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There has never been anything particularly timid about UWE BOLL. As a filmmaker, he has never appeared interested in asking permission to tell a story, courting consensus once he has told it, or softening his point of view to make the result more palatable. With CITIZEN VIGILANTE, written and directed by Boll, that willingness to provoke is not merely evident. It is foundational.<\/p>\n
Starring Armie Hammer as Sanders, an American military veteran living in Croatia who takes justice into his own hands when he believes the legal system has failed its victims, and Costas Mandylor as Interpol officer Henry, CITIZEN VIGILANTE is lean, brutal and unapologetic. But beneath the bloodshed and vigilante action is social commentary that Boll very deliberately wants to put on the table.<\/p>\n
For Boll, the impetus for CITIZEN VIGILANTE can be traced in part to his earlier film RUN, a very different exploration of migration and its consequences. While RUN approached the subject through tragedy, Boll wanted to go somewhere much harder this time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt I have to basically do a way more radical movie,\u201d says Boll, who sees CITIZEN VIGILANTE as a response to what he believes are profound cultural and societal changes taking place in Germany and throughout Europe. \u201cI wanted to ask the question: Why we do this to us?\u201d<\/p>\n
It is a question Boll poses without equivocation, particularly when discussing crime, immigration, integration and what he sees as failures within the justice system. One case, he explains, became particularly important in developing the film\u2014a rape case in Hamburg involving a 14-year-old girl and multiple perpetrators.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s why I did the movie\u2014to shock the people. Also, to show, like, if you push everybody too far, then you will have kind of a vigilante justice.\u201d<\/p>\n
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And that brings us to Sanders.<\/p>\n
Boll didn’t want a conflicted vigilante. There would be no agonizing over whether Sanders should cross a moral line, no handwringing after he did so. By the time we meet him, Sanders knows exactly who he is and exactly what he is prepared to do.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want a guy who has a big inner struggle,\u201d Boll explains. \u201cI want a guy who made that decision. That\u2019s the rules I\u2019m living by. And if the government or whoever is not following my moral compass, then I still do what I think is right.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finding the actor capable of embodying that kind of unwavering resolve led Boll to an unexpected place: Instagram.<\/p>\n
Armie Hammer had been absent from screens for several years when Boll saw him speaking at length about his life and controversies during an appearance on Bill Maher\u2019s Club Random<\/em>. Boll saw something beyond the headlines. He also saw Sanders.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt also, look, that guy looks like he could play James Bond. He was exactly the guy I was basically looking for for Sanders.\u201d<\/p>\n Unable to find useful contact information through IMDbPro, Boll went directly to Hammer.\u00a0 \u201cI wrote him on Instagram, and after like two, three times messaging, he finally came back and he said, \u2018Well, what is that project?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n A Zoom conversation followed. So did CITIZEN VIGILANTE.<\/p>\n Boll wanted Hammer\u2019s Sanders \u201ccompletely unapologetic,\u201d methodical and unflinching, a man whose military background informs not only his skill set but the precision with which he operates. Hammer delivers just that, while still finding moments of compassion, notably when Sanders encounters one of the young victims whose experience fuels his mission.<\/p>\n \u201cI think he completely nailed it and was really a force in the movie. I was so happy with him,\u201d says Boll. \u201cAlso, he came to Croatia, no attitude, no like, \u2018Oh, I want this perk and this and this and this.\u2019 Nothing. And no, it was a pleasure. I would do any movie with him in the future also.\u201d<\/p>\n Little did I know when Boll said that just minutes into our conversation how important those last words would become before we were finished.<\/p>\n If Hammer gives CITIZEN VIGILANTE its implacable center, Boll surrounds him with filmmaking that is anything but restrained.<\/p>\n Nowhere is that more apparent than in a spectacular shootout roughly 44 minutes into the film, when the apartment Sanders has transformed into his own personal fortress comes under assault. It’s a delicious piece of controlled chaos: slow motion, blood everywhere, flying splatter, gunfire, explosions, a trap door, flames and an intricately designed interior that allows Boll to keep us moving between Sanders inside and Henry outside. And playing against all that brutality is an almost absurdly jaunty piece of music.<\/p>\n I called it \u201cjazz salsa.\u201d<\/p>\n Boll laughed.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cYeah, it\u2019s like an elevator music.