With Dead Man’s Wire, Gus Van Sant transforms an infamous true-crime tale of the 70s into both a wildly entertaining spectacle and a razor-sharp look at what happens when spectacle is all you’ve got.
The film immerses the audience in the black-comic frenzy of an unhinged hostage taking. But just beneath the thriller’s frantic tension lies a darkly funny, deeply human excavation of American myth-making—as an aggrieved Everyman, an indifferent system, a media expanding its power, and a rising current of outrage at life being stacked against the little guy converge into an eerily familiar circus onto which everyone projects their own meanings.
The film marks Van Sant’s first feature in seven years
But as he has done in such touchstone movies as Drugstore Cowboy, To Die For, Good Will Hunting, Milk, and Elephant, he taps into themes that are immediately resonant in American culture. Mirroring a standoff that was entirely broadcast live, Van Sant employs a style as direct and reverberating as a gut punch, purposely designing a run-and-gun production that took just 19 days to shoot, an event that unfolded over an incredible 63 hours. Says Van Sant with his distinctive economy of words, “I am always drawn to what makes people do what they do, and here I was interested in Tony Kiritsis’s misguided sense of heroism.”
Sparking that approach was first-time screenwriter Austin Kolodney’s lean yet wide-ranging screenplay
Steeped in a comedy-writing background, but with the soul of a cinephile, Kolodney had done something unexpected: disarmed the story’s pure sensationalism by leaning into all that raged just below its surface, into a tangle of roiling human emotions, unresolved furies, simmering class divisions, and blurred lines between grabbing attention and getting true justice. He keyed into the inky-black absurdity of a man whose deluded quest to be heard collided head-on with a new age of infotainment.
Unusually, the two-time Oscar-nominated Van Sant developed the script with Kolodney while the struggling young writer worked as a janitor squeegeeing gorilla and orangutan enclosures at the LA Zoo. Kolodney’s free-wheeling writing, and its match with Van Sant’s penchant for outsiders and outlaws, soon lured an inspired cast including Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Colman Domingo, rising star Myha’la, and legendary Al Pacino. Always meticulous with atmosphere, Van Sant crafted the film’s grit and urgency with a team led by cinematographer Arnaud Potier, production designer Stefan Dechant, costume designer Peggy Schnitzer, editor Saar Klein, and composer Danny Elfman.
From the opening moments, an unblinking, handheld camera latches onto the manic energy of Skarsgård’s Tony—and stays with him through every second of ratcheting pressure, epic rants, and sardonic twists as he rides the line between righteous defiance and abject madness. If the film is rigorously period, it also taps into an of-the-moment mood of anxiety in the face of goliath power structures. Both the immediacy and the resonance, says Van Sant, were a result of “bringing these three days in 1977 to life minute-by-minute, item-by-item, line-by-line with our cast and crew.”
Sums up Domingo, “Dead Man’s Wire marks the thrilling return of Gus Van Sant to auteur filmmaking. He has created a world that is exciting to experience but will undoubtedly spur multiple perspectives and meaningful conversations.”
Director’s Statement
I’ve always been drawn to understanding what drives people—what compels someone to cross a line, to act out of desperation, conviction, or fear. Dead Man’s Wire is no exception.
The film is based on the true story of Tony Kiritsis, a man who, in 1977, felt deceived and cornered by the system he trusted most. Believing his mortgage company had exploited him at his most vulnerable, he took drastic and very public action to reclaim a sense of power and justice. His story is both deeply human and profoundly unsettling—an act of rage that became a cry to be heard.
In telling Tony’s story, I wanted to resist the impulse to lead the audience toward a single interpretation or moral conclusion. Instead, I chose to observe—to let the situation unfold as it did in real life, without judgment or commentary. My hope was to create space for viewers to experience their own emotional responses, whether empathy, discomfort, confusion, or even laughter.
That laughter, too, is deliberate. Even in moments of chaos or despair, absurdity has a way of creeping in. Allowing humor to exist within unsettling circumstances felt essential—it reflects how people really experience crisis, and it reminds us that tragedy and comedy often occupy the same fragile space.
We began filming in November 2024, and as the world shifted around us, we found ourselves confronting echoes of Tony’s experience in today’s headlines—stories of economic strain, mistrust, and the fraying social contract. These parallels made the project feel eerily timely, and at times, uncomfortably close.
My hope is that the film doesn’t merely revisit a moment in history, but opens a conversation about how frustration, alienation, and loss of control can twist into something volatile. While the subject matter may be disturbing, it reflects the uncertainty, anger, and—sometimes—the strange, human humor that continues to shape our collective experience.
I am profoundly grateful to the real people whose lives informed this story, and to the extraordinary cast and collaborators who brought it to life with honesty and empathy.
Director Gus Van Sant was born in Louisville, Kentucky. His many features include the Festival Official Selections Drugstore Cowboy (89), My Own Private Idaho (91), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (93), To Die For (95), Gerry (02), Elephant (03), Paranoid Park (07), and Restless (11) as well as Good Will Hunting (97), which was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director at the Academy Awards. Dead Man’s Wire (25) is his latest feature.
The Kidnapping
On February 8, 1977, would-be Indianapolis businessman Tony Kiritsis walked into the offices of Meridian Mortgage prepared to seek his own diabolical means of justice. Believing he had been screwed over on his loans, Tony blamed company owner M.L. Hall for severing his hoped-for path to the American Dream. His appointment that day with Hall’s son Richard was merely a feint for a bizarrely-conceived kidnapping scheme. Once they met, Tony forced Richard into a home-made, “fail-deadly” device later dubbed a dead man’s wire—a noose wrapped around Richard’s neck connected to Tony, then to a sawed-off shotgun designed to instantly go off should sharpshooters try to intervene.
