Creating Documentaries that Challenge Narratives: From ‘What Is A Woman?’ to ‘Am I Racist’ | 10.27.24
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Daily Wire's new Matt Walsh-starring comedy Am I Racist is now the most successful documentary to hit theaters in a decade, an accomplishment achieved despite major headwinds from legacy media and a hostile Hollywood. In this episode, we sit down with the director, Justin Folk, to discuss his film's box office run, its launch on Daily Wire's platform, and why getting conservative content in theaters is more crucial now than ever. ♪

I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's October 27th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.

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Joining us to discuss the box office run of the Matt Walsh comedy Am I Racist is its director, Justin Folk. Justin, it's great to have you on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's good to be on with you guys. Listen to you guys a lot, actually. We love to hear that. Look, you directed The Daily Wire's first big documentary hit, What is a Woman? This film is sort of a sequel in some ways, but it's also very different on many levels. That includes This Time You Took Your Film to Theaters.

That's a major risk, but it appears to have paid off here. First, how much has the film brought in from theaters at this point?

Well, we've passed the $12 million mark at the box office, which is very, very exciting and actually quite historic for a documentary. I believe we're the top documentary of the decade. And to achieve that sort of level of success in the theaters out of the gate for The Daily Wire, I think was a big achievement. And I'm really proud of it. I know the team is proud of it. And ultimately, there was a lot of people involved in that effort. But at the base of it all, I mean, we had to make a good film for that to happen.

You kind of mentioned that this film is different than What is a Woman, and that's by design. We didn't want to come out with a half-hearted sophomore effort. And we knew we had to do something different. We knew we had to kind of go bigger. What is a Woman is a little bit more of a straightforward documentary. This one is much more of a comedy. And we felt like the issue, the issue of race...

kind of demanded a different approach with what we're seeing with all the race hustlers and the people that are dividing us as a society. We just felt like ridicule would be one of the best tools we could use when making this film. Right. And, you know, speaking of ridicule, describing the film was actually a bit of a struggle sometimes for people. Some called it a mockumentary, which is not actually correct.

But it did include a lot of mocking of things, as you said. If you could sum up the approach to this film, what were you trying to attain? Well, first of all, let's start with the category. It would officially be categorized as a comedic documentary, which isn't a very sexy term, I don't think. Those two things don't necessarily usually go together. And so I think it's hard for people to kind of understand what this is. But it's comedic, and so there's a lot of laughs, there's a lot of jokes in there. But it's a documentary, too, because...

These are very real situations that we put Matt Walsh and wanted things to play out with real people. And so that approach was something that we basically kind of started with. We knew the success of What Is Woman was done by allowing people to kind of talk, by allowing these people to say what they really feel about things. And that was very eye-opening for Americans in terms of race. Same thing here. We wanted these people that were

were pushing this race agenda to just say in their own words what they felt and what they wanted for the rest of us as Americans. And we felt that that would be powerful for Americans just to see that and then to decide for themselves if this is the right path. And so the approach involved taking Matt, dropping him into the situation with these people, and essentially having Matt believe them and what they say, and then chart the course based on all their prescriptions.

And so that's what Matt did. He basically became one of them. And in doing so, I think we revealed the ideology underneath and what's behind it all. When Matt adopted this character as a anti-racist grifter himself, you got to see kind of

what's behind it philosophically, and what it all leads to. And that was our goal, was to have Matt become one of them, essentially. You know, it strikes me that this is the yes and approach that you learn in improv. The entire film is Matt performing yes and, and it really opens the door for letting some of these DEI experts go deeper into their ideology than they normally would have if you started improvising.

to question their approach. And it clearly worked here. Did you expect this kind of reception in theaters, this degree of success?

You know, I was hoping for this reception. And the thing that struck me was how consistent the response was in terms of being positive, in terms of people understanding the humor. If I had a fear, it was that we were making a film that only the demographic males 25 to 55 would really, really enjoy. But women and older people, it would maybe just kind of go over their head. But that hasn't been the case. And I had the fortunate opportunity

ability to go to some of these pre-screenings before the film came out. And I got to watch the audience react to a lot of the jokes and a lot of the things that were in the film. And it was universal. It was across the board, the reaction that we got from people in the audience, whether they were young or old or male or female. And that just gave me a big sense of pride that we made something that

everybody can enjoy. Now, some people think some jokes are funnier than others, and some people really love some moments in the film compared to others. But really, as a filmmaker, you try to make something that would be universally accepted and liked. And that was just great confirmation for what we did. Now, one of the controversies for the film early on involved critic reviews. This film has gotten outstanding audience reviews from the start, but was shunned by major media critics.

Where do the critic reviews stand at this point? Did you get some of the legacy critics to actually weigh in? We had a couple mainstream critics eventually limp in with the review. And I think they did that because they were sort of called out for ignoring this film. Initially, they were staying away from it. And we have our theory why they were staying away from it. And that involves the fact that it was a good film and they would have to say something nice about it. And I don't think they wanted to give Matt Walsh that platform.

We did have a lot of, I guess, mid-tier critics review the film, and it was very, very well accepted by them. And these are people with no axe to grind. These are people that don't work for a major corporate media entity.

