The duo is at the Taormina Film Festival with the crime thriller about the infamous American cult, where Gallagher also commented on 'Backrooms' phenomenon and YouTube boom
When director Michael Gallagher was eight years old, 39 people died in his neighborhood in San Diego, California. They were the victims of the infamous Heaven’s Gate cult, who died in a coordinated mass suicide timed with the approach of the Comet Hale-Bopp in March of 1997. That event would leave an indelible mark on Gallagher, who spent his life researching the cult and its leaders, Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. The result of that lifelong curiosity is “The Leader,” a film based on the history of Heaven’s Gate, starring Tim Blake Nelson and Vera Farmiga.
Playing at the Taormina Film Festival after its world premiere at Tribeca, “The Leader” trails the creation of one of the most notorious cults in America, from the early meeting between religious leader Applewhite and nurse Nettles, to the devastating repercussions of their group, resulting in the largest mass suicide in the country’s history. “The Leader” also stars Jim Parsons, Simon Rex and Grace Caroline Currey.
Speaking with Variety out of Sicily, Gallagher recalls the shock of hearing about the deaths as a young child. “It was my first exposure to cults, to mass suicide, to extremism,” he says. “I was left with many, many questions and few adults would treat an eight-year-old with the kind of respect and give the depth of answer required to further understand how and why something like this happened.”
“I became very curious and tried to find out the details for myself,” he goes on. “When I looked at what the media was portraying, I saw judgment and outlandish headlines. I saw everybody putting them in a sort of crazy and weird box because it’s such an enormous and tragic topic that I think it was easier to dismiss them and look at the matching Nikes, the purple trousers, the bunkbeds and the alien ideas and dismissing everything else.”
With “The Leader,” the director set out to “understand the humans behind” Heaven’s Gate, a process that involved a full decade of research, including dozens of books, hundreds of news articles and going through hours and hours of tapes recorded by Applewhite and Nettles themselves, titled “The Classroom Tapes.” “What I found through doing all of this was that these people were not that different from you and me,” he notes. “They lived in a world where they at times felt out of place, and they felt like they needed a sense of connection and belonging. By having this community, they were able to find a higher purpose than themselves. Unfortunately, that then got corrupted by a man, and it led to tragedy because they were led by someone who was dealing with a lot of pain himself.”
Nelson, who delivers a performance described by Variety critic Owen Gleiberman as “subtle and unnerving” and of “insidious wackadoo force,” was first approached by Gallagher about the role in 2021. A global pandemic, strikes and many other obstacles stood in the way of their collaboration, with shooting finally getting underway in 2025. This ended up working well for the actor, whose only prerequisite for taking on the role was having at least six months of preparation, but who ended up with a whole five years to dig into Applewhite.
“I was initially interested because, at this point in my career, I’m pretty much only intrigued as an actor by extreme challenges or by extremely daring work if I can lend myself in any way possible,” says the actor. “An example of that would be ‘The Testament of Ann Lee.’ Not incredibly challenging as a role, but getting to work with Brady [Corbet] and Mona [Fastvold] made the film something I was keenly interested in.”
The actor calls the role “monumentally challenging,” noting he had to work to “understand both the extreme distance between [Applewhite] and me but also how I could access aspects of my own alienation to source the character from within me in an honest way.”
With a whopping volume of material on the case available, how did Gallagher go about researching for the project, and how did he thread the lines between fact and fiction? By “excavating the facts and finding the truth within it,” he says.
“Everything in the film is rooted in real events,” the director reiterates. “It has been done with a very documentary-like approach. It’s a non-linear story. We used mixed media, recreating archival moments within the film. It’s about these two characters in a duel, playing off the words they are saying and what they believe in.”
For Nelson, having a great script helped immensely in prepping his Applewhite. “I am an actor who believes that film is a director’s medium, so Michael focused me in terms of what was important biographically within Applewhite’s story, but also his anguish, which he then perpetrated,” he says.
“In addition, there are hundreds of hours of Marshall Applewhite on the internet, and the reason I needed at least six months to work on the role was that I wanted to spend four months just watching Applewhite and not trying on any voice, not trying to be anybody but just letting him seep into me almost to a point where I was dreaming about him at night but, again, without leaping to a result,” he recalls. “Only in the last couple of months of that period did I start to learn the role. Then, it was day after day of an inculcation with the material so that I could embody this guy for my director. It was a great and exciting process.”
As for the resonance of the story today, when there is a certain trivialization of the word “cult” and constant discussions on the effects of mass mentality in a hyper-connected era, Gallagher says, “we need to look at history to understand where we are and how to move forward.”
“These are really difficult times, when human beings are being pitted against each other constantly,” he adds. “I think having belief is a cornerstone of the human experience, but it’s also essential to have doubts about our beliefs, to question those in power. Because when there is nothing but certainty within a group, that’s when a lot of danger can strike. It takes a lot of self-reflection and a lack of ego for someone to be able to do that. If people can check themselves and what is leading them down a dangerous road, I think we could avoid a lot of strife in this world.”
Gallagher, who started his career on YouTube with the highly popular “TotallySketch” series, also briefly commented on the major success of “Backrooms,” directed by Kane Parsons, who also got his start on the platform. “I grew up always wanting to make films and always looked to whatever mediums were available for me to tell those stories,” he notes. “I grew up in a time when I started making short films and comedy with my friends, and there was this great medium of YouTube where you could get immediate distribution. The fact that you could connect to millions of people and have those stories get that kind of exposure created confidence and also a film school in the public eye, if you will. I am very grateful for YouTube as a medium. It’s a tremendous learning ground for filmmakers to be able to experiment.”
“I also think we’re seeing the landscape of media change in front of our eyes,” he emphasizes. “It’s essential to try and tell stories with a clear authorship, and I think YouTube inspires that in a lot of people because you are the writer, the director, the producer, the editor, the marketing, the distribution… You learn so many things about the entire pipeline that become essential later on. If you can stay true to your vision and get an early start in that medium, the sky’s the limit.”