'King Ivory' cast talks about filming crime thriller about fentanyl crisis: Venice Film Festival

Action thriller by indie filmmaker John Swab King Ivorya multi-layered look at the U.S. fentanyl crisis that weaves together storylines from different drug war angles, had its world premiere this week in the Horizons Extra program at the Venice Film Festival. Much of the main cast was on hand to reunite on the Lido after shooting the film last year under an interim arrangement in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The story follows Tulsa drug agent Layne West (James Badge Dale) as he fights local crime, which hits close to home when his son becomes addicted to fentanyl. West makes it his mission to take down those responsible, including local Mexican cartel leader Ramón Garza (Michael Mando), Indian Brotherhood war chief Holt Lightfeather (Graham Greene), who controls the nationwide drug trade while serving a life sentence at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, and the local Irish Mafia family gang led by George “Smiley” Greene (Ben Foster) along with his mother Ginger (Melissa Leo) and uncle Mickey (Ritchie Coster).

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Swab, from Tulsa, who has been sober for nine years, has spoken openly about his time as an addict. In his research for King Ivory (a street name for fentanyl), he spent time with families of addicts, active junkies, government officials, police officers, victims of human trafficking, criminals, cartel members, and prisoners.

Deadline spoke to Dale (1923, Hochstadt, The Departed), Mando (Better call Saul, Criminal) And The Fighter Oscar winner Leo, who previously worked with Swab, talks about their experience on the film. Below are excerpts from those conversations, which have been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Producer is Jeremy M. Rosen under his name Roxwell Films, in his eighth collaboration with Swab. WME Independent is selling the domestic rights.

DEADLINE: Melissa, how did you get into King Ivory?

MELISSA LEO: Well, there's an answer to that question: John Swab. He's a spectacular director who is extremely, extremely prolific and constantly exploring familiar themes but exploring them in ways that haven't been explored before.

So with King Ivorywe're looking at fentanyl. Without judgment, John magically explains with this film: This shit is going to kill everybody. It's going to kill the people who sell it. It's going to kill the people who buy it. It's going to kill the people who are doing it for the first time. It's going to kill the people who don't know they're doing it. It's going to kill the people who are hardcore drug addicts.

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DEADLINE: Her character is somewhat ambiguous in that on the one hand she is part of a mafia family, but on the other hand she is also trying to protect her son.
LION: The gentle way in which (Swab) deals with this difficult subject, in my eyes, removes the notion of good and bad people. She's a woman who is a mother and she grew up in God knows what circumstances… But I imagine because of her brother character that she has quite a criminal background and you grow up with the knowledge you have and make your way in the world. So I don't feel like she's evil or bad or good. She's a human being, a complicated human being. And that's what draws me to work with John.

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DEADLINE: Michael, your character also seems to care deeply about his family, but is responsible for pushing people into the drug trade.
MICHAEL MANDO: What I find interesting about gangsters is that they're very human. We tend to put some people in a category like they're special, don't we? They really are human, just like everyone else. They have families, they have a sense of humor, they have compassion, they just have a view of the world that's very different from most of us on the other side of the border. And I think that comes from growing up without anything, having no opportunities, not seeing a way forward, at least from their perspective, not knowing how to afford to feed their families, and they get into that situation at a young age, just like the younger character in this movie, and sometimes because of circumstances outside of their own.

Ramón Garza, deep down, wants to get caught. I think he's a guy with a conscience who has an epiphany after seeing all the violence. He realizes, “I can keep running away, but this is not the world I want my daughter to grow up in.” And I think there's a parallel, even though their paths never cross, but there is a parallel (with Dales West, who is also a father).

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DEADLINE: James, how familiar were you with the fentanyl crisis in the United States before you signed?

JAMES BADGE DALE: I've been preparing for the role a lot. We have to protect the younger generations. I don't have any solutions or anything, but it's a problem we have to deal with. And it's going to keep morphing into something else. We have a responsibility to the younger generation to look after them, hopefully inform them and make sure they're OK. I have kids. I'm scared for my kids. I mean, my kids are young, but I don't know what it's going to be like in 10 years, and it might be something new.

LION: I'm not speaking for John or his film, but for Melissa's opinion on the subject. I believe that the US government is putting the opioid crisis on its own people in order to control the people. I feel like the government hardly has any religion left to control the masses.

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DEADLINE: Is it important to you to do projects that get to the heart of the matter?

LION: Not particularly important in and of itself. I'm not a politician. I'm an actor, right? What has become extremely important to me, as I turn 64 in a few weeks, is the portraits of women. And I'm scared to death of the inaccuracy of the portraits of women from the United States, and I'm even more scared of the portraits of women of a certain age.

John has used my experience, my opinion and my taste in things in the most wonderful way. He gives me this incredible gift from a director to an actor: he respects my perspective on the character. And I work with him because it gives me the chance to show women – even if it's just a smaller role – that I can understand them.

DEADLINE: How did John make filming in his hometown possible?

VALLEY: Tulsa was a little bit like the Wild West – we have handheld cameras, two cameras, go and go, a super young team that had worked with John before. So we do it that way, but John could just say, “Hey, yo, man, you want to be in a movie?” So, it's paperwork, boom, boom, boom, you get put in there, and he has the ability to talk to people that others might be afraid to talk to, communicate with, involve them.

MANDO: We had a scene where two guys were working with my character. We were in a car and there was this whole intimidation scene with us. We literally grabbed two guys off the street. And it was fascinating when you're working with great actors like James, Ben and Melissa, but also people who have never been on camera before and you and the director have to find a way to get them to give the right performance.

LION: Tulsa is John's territory, he knows it as well as Scorsese knows New York. It's wonderful to work with him there.

VALLEY: We can tell that John put a lot of himself into it, with his whole heart and soul, and this job meant something to him. It was a special job for me – that's what excites me when a writer and director is so personally involved, with his backstory, and then also shooting in his home town. It was a really tight script.

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DEADLINE: It was also a pretty close shoot, wasn't it?

VALLEY: We wanted to finish the film before the shutdown, and when we didn't sign our contract, we had to take five days off. We were one of the first films to apply for an interim contract, and we were one of the first, I think, 30 films to get a contract. But we're an independent film, so we miss five days of shooting, and we don't have the money to make up those five days. So we extended the shoot. We just went to six-day weeks.

DEADLINE: Given the structure of the film with separate but ultimately converging storylines, how often did your paths cross?

MANDO: I have a scene with James and in that scene we don't talk, and then I have a scene with Ben and in that scene we don't talk either. It was so interesting. You kind of see the other side of the story and you're like, “Oh, there you are. You're the guy who's trying to take me down.”

VALLEY: I love films like this where the storylines are interwoven. The great thing for us in Venice is that I can look at Michael's work. I can look at Ben's work and Melissa's work. I can see what they put into it. And this was one of those shoots where you could feel the energy that everyone is showing what they can do every day, and I think that's the spirit of filmmaking.