie theaters many times, but it's not in their soul, right?
	And their generation.
	So it's all gonna become a home entertainment play.
	The good news is, it levels the playing field for everyone.
	It's like the music industry.
	I couldn't tell you what label released the last 200 albums that I've downloaded, right?
	I couldn't even tell you.
	So it's really important now that we put out enough content to compete with Netflix, build up that brand, servicing our audience in a way where we can get them to expect great movies from us.
	Because if you look at the movies that conservatives have generally been fed, they tend to be sort of overtly political or overtly Christian.
	Nothing wrong with either of those.
	And I have great respect for the people who work in those industries, and they are my friends.
	But I believe that we make better movies and I believe that we can figure out how to create a real momentum, a real movement in movies that aren't necessarily conservative but simply are not
	I think one of the big moves here is going to be toward better writing, I'm hoping, in Hollywood, just because they've been talking about how it's the golden age of TV for a while because the writing has gotten so much better on TV than it is in many of the movies, but movies were so reliant on giant spectacle and foreign marketing in China and all of this that now that the theater experience in the United States is largely dead, it doesn't matter to you if you're watching a hundred million dollars on your phone.
	Right?
	The only thing that matters is whether it's watchable on the phone.
	The special effects don't look the same when they are held in your hand as they are when they're projected on a giant iMac screen.
	I also think the phone is at times is even sort of over focused.
	We focus too much on the phones.
	I still think the movie theater, television, screen is still the key.
	So I think if you have provocative movies with great writing, great acting, a really compelling story, and good producing, because you've got to bring it all together, I think that's really exciting.
	And then, just putting out the movie with Daily Wire, we're reaching an audience size That we've never reached on a movie before.
	Ever.
	Ever.
	Not even Bone Tomahawk, not Brawl in Cell Block 99, not Dragged Across Concrete.
	None of those movies in one week have reached as many people As Daily Wire with Run Hyde Fight as those movies have in their entire runs.
	So this is such an exciting thing and I just want to keep doing it because even just the trailer numbers are out the roof instantly.
	So your access to the audience through Daily Wire and your own show I think is so key because they trust you and then if we can continue to bring them great content that is exciting and entertaining, I think that there will be a real opportunity here in the marketplace to kind of take some of the focus away from traditional big Hollywood.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about some of the other movies that you've made.
	What are your favorites?
	And also, I want to I want to ask about the level of violence in the films, because the conservatives are always sort of complaining about levels of violence in films.
	Your films are certainly not shy when it comes to the when it comes to the bloodshed.
	So we'll get to that in just one second.
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	As a big fan of all of your films, I can definitely say that none of them are for kids who are under the age of maybe 15 years old, at a minimum.
	Yeah.
	Bone Tomahawk is a movie that I loved and also would not watch with my wife because she's a bit skittish when it comes to the violence.
	And Bone Tomahawk is definitely not skittish when it comes to the violence.
	So how should conservatives think about themes like that?
	It seems to me that Hollywood owns the space because conservatives have given up the space.
	And so instead of being so puritan about the kind of stuff that people watch, we should just acknowledge what people watch and then compete in that space.
	I think if you look at a traditional Hollywood conservative viewer going back to the 70s and 80s, I think they liked a lot of movies that were pretty violent.
	All the Schwarzenegger movies, Stallone, Rambo, going back to the 70s even with The Godfather, these are great movies.
	And I just think that that audience has been forgotten, right?
	Now, as we bring them back into the fold of watching movies, I think that there's always going to be a skepticism, right?
	Conservative movies tend to be too sort of overtly political, or they tend to have sort of a quality of writing that just isn't competitive.
	Let's fix that, right?
	Bring them back into the fold.
	Now, in terms of the violence, keep in mind, I was making movies that would go through a traditional Hollywood distributor for VOD and have no marketing.
	So the movies themselves were the marketing.
	And so I think most of the movies I was making were that.
	violent because I needed a hook or I needed an inflection point or something to go viral.
	And also just the filmmakers that I was attracted to and continue to be attracted to their work, you know, happened to be that. And let's be honest, I was processing the death of my parents, you know, the deaths of my parents. So I think if you look at my body of work 10 years from now, I think it will level out a little bit in terms of the violence.
	But in terms of the conservative audience, give it a chance.
	There's always a level of provocation and entertainment to any movie.
	The violence in our movies is almost clinical in its realistic and commitment to authenticity.
	So we're no different in many ways than almost sort of a documentarian in that sense.
	But I look forward to seeing everyone's reaction because yeah, it's very violent.
	We make violent movies.
	I mean, I think that this is part of the general appeal that conservatives are also going to have to understand is to younger people.
	And that is that younger people are used to a certain level of edginess and violence and pushing the envelope in the stuff that they watch.
	And so if we're going to make this move over a daily wire into the entertainment field, we want to be pushing the envelope.
	We want to be arguing in favor of why 17 or 18, 21-year-olds should be watching our stuff.
	You know, there's lots of great material over at Hallmark Channel, but that's not exactly what we're seeking to do.
	What we're seeking to do is reach out to audiences who have opened up to the Hollywood experience because they're looking for edgy, cool, interesting, suspenseful.
