VENICE, Italy — Jude Law plays an FBI agent investigating the violent crimes of a white supremacist group in ''The Order,'' which premiered Saturday at the Venice Film Festival.
An adaptation of Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt's nonfiction book ''The Silent Brotherhood,'' Nicholas Hoult was cast as Robert Jay Mathews, the charismatic leader of the group, which was considered the most radical hate group since the Ku Klux Klan. Their crimes, including bank robberies and armored car heists that the group was using to fund an armed revolution, led to one of the largest manhunts in FBI history, in 1983.
''What amazed me was it was a story I hadn't heard about before,'' said Law, who also produced. ''It like a piece of work that needed to be made now.''
He added: ''It's always interesting finding a piece from the relative past that has some relationship to the present day.''
Law made the trip to Italy with his director, Justin Kurzel, and co-stars Hoult, Jurnee Smollett and Tye Sheridan for the premiere.
His character, called Agent Huss, is an amalgam FBI agent and not based on a specific person. This, they said, was important for positioning him within this story.
''He represents an awful lot of us,'' Law said. ''He felt his hardest work was behind him and in fact he had his biggest battle ahead of him.''
Kurzel, an Australian filmmaker known for the 2015 adaptation of ''Macbeth'' with Michael Fassbender, said he had always wanted to make an American film in the vein of dramatic thrillers from the 1970s like ''The French Connection,'' ''Mississippi Burning'' and ''All the President's Men.'' He tried to make this film with the simplicity he admired in those classics.
