Filmmaker John-Michael Powell on Redemption, Revenge, And His Crime Thriller Violent Ends

Violent Ends. Photo credit: Danielle Freiberg IFC Films (Independent Film Company).

As 2025 is nearly over, it is safe to say that Violent Ends is one of the year's best crime thrillers. Directed and written by John-Michael Powell, the film follows Lucas Frost (played by Billy Magnussen), an honest and peaceful man who was brought up in a notorious crime family known for its ruthlessness. He desperately tries to distance himself from his family's legacy of violence and build his own life with his fiancée, Emma (played by Alexandra Shipp). However, after an armed robbery occurs at a local scrap yard where an innocent life is lost, Lucas is brought back into the family business he so despises.

Full of captivating performances, especially Magnussen and James Badge Dale (who plays Sid Frost), thrillingly violent action, a chillingly bleak tone, and an incredible finale, Violent Ends is a crime thriller you need to watch, especially if you enjoy Blue Ruin, Cold In July, or Wind River.

Recently, REVERIE chatted with Powell about his new film Violent Ends. 

Director John-Michael Powell. Photo by: Kai Caddy.

The seeds of Violent Ends began when Powell thought of making a film that blends his love of Arkansas and crime cinema. “I grew up in Little Rock, which is a little bit more urban than the rural setting of this movie,” says Powell. “I spent most of my childhood running around the woods, exploring, and bumping up against a lot of the types of people who are in this movie, so when I set out to make the film, I always wanted to make a little bit of a love letter to the place I grew up in. Full disclosure, I did not grow up in a crime family in the drug trade. I grew up in a very normal family. But that part of the story, I think, comes from my love of crime cinema, specifically harkening back to the ’70s era… We wanted to blend that gritty realism of 1970s crime cinema with a very specific part of the world that I knew very well in Arkansas. Quite frankly, Arkansas is not a place that is often put on camera. I knew I could take the familiar structure of a revenge genre picture and crime story and put it in Arkansas, and what would be fresh about it would be the world… Arkansas is a world that just doesn’t get a lot of shine, and I knew as a filmmaker from Arkansas that was my card to play.”

For Violent Ends, Powell drew influence from multiple crime thrillers rooted in strong character stories, including Blue Ruin, Death Wish (1974), No Country For Old Men, The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, Blood Simple, and The Place Beyond The Pines. “Anything with a formula that sets the best artists of those forms apart is their ability to take the format and just paint a little bit out of the lines left and right in their own way,” says Powell. One film he singles out that does this perfectly is Blue Ruin. “That movie is a revenge film, but it is about the repercussions of taking revenge, which is so smart to invert the genre that way. When I attacked [Violent Ends] I was like ‘How can I put my own spin on the genre.’” 

With Violent Ends, Powell was interested in exploring how revenge shapes a person. “I felt like most revenge films, some get at the weight of what it means to take revenge, but there’s sort of a gleefulness in taking the revenge,” he shares. “I wanted to make a story that really puts you in the shoes of the main character, but instead of going down the war path, he is doing everything he can to not take vengeance into his own hands. My whole calculation was if we really get into the character at the start and if we really understand what the character is battling inside, then when he does decide to take action, it feels like a cannon going off and will really launch the narrative.”

Violent Ends was shot in October and November of 2023. Initially, the plan was to start shooting the film in September, as Powell really wanted it to have an autumnal feeling, and November is when trees start to shed, and leaves start to lose their colour. “When we got [in Arkansas] from no fault of our own, as things take a life of their own, we couldn’t shoot the movie until mid-October,” he explains. “We were really quite worried that we wouldn’t have the autumnal stuff. What ended up happening was a blessing because it’s a story about a person who goes from noble to the opposite of noble, which fits well with the seasons. You start the film very autumnal with oranges and yellows. By the end of the movie, when it's at its bleakest, well, naturally the trees are starting to shed, and it's getting a lot grayer and colder. There was this beautiful gradation of light to dark in the movie that happened naturally and was a happy accident.”