\u201d<\/p>\n That musical incongruity only makes the violence more effective, but executing the sequence presented Boll with a more immediate problem: finding somebody willing to let him destroy a location.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was actually not easy to find any location who would be available because it was clear we will have massive explosions, breaking things, the wall, everything.\u201d<\/p>\n Eventually the production found an empty villa in Croatia. With no furniture inside, Boll and his crew were able to essentially build a destructible environment within the existing structure, protecting what needed to remain intact while creating walls, windows and doors that could take the punishment demanded by the sequence.<\/p>\n And Boll wanted punishment.<\/p>\n For all the digital tools available to filmmakers today, CITIZEN VIGILANTE retains a tactile quality, particularly when bullets start flying. Boll remains an unabashed proponent of practical filmmaking, including the use of blanks rather than replacing muzzle flashes and gunfire entirely in post-production.<\/p>\n For him, the difference isn’t merely visual. It affects performance.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reaction of an actor to a blank, what makes boom, and it comes actually some fire out of the gun, is totally different as you just point the gun at him.\u201d<\/p>\n His conclusion is characteristically Boll.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cI will keep shooting blanks.\u201d<\/p>\n But creating the action was only half the equation. Controlling its rhythm\u2014and the rhythm of the film as a whole\u2014fell to editor Ethan Maniquis, with whom Boll has developed an easy shorthand through multiple collaborations.<\/p>\n What initially appears to be a relatively straightforward vigilante narrative is, on closer examination, anything but linear. Boll moves us between Sanders’ actions, his statements on social media and an interrogation taking place after authorities have begun to suspect him. He deliberately refuses to announce those temporal shifts or provide an easy roadmap for the audience.<\/p>\n That was not accidental.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted also to throw the audience a little off. What happens when? You know, so it\u2019s not straight, like it\u2019s not like two days straight or something.\u201d<\/p>\n Maniquis, says Boll, had already assembled an editor’s cut that was remarkably close to what the director wanted.<\/p>\n \u201cEthan had it like almost the scenes in how he cut it. It was almost perfect, like usual.\u201d\u00a0 But Boll wanted to disrupt it further.<\/p>\n \u201cI go a little back and forth. I mix up the events that the audience should also figure out when is exactly what.\u201d<\/p>\n It’s an interesting choice because Sanders himself is anything but disordered. The man is methodical. His world is not. By fracturing chronology around him, Boll and Maniquis create uncertainty without sacrificing the character’s almost unnerving sense of control.<\/p>\n And nowhere is that control more chilling than in the film’s extended final confrontation.\u00a0 This time, rather than accelerating the action through increasingly rapid cuts, Boll does the opposite.<\/p>\n He waits.\u00a0\u00a0Sanders waits.\u00a0\u00a0And Boll makes us wait with him.<\/p>\n After Sanders summons the remaining men he is seeking, Boll allows time to pass because, quite simply, people don’t materialize at the front door seconds after receiving a telephone call.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to give that the time that it\u2019s realistic, right? Because you cannot call somebody and you think five seconds later he rings the doorbell.\u201d<\/p>\n That meant preserving the dialogue Sanders has with the family, but also preserving the uncomfortable spaces between arrivals.<\/p>\n \u201cI need also these waiting times in between, and I think that makes that scene so good in the very end when he\u2019s just sitting there looking on his phone and waits for the next two guys to come.\u201d<\/p>\n Nothing needs to happen.<\/p>\n That’s precisely the point.<\/p>\n The waiting tells us as much about Sanders as another burst of gunfire ever could. There is no panic. No second thought. No sudden attack of conscience. Just a man sitting with his phone, waiting for the next person to arrive.<\/p>\n \u201cThat makes it so hard also,\u201d Boll says, \u201cwhere people sit there and say, \u2018This guy\u2019s just ice cold, like Dirty Harry.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n It brings Boll right back to the conception of Sanders that informed Hammer’s performance from the outset. The filmmaking doesn’t manufacture a moral struggle that the character doesn’t have. Camera, edit, sound and performance all reinforce the same thing: Sanders has already decided.<\/p>\n Composer Rodolfo Matulich adds another layer of contradiction. Rather than simply underlining brutality with the expected musical aggression, his score can work against what we are seeing, creating the kind of visual and musical juxtaposition that makes the apartment shootout so unexpectedly exhilarating.