The Pirate King is very close to its director’s heart. Josh Plasse’s uncle, Captain Todd Willis, was the inspiration for the new movie, which follows Marine veteran Todd Gillis (Rob Riggle) struggling with PTSD and addiction after serving in Afghanistan. Hitting rock bottom, Gillis suddenly finds an unlikely community in a group of pirate reenactors.

It’s Plasse’s first feature film, but he says tackling such personal material elevated his work ethic, despite its tricky balance of comedy and drama. “It has a difficult tone to capture,” he tells Den of Geek at SXSW. “Because you need to have the levity of the pirate reenactment, but also the grounded truth of what these veterans are going through. I had to spend a lot of time really preparing how we would do that, what that throughline would be, and how we would capture it. I knew I couldn’t let this story down because it was so true to my uncle, true to myself, and true to my hometown that I would be embarrassed. It just made me work harder.”

Part of his preparation involved Mission 22, a non-profit that teaches veterans and their families how to recover, reconnect, and rebuild following their service. Through Mission 22, he did a “ruck run” for Stop Soldier Suicide, where he ran 22 miles wearing a 22-pound rucksack. “At the time, 22 veterans were dying by suicide every day in this country, which is a staggering statistic. 121 people die by suicide every day in the United States. So that’s almost a sixth of them who are veterans, and that’s an overwhelmingly unacceptable number.”

But after talking to veterans and their families, Plasse discovered that many of them didn’t want to discuss their post-service struggles. “[They] don’t really want to talk about it, because there’s a stigma there. They think that the more you talk about this issue, the more it’s propagated, whereas the others say, ‘Hey, it’s okay to be vulnerable. It’s okay to have real conversations and talk about things that are hard, because we have to end this issue.’ So it was something I felt was a heavy, hard task, because I didn’t want to alienate some people, but I knew it needed to be spoken about.”