And they were just quite honest with their review. And they just were like, wow, this is a very, very powerful and very funny film was sort of like the take that they would give. And some of them even got backlash for doing so. And so we can kind of understand why some of these mainstream critics ignored it because we knew that they would actually face a lot of backlash. Yeah. At what stage did you begin to plan for a theater launch? Was this the plan all along or did this sort of become more concrete later on? Well,

Listen, there's a lot of risk involved in going to the theater. And there's a lot of things that need to fall into place. And I got to credit the Daily Wire team. I got to credit Jeremy Boring, who's

for navigating all that. John Lewis and the whole team, Dave Coleman. First of all, we had to convince theaters to take us. We had to convince the exhibitors themselves that this is something that they would want to have in their theaters and would actually do good business. And so there was a lot of hurdles along the way and meticulously Daily Wire got over all those hurdles and positioned this film

in such a way that the exhibitors would take it and also all the marketing that took place. There's just so much involved in going to the theater. There's a ton of risk. You know, that risk is something you definitely have to consider when launching into this. But, you know, I'm glad we did. I think we proved what we set out to do. And I just feel very fortunate that we were able to have people see this in theaters where they could sit together in a group and laugh.

you know about that how significant is it for conservatives in particular to get contents into theaters like this as conservatives we have to play on the battlefield that the rest of society plays on you know we have a tendency to kind of shrink back into our silos and and speak to only our people as conservatives we have the best ideas we have the winning ideas and those ideas need to be played out on the main stage and in the case of theaters

Theaters are our main stage. Theaters are a place where a lot of people go for their entertainment. These are people, some of them that aren't really engaged in politics. These are people that have busy lives and don't pay attention too much to a lot of the issues. And so we need to reach those people. We need to perform the way the left does when it comes to entertainment.

Getting our ideas out there to the mainstream and theaters is one way we can do that. Listen, not every conservative film is meant for the theaters. Different films have different purposes. In our case, we kind of went hard to the paint with the fact that we wanted this to make this a entertaining movie first.

and then have our ideas tucked in alongside. And, you know, that makes our film very palatable for a movie theater environment. But listen, I think it's very important that conservatives take some of that ground back from the left and have our ideas play out on the main stage. Yeah, and seeing this reach over 1,600 theaters was a massive deal, just almost symbolically. Now, the film is going to be available on demand exclusively on the Daily Wire Plus platform now.

In general, do theater runs help or hurt streaming performance in the industry? Theater runs are extremely helpful. In fact, a lot of distributors refer to theatrical releases as a big marketing campaign. And I think that's the truth here because it allows you to get your film out there in the public in a way that you wouldn't normally have it out there.

You know, the theatrical release of Am I Racist? I think is only going to help raise awareness with the general public and then point those people back to Daily Wire, Daily Wire Plus to go watch it if they didn't get a chance to see it in theaters. Yeah, I think the theatrical release is really going to help this film.

I think it's going to really drive a lot of attention to it for the home entertainment platform and the Daily Wire platform. And I'm excited about that because, you know, a lot of people didn't get a chance to see it. People have busy lives, but at least they heard about it. And now they can go watch it on Daily Wire Plus. And the good news there is they can watch as many times as they want. It's not a one-time viewing. They can watch it over. And I do recommend that with this particular film. This is the type of film that you're going to want to watch it a couple times just to catch all the great performances that Matt has throughout the show.

Yeah, I found that myself. There's so many little details that you miss the first time around. Now, for you personally, this is a unique film. It's unorthodox in many ways. As a filmmaker, what did you learn in the making of this particular film? There's a lot I learned in making any film. It seems like every time we go out and do something, we're endeavoring to do something very difficult, and we're diving into a topic that

And when you dive into a topic, you have to sort of live it while you're making it. And in this case, it was even more so because Matt had to live this character. And so we had to essentially think like the other side. Matt had to adopt their beliefs and have them play out. And so, you know, I learned a lot about the topic itself. I also learned a lot about America and how we view the issue of race.

There are actually way more people that think rationally about this issue than I think we realize. It's just that they've been taken advantage of. They've been polite. I think these people that are pushing this DEI agenda have taken advantage of

of so many people in this country that don't want to be mean, that don't want to be called a bigot. And so one of the things I learned was actually a hopeful thing, which was most people don't go along with this stuff. They don't go along with this racial division. And so that was sort of a hopeful thing that I learned along the way. We found that common everyday people don't really buy what's being sold by these so-called race experts. And so that was a very, I guess, uplifting realization for me.

Yeah, some of the more powerful moments in the film came from just regular folks dismissing the racially divisive talking points.

Final question, what's next for you? Any plans to work further with Walsh or any other Daily Wire talent? Can you answer this question? Absolutely. I mean, we have a... I can say that we are working on stuff and it's been a pleasure to work with Matt on these last two films. We have such a great team. It's a small, tight-knit team. Just great professionals that are just the best at what they do. I'll be honest with you, it's a lot of fun making these movies with Matt

It's not always easy. It's a challenging thing to do what we've been doing, but it has been a ton of fun and we would love to keep that going. Well, we all hope you do. Justin, thank you so much for talking with us. It's been a really a pleasure. Thanks, John. Great to be on. Thank you. That was Justin Folk, director of Am I Racist? Available starting this week exclusively on Daily Wire Plus. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.