‘Dead Man’s Wire’ Director Gus Van Sant Reflects on 40 Years at the Helm: ‘I Was Sort of a Rabble-Rouser’

For his first feature in more than seven years, Gus Van Sant returns to themes — and also to a significant moment in time — that have resonated with the director over the course of a four-decade career. Such an artistic comeback makes an ideal excuse for a wide-ranging conversation, in which Van Sant sheds light on the lesser-known corners of his career, from the debut film that was not to be (“Alice in Hollywood”) to his role in launching Larry Clark’s “Kids.”

In his timely new thriller “Dead Man’s Wire,” Van Sant offers another original take on sensational true-crime material, attempting to humanize the parties involved. The gritty late-’70s drama re-creates an unusual stunt in which a disgruntled Indianapolis man named Tony Kiritsis (unpredictably embodied by wild-eyed “It” star Bill Skarsgård) kidnapped an employee of the mortgage company he felt had swindled him (Dacre Montgomery of “Stranger Things” plays his victim).

“He wants an apology. But he wants the apology to be over the airwaves,” explains Van Sant, whose longtime fans will surely see a connection between “Dead Man’s Wire” and the director’s 1995 film “To Die For,” an irreverent, wickedly funny retelling of the tale of Pamela Smart, a ruthlessly ambitious small-town weather girl who manipulates two starstruck teens into killing her husband.

“You’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV,” purred a coquettish Nicole Kidman as spotlight-chasing Suzanne Stone in that torn-from-the-tabloids satire.

“To Die For” anticipated the fame-seeking influencer culture to come, even as it reflected the desperation that compelled Kiritsis to air his grievances on live TV. As Kidman’s character so aptly put it: “Because what’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody’s watching?”

“Her case became a media circus,” says Van Sant, who found Kiritsis’ story interesting for different reasons — namely, the way a man who felt betrayed by the system leveraged public attention: by calling into the radio station and playing to local TV cameras (this was before the rise of cable reflected in “To Die For”).

“I had sort of done that film,” Van Sant says, explaining why he struck a more serious tone than he had in “To Die For.” “‘Dead Man’s Wire’ was like a six-years-earlier version of that dynamic, when the media was not quite as sophisticated.”

Though many mistakenly count 1986’s “Mala Noche” — the scrappy, street-level portrait of drifters and daydreamers that introduced the director to what would become his adopted home of Portland, Ore. — as the beginning of Van Sant’s filmmaking career, he’d been making films (mostly shorts) since the ’70s.
“Dead Man’s Wire” takes place in 1977, roughly a year after Van Sant arrived in Los Angeles, and a year before San Francisco mayor Harvey Milk was assassinated — the subject of his Oscar-winning 2008 film, “Milk,” which unspools in that same meaningful era for Van Sant. The director’s first commercial hit, “Drugstore Cowboy,” was also set in the ’70s.

According to Van Sant, before moving to Los Angeles, he’d read an interview with Chevy Chase in which the comedian had been asked what he planned to do when he got to L.A. “He said, ‘I might just visit some friends like Ken Shapiro,’” recalls Van Sant, who’d admired an independent comedy feature Shapiro had made called “The Groove Tube” — a motley collection of comedic skits, musical acts and assorted nonsense that not-so-coincidentally anticipated “Saturday Night Live.”

“‘The Groove Tube’ was important because it was a low-budget film — like a $200,000 film — sort of at the same time as ‘Pink Flamingos,’ which was a $12,000 film. They both were comedies, and they both were pushing boundaries,” says Van Sant, who took inspiration from those projects (along with “Easy Rider,” John Cassavetes and “Eraserhead”) when taking his first steps toward directing.

“So when I showed up in ’76, I just looked up Ken Shapiro in the phone book, and I called him and said, ‘I make short films. Do you have a position?’ And he hired me as his assistant,” Van Sant recalls. The director makes that first break sound easy, but insists it wasn’t exactly glamorous: “I moved into his backyard in a tent. He had a really good office, with an executive shower and a secretary. That’s where I would use the shower.”

Van Sant tried to soak up as much as he could from Shapiro, who watched his sketch-comedy format take off on TV (as Van Sant remembers it, his boss had commissioned Lorne Michaels to write a screenplay about “phone phreaking,” tentatively entitled “Ma Bell,” but the movie fell through when Michaels moved to New York to launch “SNL”).

