‘King Ivory’: Melissa Leo, James Badge Dale & Michael Mando Talk John Swab’s Fentanyl Crisis Crime Thriller – Venice Film Festival

Nancy Tartaglione

September 4, 2024 at 5:30 AM·8 min read

Indie filmmaker John Swab’s action thriller King Ivory, a multi-faceted dive into the U.S. fentanyl crisis that weaves together storylines from various angles of the war on drugs, had its world premiere in the Horizons Extra strand at the Venice Film Festival this week. Much of the main cast was on hand to reunite on the Lido after having shot the movie under an interim agreement last year in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The story follows Tulsa drug cop, Layne West (James Badge Dale), who is battling the local criminal element, which hits too close to home when his son gets hooked on fentanyl. West makes it his mission to take down those responsible, including the Mexican cartel’s local shot-caller, Ramón Garza (Michael Mando), Indian Brotherhood War Chief, Holt Lightfeather (Graham Greene), who controls state-wide trafficking while serving life inside the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester and the local Irish Mob family outfit, led by George “Smiley” Greene (Ben Foster), along with his mother, Ginger (Melissa Leo), and uncle, Mickey (Ritchie Coster).

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Tulsa native Swab, who is now nine-years sober, 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, cops, trafficked migrants, criminals, cartel members and prisoners.

Deadline spoke with Dale (1923, Hightown, The Departed), Mando (Better Call Saul, Criminal) and The Fighter Oscar-winner Leo, who has previously worked with Swab, about their experiences on the film. Below are excerpts from those conversations which have been edited and condensed for clarity.

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

DEADLINE: Melissa, how did you get involved in King Ivory?

MELISSA LEO: Well, there’s one answer to that question, John Swab. He is a spectacular director who is extremely, extremely prolific, and is constantly exploring things that are known subjects, but exploring them in ways that have not yet had the opportunity to be examined.

So with King Ivory, what we’re looking at is fentanyl. Without any judgment, John magically explains with this film: that sh*t will kill anybody. It will kill the people who sell it. It will kill the people who buy it. It will kill the people who have done it for the first time. It will kill the people who don’t know they’re doing it. It will kill the people that are hardened drug addicts.

DEADLINE: Your character is sort of ambiguous in that she’s part of a mob family, but also trying to protect her son.
LEO: The gentle way that (Swab) explores this difficult subject removes these ideas, in my mind, of bad people and good people. She’s a woman who’s a mother, and she’s grown up in God only knows what circumstances… But I imagine, because of her brother character, that it’s a pretty criminal background, and you grow up knowing what you know, and you make your way in the world. So I don’t feel that she’s evil or bad or good. She is a human being, a complicated human being. And that is what draws me to work with John.

DEADLINE: Michael, your character also appears to care deeply about his family, but is responsible for forcing people into the drug trade.
MICHAEL MANDO: What I find interesting about gangsters, is that they’re very much people. We tend to put some people in a category as if they were separate, right? They’re really people, just like everybody else. They have families, they have a sense of humor, they have compassion, they just have a point of view of the world that’s very different from the majority of us on the other side of the line. And I think it comes from having grown up with nothing, having no opportunity, not seeing a door in, at least from their point of view, they don’t see how they can afford to feed their families, and they come into this at a young age, just like the younger character in this film, and sometimes from circumstances outside of themselves.

Ramón Garza deep down wants to get caught. I think he’s a guy with a conscience who comes to an epiphany after he sees all the violence. He realizes, “I can keep running, but this isn’t the world I want my daughter to grow up in.” And, I think there’s a parallel, although they never cross paths, but there’s a parallel (with Dale’s West, who is also a father).

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

JAMES BADGE DALE: I took a deep dive to prepare for the character. We need to protect the younger generations. I don’t have solutions or anything like that, but it’s a problem we have to deal with. And it’s going to continually morph into something else. We have a responsibility to the younger generation to take care of them and hopefully inform them and make sure that they’re OK. I have children. I’m scared for my kids. I mean, my kids are young, but I don’t know what it’s going to be 10 years on, and it might be something new.

LEO: This is not speaking for John or his film, this is Melissa’s opinion on that subject. I think that the opioid crisis is brought on by the United States government on its own people as a way of controlling human beings. That’s my feeling, that the government barely has religion any longer to control the masses.

DEADLINE: Is it important to you to do projects that bring issues to the fore?

LEO: Not particularly important in and of itself. I’m not a politician. I’m an actor, right? What’s become extremely important to me, as I will be 64 in a couple of weeks, is the portraits of women. And I’m frightened to death of the inaccuracy of the portrait of women from the United States, and I’m even more terrified of the portrait of women of a certain age.

John has used my experience in the most delightful way, and my experience, my opinion, my taste about things; he gives me this incredible gift from a director to an actor that he respects my perspective on the character, and I work with him because I’m given an opportunity to show women — even if it’s a smaller part — that I can see.

DEADLINE: How did John facilitate shooting in his hometown?

DALE: Tulsa was a little bit wild west — we’re going handheld, two cameras, run and gone, super young crew that had worked with John before. So we’re moving like this, but John could just be like, “Yo, yo, man, you want to be in a movie?” So, that’s paperwork, boom, boom, boom, put you in there, and he has that ability to talk to people that maybe other people would be scared to talk to, communicate with them, bring them in.

MANDO: We had a scene where we had two guys who worked with my character, and 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, you know, great actors like James and Ben and Melissa, but also people who’ve never been on camera, and you and the director have to find a way to get them to do the right performance.

LEO: Tulsa is John’s stomping ground, he knows it like Scorsese knows New York. It’s beautiful to work with him there.

DALE: We can tell that John put a lot of himself into this, in his heart and his soul, and this one meant something to him. It was a special job for me — that excites me when a writer-director has that personal stake, and with his backstory, and then also shooting in his hometown. It was a really tight script.

DEADLINE: It was also a pretty tight shoot, right?

DALE: We were trying to finish the film before the labor stoppage and so when our deal wasn’t agreed to, we shut down for five days. We were one of the first films to put in for an interim agreement and we were in that first, I think, 30 something odd films that received an agreement. But we’re an independent film, so we miss five days shooting, we don’t have the money to gain back those five days. So we ramped it up. We just went to six-day weeks.

DEADLINE: Because of the way the film is structured into separate but ultimately converging storylines, how much did your paths cross?

MANDO: I have one scene with James, and we don’t talk in that scene, and then I have one scene with Ben, and we also don’t talk in that scene. It was so interesting. You kind of see the other side of the story and go, “Oh, there you are. You’re the guy trying to bring me down.”

DALE: I love movies like this, where you’re weaving together these storylines. The great thing for us in Venice is I get to go see Michael’s work. I get to go see Ben and Melissa’s work. I get to see what they put into it. And this was one of those shoots, like it had the palpable energy of everyone putting their best foot forward every day, and that’s, I think, the spirit of filmmaking.

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‘King Ivory’: Melissa Leo, James Badge Dale & Michael Mando Talk John Swab’s Fentanyl Crisis Crime Thriller – Venice Film Festival