	And drawing people when they're young is the way that you're going to eventually dissuade them from entering the culture war on the other side.
	That's absolutely right.
	I think two things on that front.
	One, the millennial generation will ultimately flow through the advertising demographic, the 18 to 34.
	That will take time, and ultimately the pendulum always swings back, right?
	So I think if we look at the early data, on Gen Z and Gen Alpha and the younger generation, I think they're going to push back on some of the general sort of stereotypical millennial reactions and behavior. So I have a hope for our children.
	If you look at history, it tends to repeat itself. And Hollywood in the late 1960s was in the toilet, They were making these giant war epics and musicals, and it was all falling flat.
	It was irrelevant.
	And in come the new Hollywood in the latest 60s, earliest 70s.
	And they arguably created some of the best movies in the world.
	You know all the filmmakers, Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, De Palma.
	Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, all those guys, certainly.
	But there were a couple of producers that helped launch this movement, and they're called the BBS guys.
	Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Steve Blanner.
	And they ushered in this new generation by producing Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.
	Those movies appealed to a younger audience that was sick of the mainstream nonsense that Hollywood was putting out at the time.
	And so I really want to take a page from their playbook and sort of reinvent this youthful, vibrant Hollywood moviemaking, which appeals to a younger audience that simply isn't interested in what the major studios are putting out right now.
	So my great hope, beyond obviously conservatives getting involved in entertainment, is hopefully moderates and even some folks on the left, good-hearted liberals, will watch the movies and maybe they will be able to forge a connection in entertainment that's been foreclosed from the other side.
	I know that that may be too much to hope for at the beginning, but I do hope that if Hollywood is going to cede all of this ground and decide that cop shows are off-limits and need to be removed from TV, and that traditional narratives are just too much for people to handle because they're not woke enough, they're opening an awful lot of ground for people like you to fill in.
	for both of us. I know for certain that after we announced this deal on both sides, our emails and boxes have been flooded and our phone calls have been flooded with people reaching out saying, finally, thank you, right?
	For every sort of aggressively mean tweet that we get, we get two to three emails in the positive manner.
	People saying, I'm so happy this is finally happening, right?
	So I know the audience is out there.
	My movies do so well in middle America.
	We sell out at Walmart, they have to reorder the DVDs.
	The DVDs!
	Okay, it's like, you wonder who are the people watching NCIS every week.
	And it's my aunts and uncles and cousins in Shreveport, Louisiana.
	Real salt of the earth, great people who I love sharing Thanksgiving with.
	And I just, this is my family.
	This is the world I know.
	This is the audience I know.
	And they're mostly conservative and some moderates and things like that.
	And I think there's such an awesome opportunity to start sharing movies with them again and making movies for that audience.
	They're going to eat it up and they're so excited about it.
	Let's talk about what it was like to work on the set of Run, Hide, Fight.
	How did that shoot go?
	How was it to work with Isabel May and Thomas Jane and all the rest of the cast?
	Yeah, Isabel had auditioned for a movie of ours before, and I'd always wanted to cast her in something.
	So when I found Run, Hide, Fight and started to put it together, and when we cast the movie, I really wanted her in that role.
	So I didn't want to sort of push, you know, an agenda on Kyle, so I sort of let it become the casting director's idea first, and then, you know, over time, But I was so happy we ended up casting her.
	And then Thomas, he had been attached to the project for a long time and really supportive of the movie and of me as a producer and things like that.
	So when it all came together, we ended up deciding to make it about a year ago in Texas in a small town called Red Oak.
	We found a middle school that was decommissioned.
	It was going to be turned into a youth center.
	And so we had the whole school totally empty to ourselves.
	And man, did we blow it up.
	I mean, we just really, I mean, we destroyed it.
	You know, with, you know, driving cars through walls and explosions, things like that.
	So it was a blast.
	It was really one of the most exciting times on set that I'd had as a movie producer because We were making something I knew was going to be a good movie and entertaining, but also something that felt really important, both for the active shooting response and trying to really sort of push that conversation into the forefront again.
	But also, I felt in my heart that this was a movie that I had to make personally.
	Uh, to sort of, you know, celebrate the legacy of my parents and their memory, uh, and their, and sort of honor all the things that they've done in my life.
	And I just can't, I can't tell you how proud I am of the movie.
	I mean, it's just so important to me.
	Well, we are, of course, super excited to be releasing it with you over at Daily Wire.
	It's already there at Daily Wire.
	As you watch this, subscribe so that you can hear not only the end of this conversation, but also so that you can actually see the film right now.
	I'm going to be asking Dallas a couple more questions, starting with a few of his favorite movies, also where he thinks the future of the country is politically, if we can actually win this particular fight.
	If you'd like to hear Dallas Sonier's answers, you have to be a Daily Wire member.
	So head on over to dailywire.com and click subscribe.
	You can hear the rest of our conversation.
	Over there.
	Well, Dallas, thank you so much for stopping by.
	Everybody needs to check out our newest film, Run Hide Fight, available right now only at dailywire.com.
	Dallas, thank you so much for joining the show.
	It's great to see you.
	Thank you for having me.
	Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
	Editing is by Jim Nickel.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
	Hair and makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
	Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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