Copyright Variety
Arkansas native John-Michael Powell had something to prove by foregrounding the Ozark mountains in his new crime thriller “Violent Ends,” in theaters now via Independent Film Company. “There’s some great Southern cinema, don’t get me wrong,” Powell says. “But I think oftentimes Southerners, and Arkansans especially, are relegated to redneck yokel stereotypes: The lovable fools, the nitwits and the uneducated. That was true of my experiences growing up. We had family in California, so we’d always visit, and I don’t have an accent, but my mother and my family sound like Southern belles. To see the way people reacted to the accent … their first inclination was, ‘Oh, that’s so cute,’ but really the subtext was, ‘Oh, they’re less intelligent than us, and lesser.’ I do think that has a lot to do with the way cinema portrayed Southerners.” The taut, bloody “Violent Ends” follows Lucas Frost (Billy Magnussen), who rebels against his criminal family, and soon wages war against them when a botched robbery turns deadly. Powell, who wrote and directed the film, says that the idea itself is rooted in the traditions and legacies of the South. “I grew up in this very specific slice of Americana in Arkansas,” he says. “I wanted to write a story about the place I came from, a smart genre picture through the lens of the world I grew up in, and that could only come from my voice. That started with family; I’m always drawn to stories about families and the conflicts within families. ‘Violent Ends’ is very much about one family: It’s the Hatfields and McCoys if the McCoys weren’t even in the story. It’s just the Hatfields going at each other. In the South, there’s a long history of these families that have been around for generations. My movie is very much about the cyclical nature of violence and how that violence, anger and hatred can get passed down from one generation and spiral out of control.” Powell has a love of stylish crime thrillers, namechecking filmmakers like the Coen brothers and Jeremy Saulnier, as well as works like Jeff Nichols’ “Shotgun Stories” and David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence,” as inspirations. One Coen brothers specialty in particular that the director tried to match was having even minor characters carry a scene to make the South feel lived-in. “I wanted to create a world that not only had Billy Magnussen and the leads carrying the story, but had little pockets of side characters that were interesting,” Powell says, “One of the things that stands apart in this movie is that even the little characters who only show up for a scene or two make their mark and are memorable. It was always about trying to bring people to Arkansas into a world that they never knew and show them that they were regular people that were both black and white, flawed, gray and everything in between. It was just trying to show a really nuanced portrayal of the Southern American.” Despite his strong vision, Powell’s road to making “Violent Ends” was a complex journey. In addition to a day job as an editor, he finished the script in 2013, and was almost able to make the film in 2017 (“We were a few weeks away from shooting, and it fell apart, like a lot of indie movies do”). He took a step back during the pandemic and shot a microbudget feature called “The Send-Off” that effectively served as a film school education. Powell admits that while waiting to make “Violent Ends” was difficult, the roundabout path of getting it made allowed him to sharpen his skills and assemble a cast filled with strong character actors that he was proud of. “It’s a brutal process of constantly getting rejected,” he says. “And obviously, when the house of cards fell apart in 2017, that was gut-wrenching. But it’s so easy for me to be excited about the process because I can just go back to the page and write. I can go back, and I can be the little only child who’s getting excited about the movie in my head. I have a tireless, unrelenting desire to make things, and I hope ‘Violent Ends’ comes out and people are really excited about it. But should it not? That’s okay. I’ll continue making movies. If I have to go make a movie on my iPhone for $15 with my friends, I’ll go do it. I’m in love with the process of making movies.” Watch the “Violent Ends” trailer below.
