Gus Van Sant: ‘My assistant wanted to erect a statue of Luigi Mangione. My generation thought: This is murder’ | film

IIn February 1977, a middle-aged businessman from Indianapolis named Tony Kiritsis held hostage an employee of a local mortgage brokers, who he was convinced had conned him out of the profits from a piece of real estate. Kyritsis decided that the system was stacked against the little man, and he would be the one to push it. He tied one end of the wire to the trigger of the gun, and the other to the hostage’s head, and demanded the head of the brokers $5 million and an admission of guilt. The final moments of the 63-hour standoff were broadcast live on television.

He’s already been the subject of a 2018 documentary (Dead Man’s Line) and a provocative 2022 podcast (American Hostage) starring Jon Hamm as a DJ who broadcast an interview with Kiritsis live from the crime scene. Now Gus Van Sant, whose career spanning more than 40 years includes outlandish landmarks (My Own Private Idaho, Milk), mainstream crowd pleasers (Good Will Hunting), and artistic award winners (Columbine-inspired Elephant), films the action in Dead Man’s Wire. This satirical thriller intercuts between the volatile captor (Bill Skarsgård) and the media circus swirling around him, which includes a DJ, played here by Colman Domingo, and a TV journalist (Mihala) who has had enough of being deceived. Al Pacino plays the head of a mortgage company, sunbathing in Malibu and not convinced he has anything worth apologizing for.

The director was oblivious to the case at the time. “I didn’t have a TV or a newspaper subscription,” he explains via video call. He’s a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was three-quarters of the band Talking Heads the year before. Already an emerging director, he spent some time in Europe, including a visit to Viterbo, central Italy, in July 1975 to meet Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was editing his scandalous film Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom. It would become Pasolini’s final film, as he was killed four months later.

“I was there with other students and he asked us what ideas we had,” Van Sant says. “My answer kind of got lost in translation. I said I thought literature could show thoughts and ideas that travel through time effortlessly, whereas cinema is just characters talking. I said I wanted to transfer what literature can do to film.” Pasolini’s response? “He said he thought it didn’t make any sense,” he laughs.

Van Sant, who was born in Louisville, Kentucky, was living in Los Angeles at the time Kyritsis carried out his plan. In Los Angeles, the 73-year-old maverick director speaks today. Wearing a red puffy jacket, he sits on his balcony facing the mountains and the flawless blue sky, reflected in the patio door behind him. His hair is gray and has a boyish smudge on his forehead. He speaks in an amused monotone. At one point, he excused himself to say hello to the refrigerator repairman, and left me staring at the lawn furniture for five long minutes. It’s not unlike watching an extended clip from one of his arthouse films — say, “Last Days,” his dreamy 2005 meditation on the death of rock star Kurt Cobain, which was turned into an unlikely opera four years ago.

Eventually, Van Sant returns and heads inside, carrying his laptop across several rooms, with paintings and photographs flashing on the walls, until he finds a new place to rest. There’s a lesson here: when you think it’s gone, it always comes back. Although he recently directed most of Ryan Murphy’s gossip TV series Feud: Capote Vs the Swans, which starred Tom Hollander as Truman Capote, it has been seven years since his last film and nearly two decades since Milk. The 2008 Oscar-winning biopic, in which Sean Penn played assassinated gay politician Harvey Milk, was the last Van Sant film anyone cared about. yet.

It’s easy to see why Dead Man’s Wire featured him. He clearly captured the flavor of the 1970s in “Drugstore Cowboy,” with Matt Dillon as a neurotic, superstitious junkie, and defined the intersection between crime and media in the black comedy “To Die For,” which starred Nicole Kidman as a bloodthirsty TV weather forecaster.

During pre-production on Dead Man’s Wire, external events ensured that one element overshadowed everything else about the film. In December 2024, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed in Manhattan. This summer, 27-year-old Luigi Mangione will stand trial for murder. Once the news broke that Mangione had allegedly referred to the health insurance industry as “parasitic,” Van Sant recognized the similarities between that apparent David and Goliath story and the story he was about to turn into a movie. “We knew it would impact the way people received the film. And it did.”

What he saw in response to the killing was a generational divide. “My assistant at the time, who was in his mid-20s, told me he thought a statue of Maggione should be erected in Central Park,” Van Sant says. “We started talking about the differences between the way people of his time viewed it — that some believed Mangione was a hero — and what people of my generation believed, which was that it was murder.”

However, the fanbase surrounding Mangione has also acquired a strange camp edge. Radical film director Bruce LaBruce, a friend of Van Sant’s, has pledged to direct a “Luigi Mangione sexist film”, while Luigi: The Musical will be released on stage in New York to coincide with the trial.

How much of the hype can be attributed to Mangione’s smoldering looks, which could have earned him the lead in a Pasolini film? “Absolutely,” Van Sant says. “He’s very typical. If he had looked different, there probably wouldn’t have been such a dramatic reaction. He still carries that with him; he has a fan club.”

Sex appeal also seems to have played a role in the casting of Dead Man’s Wire. Documentary footage at the end of the film reveals that the real Tony Kiritsis was a middle-aged young man who largely had no oil painting. While the actor playing him is not only a decade younger, but as one of the Skarsgård brothers, he is part of an entire gallery of oil paintings.

Weren’t there any older, uglier alternatives? “Oh, we had a lot of ugly old men,” he says. “But I thought Bill would do well. Although of course he’s tall, and the real Tony had little man syndrome. Bill told me when he was younger, he was a short kid and then he grew up fast. So I think, uh…”

As his answer turns into gentle nonsense, I remember what the actors told me about working with him. Casey Affleck, who starred in films To Die For, Good Will Hunting and Jerry’s Desert Odyssey, described the filmmaker as an “enigma” and “a tough nut to crack.” James Franco, who played Ben’s lover in Milk, said that Van Sant “seems to do so little — you feel like you’re not being directed at all.”

There is an innate calm and patience that makes him an ideal interpreter of sensitive or inflammatory subjects, from Columbine to Cobain. Had Pasolini lived to see Van Sant’s films, he would certainly have been more responsive to his suggestion when they met. Did the ideas he tried to explain to the Italian maestro in 1975 end up enriching his career? “I think so, yes. I was trying to bring about this change in cinematic vocabulary.”

He insists he didn’t make much progress until he fell under Bela Tarr’s spell. The Hungarian composer, who died earlier this year, was thanked in the credits for Gerry, the 2002 film that launched Van Sant’s more experimental phase. “I thought: Oh, it actually did what I was hoping it would do.” I always wanted to play with the way movies are cut. The rules about continuity bothered me. Now everyone is filming their own stuff and posting it online, and they don’t know or care about these rules. But Bella changed things up by simply not cutting. The shooting continued.”

Interviews, though, no. As a publicist signaled that our time was up, the director glanced back at me, still bundled up in his puffy jacket even after half an hour inside. For all the alienation, exhaustion, and discord his films consume, he comes across as a calm rationalist — like regular Gus Van Sanetti.