Rebel Ridge Director Jeremy Saulnier on the Very Real, ‘Very Unjust’ Police Tactic the Film Exposes

Rebel Ridge, the new Netflix hit from Jeremy Saulnier, starts with a veteran named Terry — played by breakout star Aaron Pierre — getting stopped by cops and forced to surrender $30,000 in cash.

It’s a great instigating incident for a film, but it’s also a dramatization of a very real practice called civil asset forfeiture, which has become a popular and much criticized tool of law enforcement.

Saulnier, who wrote and directed Rebel Ridge, presently No. 1 on Netflix, tells MovieMaker he wanted to touch on issues like the militarization of small-town police forces without getting “sidetracked with injecting any overt politics.” But he found that civil asset forfeiture was something that people of all political stripes tend to dislike.

“The story itself was just compelling to me because of a very unjust practice that is, in fact, legal and promoted throughout local law enforcement as a way to sort of use a cartel-fighting loophole in the law on everyday citizens,” he says on our latest podcast, which you can enjoy on Apple or below.

“I was very attracted to it because it was a unifying principle — everyone loathed it. You’d have victims that were sort of marginalized people in the rural South. You had people of color. You had white Texas ranchers who had their entire property and every vehicle on it seized because they had couple marijuana plants.”

The Associated Press explains that while civil forfeiture was designed to let police take assets from criminal enterprises, the practice “allows authorities to take someone’s property, without having to prove that it has been used for illicit purposes” and that critics consider it “legalized theft.”

A 2024 poll by the libertarian Cato Institute found that 84% of Americans oppose civil asset forfeiture. The liberal-leaning American Civil Liberties Union is among critics of the practice — and even recently cited Cato’s poll in a rare example of liberals and conservatives finding common ground.

While Saulnier was writing Rebel Ridge in 2019, the Supreme Court issued a rare unanimous ruling placing limits on the practice — though the ruling, as Saulnier notes, “certainly did not get rid of it.”

So yes: The No. 1 movie on Netflix is about civil asset forfeiture. But the joy of Rebel Ridge is that it also works as a taut drama about man standing up to a corrupt-small town police department (led by Don Johnson’s Chief Sandy Burnne) with the help of an aspiring lawyer named Summer McBride (AnnaSophia Robb.) There’s lots of car crashes and martial arts and pointedly non-lethal shootings.

Saulnier loves to include references to societal injustices in his films without spelling out his politics or speechifying. His 2015 punks vs. neo-Nazis film Green Book, for example, didn’t feel the need to explain that Nazis are bad — it trusted the audience to understand that.

Rebel Ridge is a relief from the onslaught of message movies that sometimes emphasize the message over telling a good story. The film is a crackerjack, mid-budget thriller that’s fun to watch, whether or not you care about the issues it raises.

“I certainly have my own politics, and I really can’t help but infuse some of them on sort of a subconscious level. But I try hard to find compelling stories and compelling characters and let that guide me. I think it’d be really boring if we got into a political back and forth.

He notes that the film includes “people advocating for their side — but it’s about institutions. It’s about pressure. It’s about point of view. It’s not about politics.”

During the filmmaking, Rebel Ridge played for test audience, and scored “very high with many demographics — but one of them was conservatives. So it was really gratifying to see how this movie hit all kinds of demographics you wouldn’t expect, and I think part of that is because of the research and the realism.

“Yeah, it’s a corrupt police force, but it’s also a cross-section of humanity. You have people who are sociopaths, for sure. You have people who are caught in the middle. You have pragmatists that just don’t have the capacity to to curb their own ambitions. It’s like any workplace or occupation or institution that you come across.