Iconic director Gus Van Sant has had a career worthy of his massive talent. From My Own Private Idaho to Good Will Hunting to Elephant – his IMDb page reads like a laundry list of some of cinema’s most influential films. His latest offering is Dead Man’s Wire, a stylish and retro ripped-from-the-headlines tale. On February 8, 1977, Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) entered the office of Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) and took him hostage with a sawed-off shotgun wired with a “dead man’s wire” – from the trigger to Tony’s neck.

Cassie Hager spoke with Van Sant about the process of bringing this story to life – and finding a delicate balance between drama and comedy.

Cassie Hager: I am so excited to talk to you about this movie. I absolutely loved it. I’m sure you get a lot of scripts, so what was it about this one that really stood out?
Gus Van Sant: You know, I don’t get a lot of scripts. The agency doesn’t really send them to me. I guess at some point I said “I don’t want to see any scripts” so they don’t send them. But they sometimes break through occasionally. Influential people will get a hold of my agent maybe once or twice a month, but not very often. I’m usually trying to do my own stuff, in this case it was an offer from Cassian Elwes (producer) to direct a film they needed to do right away. They needed to shoot within a couple months because of their incentive in the location they wanted to shoot, so they needed to start. That kind of got me interested, and in some ways the screenplay was kind of the last thing I considered. When I did read it, it was great. It was a very interesting and intense character. A crazy character at the height of his craziness. The minute you start reading it he’s already at peak craziness, and I always wanted to create a character like that. Here, it was created for me. 

Cassie Hager: Bill Skarsgård is so great in this role. I mean he’s great in everything, and he makes the character so likable even though he’s technically a villain. What made you go “I gotta work with this guy?”
Gus Van Sant: In his films he often plays extreme and intense characters. Like in IT and Boy Kills World. 

And he plays a kind of normal character in Barbarian, so I had this grouping of different instances of his work. I didn’t know the Swedish work that he had done so much, but he had sent me some of them after we started talking and I got excited about casting him.

With Dacre [Montgomery], I was impressed with his audition tape he had done for Stranger Things. You know about that?
Cassie Hager: I do! It was everywhere for a while.
Gus Van Sant: It was everywhere, and I was part of the “everywhere.” I hadn’t seen Stranger Things properly and I looked up the episode that he was in which made it feel more like a good idea. 

Cassie Hager: One of my favorite aspects of this film is the soundtrack. I had never heard one of the songs (Harper’s Bizarre, Witchi Tai To) and I immediately went and downloaded it after the movie was over because it’s so pretty. How much of a hand did you have in choosing songs?
Gus Van Sant: Yeah, that particular song is playing at a very desperate time in the story and it was kind of haunting, you know, that choice to use it there. Witchi Tai To was my own idea. We did have a music supervisor who was somebody that I never worked with, and she was sending me things that were pretty unknown. We also started to just use songs we knew about. The first is Deodato doing a Strauss composition, so like a rock version of a classical music piece. Through a lot of trials and errors we came back to the Deodato song and decided it worked perfectly. It’s hard because you have to make sure the song is representing exactly what you want.

Cassie Hager: You’re obviously familiar with doing films based on true events.I recently watched Elephant for the first time, which was brilliant but really difficult to sit through. Dead Man’s Wire has dark moments, but it’s also light-hearted at times. How do you find that balance between historical accuracy and entertainment?
Gus Van Sant: There is a sort of strange light-heartedness to it that I think existed in the actual event. Although it was very dark and scary when you saw the original footage of the two guys walking with the shotgun. You sort of feel bad for Richard, meanwhile Tony is in this other kind of headspace of talking to people and striking up conversations and this strange lightness to his character sort of flashes into anger. So that existed in the original event. Kind of an existential comedy, like a Samuel Beckett play. It’s something that is dark, yet funny.

Dead Man’s Wire is in select theaters December 12th for a limited engagement and opens on January 6th.
You can read our review of the film here.