In early October, writer-director Taylor Sheridan’s Western mystery, Wind River, was eight weeks into its theatrical release when he read the same horrifying news about Harvey Weinstein as everyone in Hollywood. For Sheridan, the allegations about the producer’s sexually predatory history carried a particular sting: Wind River is about sexual assault, and the Weinstein Company was the film’s distributor.

“Each day a subsequent story broke, and it got progressively worse, and things went from coercion and harassment to assault,” Sheridan said, speaking by phone recently from the Park City, Utah, set of his upcoming TV show, Yellowstone. “At that point, feeling sick, it became a revelation that . . . I can't have a film about violence against women silenced by the perpetrator of that very act. I called the financier, I called the producer, I called Jeremy [Renner], and Lizzie [Olsen], and I said, ‘This is what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna take it back.’” (Weinstein has denied allegations of nonconsensual sex).

Wind River stars Renner as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tracker and Olsen as an F.B.I. agent investigating the suspicious death of a young woman on Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation. Among the cast are several Native American actors whose families had been directly affected by sexual assaults on reservation lands, Sheridan said, and the movie was financed by Acacia Entertainment, a company owned by the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe of Louisiana, and producer Matthew George’s Savvy Media Holdings.

After what the filmmaker described as contentious negotiations, the Weinstein Co. finalized an acquisition deal for Wind River during the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Amid strong reviews, the movie arrived in theaters in August and went on to earn more than $40 million at the box office, well past the point of profitability against its $11 million budget.

On October 9, the Monday after the first Weinstein story broke in The New York Times, Sheridan called Weinstein Co. President and C.O.O. David Glasser to extricate his movie from the company. “I said, ‘It’s unfair to the people this movie’s about that it be under this umbrella . . . I need the film back,” Sheridan said he told Glasser. “I need the profits to go to a charity of my choosing.” Glasser, Sheridan said, was amenable—“He seemed as gut-punched as anybody,” Sheridan said—and persuaded what remained of the Weinstein Co. board to let the film go.

With the Weinsteins out, control of the film and its profits reverted to the Tunica-Biloxi tribe, which is paying to mail awards screeners without the Weinstein name on them, and to host a cocktail party this weekend for the filmmakers. All future proceeds from the film will go to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, which intends to use the money to finance a database of crime statistics about Native American women—such statistics are difficult, if not impossible, to find, Sheridan said, because of jurisdictional issues among the law enforcement agencies around reservation land.

Sheridan is no stranger to awards season; he wrote the scripts for the Oscar-nominated films Sicario and Hell or High Water. But the strange circumstances of the Weinstein saga have involved him more than usual in the minutiae of the process. “I saw how much screeners cost, and now from this day forward I will watch every screener sent to me,” Sheridan said.

Having freed his movie from the Weinsteins’ control, Sheridan has been observing, from his shooting locations in Wyoming and Utah, as Hollywood grapples with a steady stream of allegations about sexual assault and harassment. “There’s a necessary purging that’s happening,” Sheridan said. “There’s a certain justice in the fact that this is the last thing [Harvey Weinstein] did, and the thing I took from him.”