The storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 by a mob of Donald Trump supporters in a doomed bid to reverse the 2020 presidential election has been extensively documented, but never as viscerally as in the new documentary 64 Days.
Its director, Nick Quested, and his team embedded for three months with the Proud Boys, the far-right, all-male street militia informally known as “Trump’s army”. You see them leading the mob’s march with battle cries such as “This is the second f...ng revolution” and “Trump’s coming!”.
As a result, some footage from the documentary played a key role in the congressional committee’s investigation into Donald Trump’s role in the attempt to overturn the election, and Quested himself was summoned as a witness. The film premiered to 20 million viewers when it was screened across most of the major United States television networks.
The shadow of that January day still looms large on the US body politic. Vice-President Kamala Harris recently delivered her closing election argument on the Ellipse, where Trump held his Stop the Steal rally preceding the Capitol insurrection. In contrast, Quested has made an unlikely, unsolicited entrance into the US political arena.
“I’ve basically worked as a foreign correspondent since 2011,” says Quested when we meet in his offices in downtown Manhattan just a week before the US election. “Making films in some of the most contested areas of the world for National Geographic, whether it’s Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Mexico or Guatemala. It’s discomfiting now to find myself [covering similar civil disorder] in the country I live in.”
The executive director of Goldcrest Films, Quested, 54, is best known for his work with lauded American writer Sebastian Junger – including Restrepo, the 2010 Oscar-nominated documentary film about a platoon in Afghanistan, and Hell on Earth about Syria and Isis. But he first made his name in hip-hop circles, directing music videos for the likes of Common, Dr Dre and the now disgraced P Diddy.
The origins of 64 Days (the title is a reference to the time period between the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection) lie in Trump’s social-media rallying cry for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in September 2020.
“I thought it was particularly dangerous for the President of the United States to name-check a street-level militia,” he says. “That type of messaging was reminiscent of countries descending into civil war, such as [in] the Middle East when you saw Islamic utopia versus Christian utopia.”
It didn’t take Quested long to persuade the Proud Boys to allow him to film them attending rallies and protest marches and visit bars with them, from just after the 2020 election.
“Someone like me turns up who is filming them for free?” he says of his ease in obtaining their co-operation. “They thought they were going to win.”
Founded by UK-born Canadian far-right activist Gavin McInnes in 2016, the Proud Boys were originally formed as a “drinking club”, Quested says, before “evolving into providing security for alt-right speakers”. The group became more political when Afro-Cuban far-right activist Enrique Tarrio replaced McInnes as leader in 2018.
Not all the Proud Boys welcomed Quested’s presence. “Some were very aloof, some were like ‘f*** you, you’re the media, I’m not talking to you’,” he says.
But Quested found Tarrio “personable and very accessible … Enrique encouraged people to chat with us and they loved Restrepo. There was a reasonable contingent of them that were veterans and they liked to talk about the conflict zones I had been in”.
When I ask him to explain Trump’s enduring appeal to the American political right, he says, “[Trump] makes people feel. Emotion is driving it rather than the policy or the ideology.” The former President is also good at articulating the frustrations of Americans, he says, especially white men.
He thinks Trump will win the election (“that’s just my intuition based on his campaign”).
He found the Proud Boys much more interesting subjects than an encounter with Trump in 2010 at a National Board of Review awards dinner where Restrepo was being honoured: “I met him with Tim Hetherington [Quested’s late photojournalist collaborator who was killed in Libya in 2011]. He was telling us about Afghanistan and how we were wrong [Trump was advocating a complete withdrawal of America from Afghanistan].
“We were like, ‘All right, mate, but what makes you an expert?’ There’s no discussion with him, he doesn’t even listen to you, as he’s thinking of what he’s going to say next.”
The Proud Boys allied themselves with Trump loyalists Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, who argued, without evidence, that electoral fraud had propelled Joe Biden to the presidency. 64 Days contains scenes such as Stop the Steal occupying the Georgia state Capitol building in November 2020. “January 6 was not a spontaneous event, it had been in the works since the previous election,” says Quested.
The ferocity he chronicled in 64 Days reminded Quested of going to away games with Chelsea in the 1980s: “I was once with my dad at Chelsea vs Derby and people were chucking the seats on the fans below, the police had established a cordon and we were trying to get out… it’s the same thing. There’s a common sense of purpose, whether as a hooligan or as a Trump proto-militia member; they’re looking for fraternity and a safe space where they can behave how they want to.”
Events reached a crescendo a couple of days before January 6 when the documentary was in its final stage. “I was sitting on that couch,” Quested recalls, pointing to a nearby sofa, “and we were like, ‘Do we want to [film] another scuffle?’ But I thought we should be there. You can’t make a film sitting on your couch!” Quested drove down in his truck and joined his cameramen colleagues Nico Lucas Sonnabend and Alex Spiess.
