Glasgow Film Festival Interview: Michael Premo discusses the production process for Homegrown and what happened afterwards
Homegrown follows three ‘Proud Boys’ (the far-right fascist group Trump famously told to ‘stand up and stand by’ during his first term in office), in the lead up to, during, and after the January 6th insurrection on the U.S Capitol.
I spoke to director and former Occupy Wall Street activist Michael Premo, who made the film with partner and sound recordist Rachel Falcone, about the production process, what happened afterwards, and where he finds hope.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
How long would you say it took Thad, Randy and Chris to get used to having you around? Were you conscious of them playing to the camera, or trying to provoke you?
People are always performing, but people are performing with or without the camera. We come from a tradition of oral history and doing interview-based work before we were doing verité. Our approach is kind of the same in both styles: we let people exhaust their own personal spiel. Everyone has that legend that they construct that they share when they first meet someone. Once we got past that, this awkward silence emerges and then people fill that with who they really are.
It varies from person to person. Chris is a very direct, blunt individual who just is who he is, regardless of who was around. With Thad, it took a lot of conversation to even get his consent to be able to film. That took several months, and then it took some time even when we were with him for him to warm up to us, so it’s certainly different with every person.
How did you decide who was filming with each of them? Did you form a particular bond with one or the other, or was it more based on schedules and logistics?
It was really schedules and logistics. Chris was mostly in New Jersey and New York City, Thad was a bit more mobile. Because it was the pandemic, we were forced to have a much smaller crew, so it was me filming and Rachel [doing the] sound. It was mostly the two of us filming everything; sometimes we would split up and try to film two simultaneous things that were happening – when that happened it was purely a flip of a coin.
We filmed a bunch of people around the country, and when we finally got into the edit we had to make those hard choices of who would actually be in the film. Those choices were largely guided by the limit to the amount of ideas that your head can hold in a two hour movie. That really created the scenario where we found that we could only have two and a half sort of protagonists in the film, and that let us to have the three that we did, because we felt like they broadly represented streams of thought in the movement.
Chris represented the type of person who was newly politicised – there was so many people that we met that had never considered themselves political before 2016, but were so, as they describe, ‘awakened’ by Donald Trump’s message that they became involved. That was very much Chris’s story. Thad represented this multicultural diverse representation that is very present in the conservative movement but is largely under reported in the media. Then Randy was that behind-the-scenes organiser, who’s working hard to work the phones and send those emails and be on the social media to really galvanise support.
Have you had much contact with the three of them since the documentary’s been released? Do they like how they came across?
Randy feels like he’s represented accurately. Chris is still wrestling with what he did and his accountability. He spent three to four years in jail (he was pardoned on January 20th), and has come out even angrier then when he went in. Prison is horrible, and he discovered the realities of an absolutely horrible criminal justice system. He has an autoimmune disease, celiacs, so he lost a lot of weight and had a lot of trouble getting proper nutrition. So he came out really frustrated, feeling persecuted. I’ve been talking to him often since he got out, about every week, and he really wants to devote himself to criminal justice reform. He started a road trip where he’s driving around to visit other people who were also convicted for their involvement in January 6th, as well as the broader support community for those people that has sprung up around the country, to figure out what’s next. Thad is in jail for something else unrelated. He hasn’t seen the film, but he’s read a lot about it and he’s got some friends who’ve seen it and he feels like he’s been accurately portrayed. He’s sent me some glowing emails from prison where he’s involved in the prison entrepreneurship programme, and trying to get his life back together.
Overall, Homegrown is a fairly bleak documentary. Was there anything you saw during the making of it that gave you hope?
What gives me hope is the understanding that the conservative movement is not a monolith. There are many different ideas at play. I feel like a lot of the conversations about polarisation are being driven by politicians, and some people in the media, who are focusing on the divisions. When it comes down to it, people want the same things. We’re living in a moment where people across the political spectrum increasingly feel like the system is rigged in favour of the wealthy and corporations at the expense of the middle class and working class, and are frustrated and looking for solutions. People are having trouble paying for eggs, and being able to have a job they feel is satisfying, and there are some people in positions of power that have large megaphones like Nigel Farage who are sort of driving these wedges in ways that I think are unhelpful.
So what gives me hope is understanding and learning that people across the spectrum want similar things. When we went into this, we thought that these movements and these people are driven by ideology. What we found is people in all social circumstances who are driven by emotions; people who are driven by this extreme sense of alienation, that’s led to loneliness that has caused them anxiety. As a result they’re looking for meaning, they’re looking for purpose, they’re looking for belonging. As bleak as that may sound, that also is hopeful because it gives us mechanisms to be able to address the alienation that people are experiencing; to be able to find ways to bridge these perceptions of polarisation that I think that are driving societies apart.
I was going to ask, while you were making the documentary, was there anything obvious you identified that Democratic politicians could be doing to reach people like Thad, Chris, and Randy – I guess from what you’re saying, it could be something as simple as messaging?
I think it’s absolutely about messaging – how can we speak to people’s alienation and frustration? The Prime Minister of Denmark (Mette Frederiksen) is somebody who’s bucked the trend of what’s been happening around the world where people feel exhausted by progressive and left wing governments. In Denmark, it’s somebody saying, “Hey look, I recognise that there’s extreme alienation, people are really frustrated by shifting and changing society, and we need to think holistically and productively around the change so that we can expand the social programmes that really support society.” So I think that there is interesting light at the end of the tunnel.
Homegrown is screening at the Glasgow Film Festival on 8 & 9 March 2025
