Gus Van Sant on Returning to Film Directing With ‘Dead Man’s Wire’ and the Steamy Audition Tape That Cost Him ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’

Gus Van Sant has a thing for outsiders.

From “Drugstore Cowboy” to “My Own Private Idaho” to “Good Will Hunting” (still the biggest hit of his career), Van Sant likes to turn his camera on the hookers and junkies, hustlers and loners who society overlooks. The more marginalized someone is, the more Van Sant is drawn to them.

“I relate to them,” Van Sant says. “Stories about one individual versus a whole system are just
something I respond to emotionally.”

“Dead Man’s Wire,” Van Sant’s latest film, is about a down-and-out guy who has been screwed over by the powers that be. Set in 1977, it tells the true story of Tony Kiritsis (played by Bill Skarsgård), an aspiring real estate developer who falls behind on his mortgage payments and decides to take his broker hostage..

“He’s a person who went completely off the rails,” Van Sant says.

In real life, Kiritsis’ 63-hour standoff with the police, during which he wired the muzzle of a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun to the back of the broker’s head, became a media sensation, transfixing viewers who tuned in partly to see if a trigger would get pulled on live TV.

“At first, it felt like a period piece,” Van Sant says. “But as we were in preproduction, Luigi Mangione shot that health-care executive, and it made me realize we’re telling a story that’s also happening today.”

Van Sant had a more personal connection to the story, which takes place in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was shot in Louisville, Kentucky — the director’s hometown. “I understood these characters,” he says. “They resemble the people I grew up with. My family had a history of being Midwest businessmen. My grandfather and my father and my uncle were all salesmen. I know what that life is like. Even the cities in that region have a small-town quality, and there’s kind of a dislocation that comes with being in the middle of the country.”

The movie is propelled by Kiritsis’ explosive indignation about how his lenders have thwarted his ambitions to develop a property and realize the American dream. Van Sant may have related to the character’s background, but temperamentally he seems far removed from his subject; there’s a shyness to him — he answers questions thoughtfully, but timidly — and a gentleness. Robin Williams, who co-starred in “Good Will Hunting,” once labeled him “the mellowest man in Hollywood.”

“Well, compared to him, maybe,” Van Sant says. “There was nothing mellow about Robin.”

“Dead Man’s Wire” is Van Sant’s first feature in six years, a lapse he attributes to directing the 2024 FX series “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” as well as a collection of short films for Gucci.

“I didn’t realize how much I missed [feature filmmaking] until I got to set and started working on this,” he says. “It’s just a different game. It’s for a different audience, and it’s a different business.”

Like many of Van Sant’s most famous films, “Dead Man’s Wire” is an indie production. It was financed outside the studio system and cost less than $15 million to make, a fraction of the budget of a blockbuster.

“Studios are only really interested in huge tentpole movies that are designed to make a lot of money — they’ve sort of taken over the industry,” he says.

Van Sant is a darling of the art-house scene, making lyrical, formally daring movies like 2003’s “Elephant” and “Gerry,” as well as prestige dramas, such as 2008’s “Milk,” that compete for Oscars. But he’s flirted with directing more escapist projects. In the ’90s he was pitched on making a movie of “G.I. Joe.” “It had a very right-wing sort of bent to it, which kind of scared me,” he says.

And Van Sant campaigned to direct 2015’s “Fifty Shades of Grey,” shooting a steamy sequence with Alex Pettyfer as the BDSM-obsessed billionaire Christian Grey to show author E.L. James how he would handle the material. He didn’t land the gig, and Jamie Dornan got the kinky lead role.

“It did not fit into her idea of what she wanted to do,” Van Sant says. “It’s a complete sex novel, but the author had this intention of not having a lot of sex in it. She wanted a movie that was a lot more chaste than the novel.” (A spokesperson for James disputes that she wanted the movie to have less sex than the books.)

And other projects passed Van Sant by. He interviewed for 2011’s “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn,” but was turned down. At various points, Van Sant was attached to adapt “Brokeback Mountain” and “Call Me by Your Name” for the screen, only to move on after failing to get the projects off the ground. In the case of “Brokeback Mountain,” the Oscar-winning gay romance that Ang Lee made with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal playing cowboy lovers, the biggest hurdle was casting.

“I was checking in with Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Leo DiCaprio, and they were all like, ‘Maybe not,’” he says of the A-listers who were uncomfortable with the material. “I saw it as a very austere movie that was really set on the range, more in line with Annie Proulx’s original short story.”

On Sept. 2, “Dead Man’s Wire” will premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It’s the same place Van Sant debuted “My Own Private Idaho,” which won an acting prize for River Phoenix and was hailed as a masterpiece. “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” also debuted in Venice, but it won nothing and earned scathing reviews. Van Sant knows that’s a risk in telling unconventional stories; not everyone appreciates it when you refuse to play it safe.

“It’s better when the films are well received,” he says. “But I don’t get too upset about it. I also don’t get too carried away when it’s a great review. Good or bad, it’s just someone’s opinion.

View this article at Variety.