Violent Ends is Powell's second feature film. His debut feature was The Send-Off, a micro-budget movie filmed over the span of 12 days. The Send-Off that let him learn many things that applied to Violent Ends, especially expanding his world-building across both the setting and characters. “I learned how to be economical with my time as [The Send-Off] takes place all over one evening at a house party, so you’re limited mostly to a house,” reflects Powell. “Visually, even though we are in a small house, my goal for that was to build a unique world that felt unique in and of itself.” Powell also establishes a fascinatingly dynamic world in Violent Ends. “One of the things I’m most proud of is the depth to which we rendered the world. For a small film, the scope is pretty grand. It’s in the Ozarks. It’s pretty lush. It’s autumnal, so it’s a very beautiful time of year.”

Upon reflecting on his two films, Powell finds he really enjoys creating ensemble pieces in which each character has a unique personality. “Both films have strange, kooky characters orbiting around some sort of, you could say, some version of toxic masculinity in the main character,” says Powell. “To me, the most interesting films are the ones where you’ve got a great lead character that you're rooting for, but then there are other sorts of interesting characters. You want to spend time with every character, even the person who just shows up for one scene… I think we did that on Violent Ends.”

Before he made his way to the director's chair, Powell spent several years working as an editor. His editing credits include American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombing, It Happened In L.A., and Obselidia, among many others. His prior experience as an editor really helps him as a director. “I tell anyone if you want to be a director, be an editor,” he comments. “I’m always editing scenes in my head. If I come in with a preconceived notion of a scene, like a scene between a son and a mother, and they’re at odds over something, I might have a conceived notion of the arch of that scene, but then Billy or Kate [Burton] might come in and do something totally different… I’ll reedit the scene in my head, reshoot it on the fly, and we’ll find something even more exciting than I had ever expected. I find those unexpected moments in filmmaking are when a movie goes from good to great. It’s the little choices that you just don’t see coming.”

Violent Ends. Photo credit: Danielle Freiberg IFC Films (Independent Film Company).

An example of an unexpected moment happening is the chase sequence in the woods, which was not originally written like that. “It was written to be in like a wheatfield, and a lot of the stuff was about ducking, being down low, and coming up, but the grass at that time of the year was dying off, and we just didn’t have it like we wanted it,” recalls Powell. He shares that they found the woods, which had trees that were starting to shed, while filming at another location. “I think the wood sequence was better than what I had ever scripted. I just love the visual of these vertical lines and these bodies of nature —these birchy, aspen-y woods. It’s quite beautiful.”

One of the main highlights of Violent Ends is Magnussen’s incredible performance. Although he has shown his dramatic chops before, most of Magnussen's career has been in comedy, like in Game Night, where he plays the charmingly hilarious goofball Ryan, or in the live-action Lilo & Stitch, where he plays Pleakley to near-perfection, generating the movie's biggest laughs. Violent Ends is quite unlike anything Magnussen has done before. He is electrifying in the lead role, completely embodying Lucas's brooding grief, tender warmth, and explosive anger.  Powell and Magnussen previously worked together on The Brass Teapot, in which Powell was an additional editor and Magnussen had a supporting role. Powell knew right away that Magnussen could play a wide range of characters. “I remember watching his dailies and editing him [on The Brass Teapot] and thought ‘This guy has so much in the tank that he could be using,’” says Powell. “I love paradoxical casting. Whenever you see someone like John Travolta in like Pulp Fiction, you’re thinking ‘The Saturday Night Fever guy is gonna be a gangster that doesn’t make any sense.’ Then you watch it and that’s actually what makes it brilliant – Finding that paradoxical thing that converges into something unique is when it gets really exciting. Those are the casting choices that get me excited, and Billy was that.”

Overall, if you are a fan of slow-burning revenge thrillers and want to see Billy Magnussen play a completely different role than what he usually plays, then Violent Ends is the film for you.