“I thought there was going to be fighting, but I didn’t know they were going to storm the Capitol,” he says.
While Sonnabend filmed inside the Capitol building, Quested remained outside with the Proud Boys on the lower plaza: “I had my camera broken, got into a couple of little scuffles and got [hit with] pepper spray and mace.”
The Proud Boys, he reflects, became overwhelmed on January 6.
“They lost control of the situation when the crowd went crazy, because there were people even more fervent than them … if the protesters had managed to accost the speaker or the vice-president, there would have been even more carnage.”
Quested ended up being subpoenaed to testify at trials of the Proud Boys (Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2023 while several other Proud Boys went to jail for seditious conspiracy and their role in the insurrection).
“I had a different perspective because, while people took pictures of the Proud Boys, I was able to be inside the Proud Boys,” he says.
Of particular interest to the January 6 Committee was a meeting depicted in 64 Days of Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes, the leader of far-right militia group the Oath Keepers in an underground garage the night before January 6.
“I did not hear them discuss anything of a seditious nature or planning for the next day … but it’s very Deep Throat-y”, he says of the parallels with the underground car park meets between Watergate journalist Bob Woodward and one of his sources.
Quested did not want 64 Days to come across like a lecture and viewers are very much left to make up their own minds. He says he has paid a price for this: “I got roasted by progressive friends who said ‘Why the f*** are you doing this? You’re making problems for us by platforming them’,” but he believes they said so “without understanding I wanted to contextualise their behaviour. I’m a journalist, not an activist, and I think the film is as fair and balanced as possible”.
The authorities were also suspicious.
“The FBI could not work out why I had such good access to the Proud Boys when they already had informants inside these organisations. They could not work out how I wasn’t part of the Proud Boy effort and asked, ‘Are you really a journalist?’”
As a result of his artistic collaboration with the Proud Boys, Quested has lost his global entry pass (that allows expedited entry at US border control), and believes there may be “retribution from a future government, which is a scary place to be in a country that has freedom of speech and enshrined in the constitution freedom and the pursuit of happiness”.
Quested, a Londoner, is married with children and lives on a farm in upstate New York, but he declines to give more specifics about his family life, citing threats he has received on social media.
However, he is happy to talk about his early life as a student at St Paul’s, an elite private school in south-west London.
He recalls an economics lesson with classmate George Osborne: “The economics teacher presented the Keynesian view one term and the Monetarist view the next term. George – or Gideon as he then was – raised his hand and asked, ‘Does that mean that everything we learnt last term was wrong?’ He went on to be Chancellor of the Exchequer!”
Quested moved to the United States in the late 1980s to study film and TV at New York University (NYU) and has lived there ever since.
“I loved hip-hop, that’s why I came to New York,” he says. After promoting the hip-hop scene in nightclubs and at concerts, he graduated to directing music videos. He says P Diddy, who is facing multiple federal charges of sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution (all of which he denies), is “a bully and I don’t take well to bullies. I did the first video for him [Special Delivery], we thought it was pretty good, sent it to Puff and he screamed down the phone at me, ‘I don’t know why I f***ing hire you white boys, you’re all the f***ing same, you’re f***ing useless, f***ing sort it out.’ We sort it out, the video goes out and I hear no more comment. Then I did a video for Black Rob [an artist produced by Diddy] and he [Diddy] said the same thing. I learnt that was his motivational technique – screaming. He kept on hiring me and it eventually calmed down. I went with him to clubs but I never went to any White Parties [the notorious annual parties hosted by Diddy].”
Despite Quested’s critically acclaimed career and the publicity surrounding his appearance at the January 6 Committee, he could not sell 64 Days to a network: “I’ve been pitching this movie ever since I testified in front of the committee and no one ever bought it.”
Among those to turn it down were the BBC and Channel 4. “In the end it became, to a certain extent, obsessive to me that I had to keep on going,” he says. 64 Days’ executive producers include PR veteran Matthew Freud and film producer Kris Thykier, and he remains hopeful of a UK release.
Even though so many prominent Proud Boys have been jailed, Quested says the group has “re-organised as a network. At any flashpoint you’re going to see Proud Boys, for instance they’ll be at tabulation centres [where votes are counted] if Kamala Harris wins in Pennsylvania”.
As for an insurrection on the scale of January 6 ever happening again in the US, Quested says, “I don’t think we’ll ever see another January 6 because the Secret Service now oversees the election certification process, but I am fearful for what will happen in state capitol buildings”.
If Harris wins, he predicts, “you’re going to see armed protesters, a flurry of lawsuits and in the swing states you’re going to see pressure on elected officials and election officials and boards of supervisors refusing to certify results”.
His future projects range from documentaries on the history of the US naval test programme to the musical style reggaeton. But don’t expect a sequel to 64 Days, his time on the project has taken its toll on Quested, who has for now curtailed his period in the political trenches: “I think my time is done on this one.”
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