During those years, Van Sant started writing a feature-length showbiz satire called “Alice in Hollywood,” in which he convinced his father to “invest” $20,000. Van Sant was still working for Shapiro at the time, but “I somehow took a hiatus when I shot it,” he says. “It was about people in Hollywood without jobs and a girl who comes from the Midwest to become a movie star, who runs into all of these characters, like casting agents and police on the corner.”

Looking back, Van Sant considers that early film a failure, insisting he hardly showed “Alice” to anyone (the failed attempt now resides in the Academy archives). “Shapiro saw it, and he just made fun of it,” says Van Sant, who radically cut the film down to 45 minutes. “That made it hard to get into any festivals. But I had some success with a short film called ‘The Discipline of D.E.’ [adapted from a story by William S. Burroughs] at festivals right about the same time.”

Things started to take off for Van Sant in the mid-’80s, but he maintains a soft spot for that late-’70s period, when he was fresh out of the Rhode Island School of Design, trying to find an opening in the film industry.

“Milk” (2008) takes place during that tempestuous period. What many don’t realize about the long, complicated incubation of that project is that nearly 15 years before getting “Milk” made, Van Sant had been hired to direct an adaptation of the Harvey Milk biography “The Mayor of Castro Street.”

“I was on it when Robin Williams was going to do it,” Van Sant says, referring to the role that earned Sean Penn an Oscar. (Williams had also been attached to an earlier version of Van Sant’s 2018 film “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot,” about quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan.)

Referring to “The Mayor of Castro Street,” Van Sant says, “Oliver Stone was going to do it after ‘JFK,’ so it goes way back. I think in Oliver’s version, Harvey kissed his boyfriend on page 70. He was mostly interested in why Dan White became crazy. Harvey was a player, but it was more Dan’s movie.”

Van Sant was ultimately fired from the film. “I was sort of a rabble-rouser,” he says. “I wanted to represent the gay community and not subvert it.” Other directors came and went — including Rob Cohen, Joel Schumacher and Bryan Singer — while Van Sant eventually found another way in, after Dustin Lance Black wrote a screenplay that wasn’t based on Randy Shilts’ book “The Mayor of Castro Street.”

“The stories were all the same. Every draft had the same Harvey antics, like the Briggs Initiative [a failed ballot initiative that sought to ban gay and lesbian people from working in schools] and winning the local elections,” he says. “The cool thing that Lance had done was he left out the trial of Dan White, which was a really great move, because then you don’t have to go into this whole story of the ‘Twinkie defense.’ You can say a couple of things about it, but it could be about Harvey and not about Dan White.”

By contrast, “Dead Man’s Wire” centers on the criminal, something Van Sant deliberately chose to avoid with “Milk.” But it’s also a very different crime (one that multiple critics have associated with the public execution of a high-profile UnitedHealthcare exec allegedly committed by Luigi Mangione last year).

“I don’t think there’s any way that you’re able to say, ‘Oh, this is just a normal guy we’re supposed to understand.’ Not that I need that from my lead characters,” Van Sant says. “I mean, he’s leading you through the story, but I don’t think that you have the ability to not think he’s crazy, because he’s just so erratic and strange.”

Kiritsis was in his mid-40s when he kidnapped Richard O. Hall, but Van Sant wasn’t interested in depicting him that way. The director had been repeatedly impressed with the performances of Skarsgård, who could channel the kind of energy Van Sant saw in the character, and he imagined Montgomery in the role of Hall.

“I think it was just a question of the guys I wanted to work with. And then the only problem with them was it wasn’t Timothée Chalamet,” Van Sant says, cynically referring to the way certain actors make projects easier to greenlight. “But there wasn’t any resistance. Casting just accepted it. Then we put Al Pacino in the dad’s role, and we got our star quality.”

Casting hasn’t always gone so smoothly for Van Sant, who famously turned young actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck into megastars after directing them in “Good Will Hunting,” a film the pair had written themselves. Back in the mid-’80s, however, Van Sant had wanted to cast Tom Waits in “Drugstore Cowboy,” but the musician had already signed to do another film (“Cold Feet”) for the same production company (Avenue Pictures), so he agreed to try Matt Dillon instead.