<\/p>\n For Boll, Matulich also brought something else to CITIZEN VIGILANTE.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cI like that Rodolfo is more a classical composer.\u201d<\/p>\n Boll was particularly delighted when music from the film was performed in a church in Italy. But his measure of the film’s impact isn’t limited to where its music has been heard.<\/p>\n \u201cThe movie really triggered worldwide the people, and nobody overlooked it.\u201d<\/p>\n Boll says messages have come to him from India, Brazil and elsewhere around the world. More significantly, he says approximately eight women who had been raped contacted him after seeing CITIZEN VIGILANTE.<\/p>\n \u201cYou cannot believe how I wished a guy like this would existed in my case,\u201d Boll recalls one woman telling him.<\/p>\n For Boll, that reaction goes directly to what he wants from his work. Provocation without relevance isn’t enough.<\/p>\n \u201cI think for me as a filmmaker to be relevant, to make a movie what is really relevant, that’s what makes me proud. And it shows also a little the older times back where movies were relevant.\u201d It is about cinema.<\/p>\n Boll starts reaching backward, invoking films that confronted the social and political climate in which they were made. DEATH WISH. TAXI DRIVER. APOCALYPSE NOW. THE DEER HUNTER. COMING HOME. JFK<\/em>. Different filmmakers, different subjects, different eras, but films that, for Boll, shared an urgency beyond entertainment.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a time where filmmakers tried to make relevant movies, and I have the feeling now, every single I watch\u2014sometimes great, great entertaining, of course\u2014but they’re all not really relevant. They’re not really reflecting the social and political world we’re living in.\u201d<\/p>\n Boll isn’t arguing that contemporary filmmakers have forgotten how to entertain audiences. He’s questioning how frequently that entertainment is being used to interrogate the world outside the theater.<\/p>\n And that brings the discussion to the machinery that decides which stories get told in the first place.<\/p>\n Boll believes part of the problem lies within today’s studio and streaming systems and what he sees as an increasing unwillingness to take creative risks.<\/p>\n \u201cIt needs more bold decision makers in the studio system too, and with the streamers. If all the people are the same kind of characters, then they will not greenlight any movies what go against the stream.\u201d<\/p>\n His criticism quickly widens to the role of technology in the development process, including what he describes as reliance on automated analysis and checklist-driven decision making rather than someone simply responding to a screenplay and the filmmaker behind it.<\/p>\n \u201cInstead of thinking about, okay, what story wants this guy to tell, and is that story told before, or is that story told before in the same matter, or is that something new? Is that something refreshing?\u201d<\/p>\n For Boll, something fundamental has been lost in that transition. And when he searches for a counterexample, he reaches once again into Hollywood’s past.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, real film freaks like Bob Evans and this kind of people from the past, where you had like one mogul running a studio. They did better jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n Then comes the punchline\u2014or perhaps the indictment.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel now with all this, you have the feeling you work for Silicon Valley, basically.\u201d<\/p>\n And that’s when technology decided to make itself part of our conversation. Zoom was about to throw us out.\u00a0 Boll wasn’t having it.\u00a0 “We can hang up, and then you send me a new link quick, and I go on again, and then we have another 15 minutes.\u201d So we did.<\/p>\n And with our technological overlord temporarily defeated, I had another question for Uwe Boll.<\/p>\n Sequels.<\/p>\n CITIZEN VIGILANTE leaves Sanders’ story open to continuation. Had Boll thought about one?\u00a0 His answer came without hesitation.<\/p>\n \u201cYes. So we will shoot next year in America sequel.\u201d<\/p>\n Not might. Not maybe. Not I’d like to.<\/p>\n Will.<\/p>\n For Boll, moving Sanders across the Atlantic makes perfect narrative sense.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it makes sense, right, to move over the ocean and to show what’s going on in America.\u201d<\/p>\n There is also the unavoidable economic reality of independent filmmaking. Boll says CITIZEN VIGILANTE was successful for him, and when an independent filmmaker finds an audience in today’s marketplace, walking away from that success makes little sense.<\/p>\n \u201cAs an independent filmmaker, you cannot let that go without trying to continue. It’s so tough, and you know it also in independent film world now to have a hit or to make money. So that’s very tough, and it worked very good. Very happy with the results. So we have to continue this show.\u201d<\/p>\n But continuing the show requires Sanders. And Sanders requires Armie Hammer.