Directed by Justin Kurzel, The Order is the kind of thriller Hollywood used to make in the 1970s and 80s. The filmmaker talks to us about its inspiration and making.
About a true-life wave of violent crimes that took place in the early 1980s, The Order itself feels – in the best possible way – like something from a bygone age of classic thrillers. Starring Jude Law as a grizzled FBI agent on the trail of a white supremacist splinter cell, it’s of a piece with the bulk of director Justin Kurzel’s earlier work – the unsparing Snowtown (2011) and Nitram (2021), for example – but it also recalls the movies of such directors as William Friedkin and Michael Cimino.
Beautifully shot by Kurzel’s regular cinematographer Adam Arkapaw, it’s a harsh, disturbing portrait of how men (and sometimes women) can be drawn into racism and violence. And if such films as The French Connection or Dog Day Afternoon or Serpico spring to mind while you’re watching The Order – written by Zach Baylin and based on the book, The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt – then that’s no coincidence.
“I was watching a lot of American films from that particular period that I really loved, which is the 70s,” Kurzel tells us over a video call one December afternoon. “William Friedkin, Sidney Lumet… There was a particular way in which those directors were using genre to [tell] certain stories and land them in a very kind of real and authentic way.”
The veteran, battle-scarred and terse agent Terry Husk, played by Jude Law, was similarly inspired by the crumbled charisma of Gene Hackman – an actor who brought his rough-edged skill to The French Connection and another of Kurzel’s favourite films, the 1986 sports drama, Hoosiers.
“Gene Hackman was one of my favorite actors – just the way in lot of the characters that he played, you really didn’t know much about them,” Kurzel says. “You know, you sort of learnt about them as the scenes played out and how they responded to the action that was coming at them rather than a whole lot of exposition… One of my favourite films ever is Hoosiers. Gene Hackman is this basketball coach who arrives in this town called Hickory. No one really knows why he’s arrived and why he’s not getting jobs in other areas. And you slowly find out during the film, but there was always this wonderful sense of mystery and a simplicity to that character that I really responded to.”
When Jude Law brought the script for The Order to Kurzel, and they began working on it together with producer Bryan Haas, Hackman was often used as a reference point for the Husk character.
Says Kurzel, “Jude and I had a lot of conversations about the central character in The Order in terms of Husk, and I guess leaning on certain characteristics and traits of those sort of past actors and leading characters.”
The difference between the New Hollywood era of The French Connection and today is that, by and large, major Hollywood studios aren’t bankrolling these kinds of adult-skewing thrillers. These days, they tend to be made independently, and on much smaller budgets. It’s here that Kurzel points to another Hackman movie – Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning. Released in 1988, it’s a true-life thriller, much like The Order, and one that did well financially and earned numerous awards.
“Look at something like Mississippi Burning,” says Kurzel. “That was a blockbuster that won Academy Awards. And The Order is a genre film that studios would really make in those days, and it would be [made] as a large, commercial film. And it is – when you go and watch [The Order], it firmly sits within that genre, but it’s just strange to me that it’s sort of talked about as an independent film. It says more, I think, about what sort of films are being made at the moment. Especially adult films – they’re rarer.”
The Order has a few parallels with David Mackenzie’s Hell Or High Water, released in 2016. Both are thrillers that say something about the state of the USA; both are made by filmmakers from outside the States (Mackenzie is Scottish, Kurzel is Australian), and both were made outside the studio system.
“I thought [Hell Or High Water] was so wonderful,” Kurzel says when we make the comparison. “I’m a really big fan of that director’s work, David McKenzie. And what was interesting about that film was that it was firmly set within the world of genre, with wonderful performances, but there was an underbelly to that film that was saying something about America today. When you can get those sorts of projects where they have those really solid stories that firmly sit within a genre, but they’re actually speaking somehow to the zeitgeist… I think that’s when it gets really exciting.”
The challenge for filmmakers like Mackenzie and Kurzel, however, is that they’re often having to work quickly in order to make the most of their smaller budgets. Where the New Hollywood generation of filmmakers like Michael Cimino had studio money to fall back on, modern directors and their teams are having to think carefully about how they can make their budgets go further.
“The resources to make them are much, much less,” Kurzel says. “So you really have to be incredibly resourceful, but also work out how you’re going to do them. There’s not much room for indulgence – you’re on the clock, and you have to go, go.”
The Order is a timely reminder of how effective a well-made thriller can be, both as a pulse-quickening piece of entertainment and as a cautionary story that finds disturbing parallels between the 1980s and the present. Nicholas Hoult is magnetically watchable as Bob Mathews, a white supremacist who oversaw several assassinations, bombings and robberies across the Pacific Northwest in 1983. A story that might have otherwise drifted into obscurity, it instead emerges as a timely reminder that racism has always loitered at the fringes of western society, waiting to sneak back towards the mainstream.
Says Kurzel, “There’s a line where [one character] says to Bob Mathews, ‘You know the way forward is to get people in Congress.’ He charts out a stealth way, you know, an in-pain-sight type way in which these organisations are going to be present. It’s kind of extraordinary how these kinds of groups have become more visible.”
In the 2020s, the mainstream filmmaking landscape continues to be dominated by superheroes and franchises based on instantly recognisable brands. And while that isn’t likely to change anytime soon, there are at least filmmakers like Justin Kurzel, working hard to make superbly made, intelligent thrillers in any way they can.
“Hopefully it’ll change,” Kurzel says of the current movie-making climate. “I don’t know where the industry is going in terms of how these films are going to be made, and whether the budgets just keep on going down. I would say it didn’t ever feel to me like I was making an independent, arthouse film. It felt like I was making a kind of genre film that we used to make a lot of.”
The Order is in UK cinemas from the 27th December.
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