The unexpected success of “Drugstore Cowboy” fast-tracked Van Sant’s directing career. So what did he decide to do next? Arguably his riskiest and most avant-garde feature, “My Own Private Idaho” (which is saying something, when you count gambles like desert-wandering indie “Gerry” and his shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”).

In its final form, “My Own Private Idaho” loosely reinterprets William Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” as a contemporary portrait of two itinerant street hustlers. But it could have gone any number of other directions, admits Van Sant.

“There were a lot of concepts because there were a lot of drafts of other scripts that were incorporated into the same project,” Van Sant says. “One was about Mike and Hans [the characters played by River Phoenix and Udo Kier]. There was a script about the strange relationship they have called ‘In a Blue Funk,’ in which Mike lives at Hans’ house. Hans dresses up in an apron to serve him food.”

Keanu Reeves’ character, Scott, didn’t appear in that draft — at least, not as audiences know him. “There was a Scott, but he didn’t have the Shakespearean dynamics,” Van Sant explains. “And then there was [a script] called ‘Minions of the Moon,’ which was all Shakespeare, just Shakespeare. They were speaking sort of like they do in the movie. There’s verse, but it’s kind of smoothed over by not trying to rhyme it.”

Van Sant had the idea to take the Bard’s Falstaff stories and transpose them to the present, where Scott served as a stand-in for Prince Hal, whose dad is the mayor of Portland, and Falstaff is a guy named Bob (William Richert).

“And then there was a third, which was more of a short story about two Mexican American characters who go back to the town in Spain where one of them has the same last name as the town,” says Van Sant, who had already cast two unknown actors to play those roles. “The idea was to go back to street casting, like we had on ‘Mala Noche,’” he says.

To be clear, Reeves and Phoenix were always Van Sant’s first choice (he’d sold German cult legend Kier on the project at the 1986 Berlinale). He just couldn’t believe they would agree to make the film, which was a synthesis of those three different scripts, united by a common theme: street kids and the people in their lives.

“We expected them to say ‘no,’ and then we would have to use the regular guys,” Van Sant says. Instead, Reeves (who was looking to stretch beyond surfer-dude roles in films like “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “Point Break”) signed on right away, and Phoenix agreed once he was sure Reeves would do it.

“So now it’s a whole different playing field. These guys are like real actors,” says Van Sant, who directed them to shed their trained-actor instincts. “They wanted to interpret the parts, but River got the idea instantaneously. It was just like a way for him to morph into this character. It was harder for Keanu because he was playing a Shakespearean character that didn’t really exist in our reality.”

Van Sant, who dabbles in photography as well, had started taking large-format portraits of the cast and crew on “Drugstore Cowboy.” The look of that film was inspired by William Eggleston, he says. He also found inspiration in Larry Clark’s work after photographer Bruce Weber arranged to send him copies of Clark’s books “Tulsa” and “Teenage Lust,” in which Clark had chronicled the lives of his friends, shooting up, having sex and playing with guns.

“It was basically the real ‘Drugstore Cowboy,’ and so we were using that as reference sometimes, visually,” Van Sant says. “I met Larry much later, when I was working on the Oliver Stone version
of ‘Milk.’”

Clark had a museum show in San Francisco, where Van Sant introduced himself. “And he knew exactly who I was,” Van Sant says. “He was like, ‘You made that film, man, and it was a film I wanted to make.’ And he just started going off on how he shot footage of ‘Tulsa,’ and he put it aside and he used his Leica instead. And I realized, he actually tried to make the same film that we were kind of making.”

Van Sant told Clark about a woman who was trying to raise money to make 10 films for a million dollars apiece. “And as soon as I said that, he was like, ‘I want to do that, man.’ He just grabbed [filmmaker] Harmony [Korine] off the street and they wrote a script [practically] overnight.”

Clark sent Korine’s script to Van Sant, who was stunned by their enthusiasm. “I hadn’t even called the woman back. So all of a sudden, I became responsible for this film that hadn’t been funded.”

In the end, Van Sant’s former agent, Cary Woods, was looking to produce. Woods quit William Morris and found the money, which is how “Kids” — on which Van Sant served as a spiritual godfather of sorts — got made.