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope I convince Armie to come back.\u201d<\/p>\n Boll already has his narrative pitch. With Sanders under investigation in Croatia, why wouldn’t an American simply leave?<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then he’s in America and boom, he can continue. That’s it. Yeah, yeah. That was my pitch to him.\u201d<\/p>\n Boll also sees Sanders as something potentially much larger for Hammer than a single role.<\/p>\n \u201cSo, I think for him, Sanders could be his John Wick, basically.\u201d<\/p>\n It’s quite a proposition: not simply another movie, but a character capable of becoming identified with the actor playing him.<\/p>\n And Boll isn’t waiting around for the possibility to become real before figuring out what happens next.<\/p>\n When I asked if he had written the sequel, the answer was another yes\u2014with a qualifier.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, I mean, not completely finished, but I’ve wrote a lot and put a lot of things in.\u201d<\/p>\n America, however, changes the equation.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cYou don’t have only one problem.\u201d<\/p>\n And that means Boll has no intention of simply transplanting his first film from Croatia to the United States.<\/p>\n \u201cI cannot do this exactly the same story just in America. It has to be a little more fleshed out, and hopefully we will have a little more money to do it also.\u201d<\/p>\n More money. More characters. A broader canvas.\u00a0\u00a0And, Boll hopes, a deeper acting bench.<\/p>\n \u201cIn U.S., of course, you have better, way more good actors. Right? So you can build an ensemble.\u201d<\/p>\n That’s where the judge comes in with CITIZEN VIGILANTE.<\/p>\n Boll is characteristically unsparing about his disappointment with the Croatian actor cast as the judge we see abducted and driven around in the trunk of Sanders’ car.<\/p>\n \u201cFor example, the judge in my film, I was very disappointed with his performance. I mean, that guy, he was kind of a Croatian name actor, and he acted before like he’s the big shot in Croatia, and then he was almost very frozen stiff in front of the camera, and I was like, \u2018Oh God,\u2019 because I really hoped he’s like way better.\u201d<\/p>\n What Boll wants in America isn’t merely marquee names. It’s depth\u2014the kind of experienced working actor who may appear for only moments but makes those moments count.<\/p>\n \u201cThe good thing in the U.S., you find great actors to deliver only two lines, but they’re perfect for that two lines.\u201d<\/p>\n He saw the same limitation while shooting the bus confrontation between Sanders and three young men refusing to buy tickets. Boll had written more for the scene, envisioning an increasingly confrontational exchange as the young men tease Sanders and emotions start to boil.<\/p>\n But a director can write anything on a page. The actors still have to make you believe it.<\/p>\n \u201cI mean, I’m a very experienced director, so I see on set also, yeah, I cannot really let them say these two lines because I will not believe that line.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0So Boll adjusted.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the script, it was a little longer, and then I shortened it a little in a way that only Armie talks.\u201d<\/p>\n In America, he believes the available talent pool will allow him to populate even the smallest roles with seasoned actors.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you do it in the U.S., you can have really every single part, people who were in 50 other movies and so on, and have the routine and bringing it.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet there is an interesting irony in Boll’s planned migration to America. CITIZEN VIGILANTE itself benefited enormously from being made in Croatia.<\/p>\n Boll praises the country as film-friendly and economical, with experienced crews and extraordinary locations. It gave him craftspeople capable of constructing Sanders’ fortress, building false walls to be riddled with bullets, replacing windows destined to shatter, creating breakaway doors, fabricating a bunker and false exit, and then restoring the location after Boll finished destroying it. He was even able to obtain military hardware from the Croatian army.<\/p>\n \u201cI like Croatia. It’s film friendly. It’s not expensive, and you get good crews, great locations.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Croatia gave Boll the technical craftsmanship and physical freedom to make CITIZEN VIGILANTE.<\/p>\n America, he believes, can give him the acting depth and expanded canvas to make CITIZEN VIGILANTE bigger.<\/p>\n And at the center of it all, if Boll gets his way, will once again be Armie Hammer.<\/p>\n Not reinventing Sanders.<\/p>\n Not rehabilitating him.<\/p>\n Not suddenly burdening him with the moral crisis Boll deliberately refused to give him the first time.<\/p>\n Just putting that same ice-cold vigilante into a much larger playground.<\/p>\n Because Uwe Boll already knows what he thinks Sanders could become.