In 2018, I traveled to Oklahoma City to visit the memorial to the victims of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing. There, in 1995, a 26-year-old Gulf War veteran lit a fuse in a rental truck loaded with 5,000 pounds of explosives, killing 168 people, including 19 children in the second-floor daycare center.

I was 15 when Timothy McVeigh carried out what remains the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history, but it wasn’t until recently that I became interested in how he and other white men in America radicalized against the federal government and violently joined private militias. racist ideologies.

It’s hard to remember now, but seven years ago it was surprising to see white supremacists publicly marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” And in this naive phase of shock, producers began Bryan Haas and I to research the American militia movement. We were looking for a story that could explain how we got here and found a crazy story at this museum in Oklahoma City.

One of the first exhibits you see when you enter the bomb memorial is a book called “The Turner Diaries.” It is the fictional account of a group of white supremacists called the Order who wage a race war against the US government. They counterfeit money, rob banks and armored cars, murder prominent black and Jewish Americans, and foment an armed revolution that reaches all the way to the Capitol. They also blow up a federal building using a rented truck loaded with explosives.

It was in this book that McVeigh found his blueprint, but it fell on his radar because a decade before him, another young man had also tried to make this fictional book a reality. His name was Bob Mathews. I didn’t know his story at all, but it turned out to be exactly the terrible starting point we were looking for.

“The Order,” the screenplay I eventually wrote and directed by the incredibly talented Justin Kurzel, tells the story of Mathews, a 25-year-old, charismatic ideologue who led a white supremacist group in the Pacific in the early 1980s Northwest about the same race war. Inspired by the doctrine in “The Turner Diaries,” Mathews’ group, which he also called the “Order,” committed the largest armored car robbery in U.S. history and used the money from a series of robberies to finance domestic terrorist attacks and assassinations. His most notorious crime was the 1984 murder of Alan Berg, an outspoken, liberal Jewish radio host in Denver. Mathews and his men followed Berg home from his radio station one night and shot him twelve times with a MAC-10. (Marc Maron plays Berg in the film.)

I knew a little about Alan Berg’s murder, especially that it had inspired Eric Bogosian’s great piece “Talk Radio.” But until I started this project, I didn’t realize how closely connected it was to my own life. My wife grew up in Denver and it turns out her family knew Alan Berg well. My father-in-law bought his car in the 70’s and his sister had dinner with Alan and his ex-wife the night Alan was killed. Mathews and the assassins sat in a car across the street from the restaurant, watching them eat, the MAC-10 on her lap.

Jude Law, left, Jurnee Smollett and Tye Sheridan in “The Order.”

(Michelle Faye/Vertical)

Berg’s murder investigation began in Denver and grew into one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. The agents who tirelessly investigated Mathews’ crimes make up the other half of the film.

With this classic structure, Justin, Bryan, lead actor Jude Law, all the filmmakers and I wanted to make an old-school crime thriller in the style of “The French Connection” or “Prince of the City”, full of chases and bankrupt robberies and shootouts, hopefully would be as entertaining as they were terribly relevant.

Bryan chose a very good book called “The Silent Brotherhood,” written by two Denver Post reporters who covered the order, and I used it as a basis for my research. (Another coincidence was that one of the authors served on the Denver City Council with my mother-in-law.)

Most of what is told in the film, especially the crimes and the insidious ideology that Mathews represents, is unfortunately factual. It’s not much fun to research or write, but to understand how we got here, it was important to be specific about where we were.

All in all, I worked on the script for over five years and, after we found financing, spent many more months working with Justin on what was at one point a 150+ page script spanning a dozen states and hundreds of states, trimming locations and characters up to 100 pages. It was difficult to finance the film.

During those years, I often thought back to the trip to Oklahoma City and the naivety and fear that brought this project into being. I remember how urgent I felt it was necessary to make this film at the time. That was almost seven years ago. Unfortunately, I worry that it’s even more relevant now.