Due Justice follows Max, a former Marine whose life is turned upside down after he faces a devastating loss. After he finds his wife and brother murdered and his daughter missing, he sets out on a personal mission to kill the gang that annihilated his family. Using his skills to take out gang members, he makes his way to the top in the hopes of finding his daughter.
Due Justice is written and directed by Javier Reyna. The revenge action movie stars Jeff Fahey, Kellan Lutz, and Efren Ramirez. Due Justice is executive produced by Stuart Alson, Grady Craig, and Matthew Helderman.
Screen Rant interviewed Due Justice writer and director Javier Reyna. He explained what Lutz and Fahey brought to their roles and what inspired the movie. Reyna also discussed his next project, which he hopes to do with Lutz, and his desire to explore the main character’s story further.
Javier Reyna Talks Due Justice
Screen Rant: This movie was so intense. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. What inspired the story of Due Justice for you?
Javier Reyna: Parenting. It was all about parenting. And everything started when I heard about the Sandy Hook events in Connecticut and I had little kids at school, in elementary school, and it really hit me hard and I started to question how sane could I be if something like that happened to my children. And I started thinking like Santiago, Efren Ramirez’s character, start thinking in a little loopy, overthinking about stuff. What if somebody actually did that? Then I come up with Max, somebody who says I’m going to break bad or even not purposely.
So that’s where the idea came from about what would I do. And the other one was to not just make generic bad characters like evil guys, but somebody like Ellis who is in a business. He’s just not an evil guy. He’s in a business and he has a boss and he’s got to deal with macro managing people above him and struggling through his career with no budget for these crew, while Santiago struggles with his own career. So that was a whole different parallel, thinking just to have fun with the characters.
Very cool. I did think it was interesting that the criminals in this were really hitting home that they did not like what was happening while still profiting from it. Can you talk about including that with each character as well?
Javier Reyna: Ellis, which is Jeff Fahey. I mean, basically we describe just Fahey as somebody who probably at a certain point was selling weapons to cartels, slept with the wrong wife in the corporate ladder of the business and got demoted and they found some way to profit from this dark Organ black market situation.
Yeah, it was really, really dark. Could you talk a little bit about the parallels between Max and Santiago as they both kind of delve deeper into this criminal underworld?
Javier Reyna: Well, basically for Max, I always saw parents, they’re amazing when they lose their children to some horrible thing and they’re able to forgive. It happened, I can’t even imagine which the penalty for that person or whatever, but I just realized that maybe I’m not a good person because I imagine what happened in Connecticut would’ve happened to my kids. And I go, I think, I don’t think I could react like that.
But a normal person would think like Santiago, we have all these dark thoughts, but I’m not going to do that. But what happened is somebody actually did it. If you have nothing to lose and if you are not very well up here, you get certainly some issues. And we see that all the time, obviously. You end up being the bad guy because obviously Max is turning to an evil thing now because he’s not asking who did it. It’s really revenge, which is not good either. And he ended up being in a way, kind of like the bad guy.
What did Jeff Fahey and Kellan Lutz bring to their respective roles that wasn’t necessarily on the page?
Javier Reyna: That’s a very good question. Well, Kellan, I love that he really is going for realism. So he will say, “I noticed here the character did this or said that,” he will look at me, goes, “Will he really do that because he just came from this.” And I’m like, “No, you’re right. Yeah, he might not be in the mood to say that or do that.” So that didn’t make me feel very safe because he was always watching for his performance and he keeps it a hundred percent, whatever he does, even in dramatic scenes, he will prepare and work really hard. So it just makes my job easier, I mean.
And then Jeff Fahey, he just reads a character and he goes to his own. He gets in a corner and I see him talking. I get close to him, he’s like, “Don’t talk to me.” And he comes and he just comes out of his mouth and have expression I wish he had or better. So I guess what they just bring is just professionalism. I’m not used to working SAG actors a lot. I’ve been working a little, but we’re also working with people like that. They’re so prepared and they just, take one, that’s perfect. Just feels really nice, get goosebumps.
I love that. And then can you talk about shooting some of the bigger action scenes in the stunt work that was involved with that?
Javier Reyna: Yeah. Well, I think the most interesting thing probably was a couple of things with the car. My son, he does a race start driving, like drifting up here in Seattle. So he’s been wanting to do stunts for a while, and we kept it pretty quiet. I mean, we didn’t do anything crazy. If you notice, my stunts were pretty simple. I didn’t want to focus so much into the action part of the movie, us on the motivations for the characters to go after somebody. But obviously, everything we showed was pretty safe, very choreographed per se.
Definitely. And then as the writer and director, were there any scenes that maybe as you wrote them, you knew exactly how you’re going to shoot them versus a scene that, when you got there on the day, you maybe had to make some adjustments and it may have improved the scene?
Javier Reyna: It will be the latter where nothing was coming the way I like it because you never get the locations I wanted and the car I wanted. So sadly, it’s a bundle of shitty compromises you have to do every day just to keep the thing moving, to stay on the schedule. There’s many, many missing scenes from the movie we never get to shoot or because of time. I think my first director script was two hours and they cut it down to an hour and a half. So we adjust some of the stuff with a friend and a psychiatrist, stuff like that. But yeah, I mean the whole process is a bunch of compromises, chopping down the thing you want to do.
Interesting. And then by the end of the movie, we see that Max has really been changed by the tragedies he’s gone through. Is that something you would want to explore further in the future?
Javier Reyna: Definitely, I would, if anybody wants to. Kellan and I discussed that several times. It will be interesting to see where they go from here because they just cross a big red line. It cannot end well. It’s not likely to end well, but we just a little worry that Santiago might screwed up where he just recovered, which was his family. So that’ll be a dangerous thing to write.
And then what did you find to be the most surprising part of working on Due Justice?
Javier Reyna: Surprising. It is amazing to work with the good actors that know what they’re doing. That was to me just amazing to say, “Action.” And they do it. And I’m like, “Well, I’m happy.” And my DP, we were landing for two hours. Can we do this again? I go, it’s just the guy did it right. I mean, why? We can do it 10 times. Jeff’s like, “Yeah, one time. That’s it. I’m done.” I like it too. So that is very refreshing. Shooting in Seattle was surprising because there’s a lot of things we couldn’t find, but it was nice to shoot in the city.
But we get surprises every day. We had COVID for a week. We had to shut down the film for a week. Because a little COVID going through the whole crew. We had to pull things, like that. But I mean, we never had big surprises. We tried to do due diligence trying to get a good production going and we shot through the summer downtown in Seattle, so everything went pretty smooth.
I’m glad. Is there anything from Due Justice that you want to take into your next project?
Javier Reyna: Well, I have a script that I want to do with Jeff. I have three scripts I want to do with Efren. I have a script that I want to do with Kellan. So I met three great actors. Now I have… I mean, seen scripts forever. So right now, Kellan and I are trying to do a movie called American Revision, which is a time travel adventure trailer.
We’re working on that, but looking everywhere. But yeah, I mean from that experience, I met great people.
About Due Justice
Former marine Max (Kellan Lutz) experiences a devastating loss when his beloved wife and daughter are brutally murdered in a cold-blooded act of violence. Consumed by grief and driven by revenge, Max embarks on a relentless mission to hunt down those responsible.