\u00a0\u00a0After discussing where Boll wants to take Sanders next, I wanted to return to something staring at me from the CITIZEN VIGILANTE credits.<\/p>\n Director of Photography: Uwe Boll.<\/p>\n Except, according to Uwe Boll, there’s one small problem with that credit. \u201cI’m not a DP.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Boll laughs, but the explanation says something about the realities of making an independent film on a very limited budget. Matthias Neumann was there as Boll’s DP, multiple people ultimately handled camera during the production, problems arose with some of the operators, and eventually, Boll explains, nobody really received the cinematography credit.<\/p>\n The producers had a solution. Put Uwe’s name on it.<\/p>\n And Boll has an equally uncomplicated assessment of his photographic qualifications.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cI’m not a DP. But I know where to put the camera.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0And judging by CITIZEN VIGILANTE, he certainly does.<\/p>\n Shot digitally with Alexa large format in CinemaScope, the film also demonstrates why Boll sees digital photography as such an important tool for independent filmmakers. It requires less light, can reduce the size and expense of a production and gives filmmakers a freedom that celluloid never economically allowed.<\/p>\n But ask Boll which he prefers and the pragmatist gives way to the romantic.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cI loved Kodak, 35 millimeter. I loved it.\u201d<\/p>\n He still believes his older films shot on 35mm possess a crispness and theatrical quality he loves, although he considers Alexa particularly effective at retaining a cinematic image in the digital world.<\/p>\n But for Boll, the difference between film and digital isn’t only aesthetic. It is discipline.<\/p>\n With digital, the camera can keep rolling. Do another take. And another. And another. The financial penalty is comparatively small. 35mm didn’t afford that luxury.<\/p>\n \u201cYou always had to know exactly what you want, because it was just too expensive to do 50 takes or something.\u201d Three takes. Four takes. Then move on.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cYou are a little more careful, and you were more careful and dedicated to the detail when you were shooting 35.\u201d<\/p>\n Would Boll ever take the next technological leap and shoot IMAX?<\/p>\n \u201cOnly if I get more money.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course.<\/p>\n But after nearly an hour talking about one particular movie\u2014its ideas, actors, blood, bullets, explosions, music, editing, cameras, money and even the possibility of what comes next\u2014I wanted to know something more fundamental.<\/p>\n After all these years, what does filmmaking itself still give Uwe Boll?<\/p>\n \u201cI mean, look, I was 10 when I wanted to make movies, and it never stopped.\u201d<\/p>\n There was a period when it did stop, at least professionally. Boll didn’t make a film between 2016 and 2021.\u00a0\u00a0He discovered he couldn’t stay away.<\/p>\n \u201cI missed it so much. I felt, no, I have to keep doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n He knows the practical absurdity inherent in the obsession.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cIt’s an expensive hobby. That’s the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n But the need itself hasn’t changed. Boll tells me that if he doesn’t have a project in development, something ahead of him that he believes he can make, something waiting to become a movie, he feels empty.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I would say like I’m not doing anything anymore and just cut my grass, you know, then I would be not happy.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0He needs, as he puts it, \u201calways something cooking.\u201d<\/p>\n And sitting on the other side of a screen, listening to Boll talk about filmmaking for nearly an hour, I had been watching something happen that no transcript could capture.<\/p>\n He lights up.<\/p>\n For all the controversies that have followed Uwe Boll throughout his career, for all the arguments surrounding his films, there is something almost wonderfully uncomplicated about the way he talks about making them. The enthusiasm is visible. He becomes like a kid in a candy store, a kid on Christmas morning.<\/p>\n I told him so.<\/p>\n \u201c100%.\u201d<\/p>\n And then Uwe Boll gave me the simplest explanation of all.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cI’m burning for whatever movie I’m doing.\u201d<\/p>\n By debbie elias, exclusive interview 09\/23\/2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/behindthelensonline.net\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/vigilante12.png\")
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\nAnd suddenly our conversation about CITIZEN VIGILANTE isn’t merely about CITIZEN VIGILANTE anymore.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/behindthelensonline.net\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/vigilante3.png\")
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