From that moment on, there was no turning back, as Tony’s very bad idea kept building on itself, generating a media frenzy that, just as Tony had hope for, soon “went national.” With the city unwilling to risk disaster, and the public at once repelled and mesmerized by images of Richard in his pinstriped shirt-sleeves reckoning with a rifle bound to his neck, Tony was able to bring Richard to his apartment without interference. There the two holed-up together for three nerve-wracking days of extreme psychological intensity as Tony demanded $5 million, immunity from prosecution, and, most importantly, a public apology from Meridian for making it so hard for people like himself to get ahead.
Madcap as it was, the incident seemed to presage all at once the modern media free-for-all, the growing power differential between haves and have-nots, and an era of lone wolf crusaders set off by hazy fury at uncaring systems. Today, the standoff is still taught in media ethics courses as a case study on the dangers of journalists escalating incendiary events.
In the end, while the kidnapping spurred fear, turmoil, and psychic damage, not a single shot was fired. That relatively upbeat outcome is what got Kolodney intrigued. “I wouldn’t have written this if it had come out any other way,” he explains. “It’s a testament to the idea that cooler heads can sometimes prevail. But also, I always thought the story was not so much about Tony’s terrible plan as about how everyone around him reacted to it. And because the real incident ended with the amazing punchline of Tony being found not guilty that really seemed to open it up into dark comedy territory.”
For Kolodney, the script would soon prove a galvanic life-changer. He was in fairly dire economic straits before and during its development—to the point he sought out an LA job fair where he landed the gig sweeping up at the zoo.
He saw none of that coming when he first bumped into the little-known reality of Kiritsis’ story whilst scrolling YouTube during the long nights of the 2020 lockdowns. Footage of Tony’s brazen scheme struck a nerve. Then it led straight down a rabbit hole. “Amid the strange confinement of that year and the questions of how I was going to pay rent, suddenly I see this clip of Tony marching down the street, slipping on the ice and nearly setting off his device, and the sheer pandemonium completely hooked me,” Kolodney recalls.
“That led me to watching the press conference where Tony is sipping water like a baby bird, cracking bad jokes, and talking about how the mortgage company stacked the deck against him,” Kolodney continues. “It was all terrifically cinematic, but it also hit home in a personal way. I was in elementary school when the 2008 financial crisis hit, and I think since then, the American Dream has felt distant for many in my generation. I didn’t want to lionize Tony or downplay the terror he caused, but it seemed notable that the itch Tony felt in 1977 still was striking a chord in 2020.”
As Kolodney plunged into research, he became aware many of those involved in the incident had already passed, including Kiritsis himself and both M.L. and Richard Hall. He also discovered the 2018 documentary Dead Man’s Line made by Alan Berry and Mark Enochs, whom he soon contacted. Though Kolodney’s inspiration came well before that, he credits Berry and Enochs with sending him a 16gb drive containing a veritable treasure trove of news clippings and original police reports.
Authenticity mattered, but Kolodney wasn’t interested in a mere procedural. His background writing for Funny Or Die and Comedy Central encouraged him to filter Tony’s cockamamie plot through an absurdist lens, fully entering the not-quite-right mind of a guy ready to go off the deep end just for the chance to say his piece—and the media eco-system that turned him into an underdog folk hero for doing so.
“I’m a goddamn national hero and don’t you forget it,” Tony informs the news crews chasing him. Yet his aims and his methods are a comical mismatch and Kolodney leaned into that humor. Even as he gains a fan club, the joke is ultimately on Tony because, while lives and careers might be forever altered by his crime, no real change can come of it. Kolodney suggests the public rooting for Tony may be as quixotic as he is and reflects affinities embedded in our national character.
“One thing I think this story does right now is open up a dialogue about who we are and who we want to be,” says Kolodney. “I loved Gus’s approach of including the clip of John Wayne and the Western iconography, because it’s a reminder that we are a nation that was founded on myths of loud, brash, boisterous outlaws.” (Remarkably, broadcasters really did cut from Wayne’s speech accepting the award for Favorite Motion Picture Actor at the 1977 People’s Choice Awards straight to live coverage of Kiritsis, creating a true-life interplay of outlaw entertainment with news of the real thing).
The more he learned about the 63 hours of the standoff, the more Kolodney saw the jumpy, tenuous personal dynamics between Tony and Richard as the beating emotional heart of the story. The claustrophobia and psychic terror of being wired to one another in Tony’s cramped apartment was palpable as he wrote through the isolation and hush of the pandemic.
Kolodney knew first-hand there would be natural class aversions between the two men. But he was also looking for flashes of unanticipated connection. “For me the soul of the movie was always what happens in the room between these two guys, which was largely drawn from my imagination,” says the writer. “I grew up with a single mom who worked in a grocery store, and to be honest, when I went to community college, I had a chip on my shoulder about people who come from wealth. So, I was attuned to how Tony might see Richard. But I also wanted to create empathy for who Richard is beyond his social status, and for this incredible ordeal Tony put him through.”
Though Tony and Richard might seem to share little but the strand of wire twitching between them, a parallel loneliness and doubts about mattering seem to eat at both. “I knew Tony had an abusive, violent father so I felt seeing Richard go through trauma with his own dad is something Tony could understand emotionally,” the writer says. “There is something so devastating about M.L. Hall refusing to apologize to Tony even with his son’s life on the line.”
Kolodney is the kind of devoted movie-lover who rarely lets a week go by without time spent in a theater. So naturally, he had in the back of his head Frank Pierson’s unflinchingly humane script for Sidney Lumet’s classic Dog Day Afternoon. That screenplay, too, was based on an actual 1970s crime—John Wojtowicz’s Brooklyn bank-heist turned explosive hostage situation. “I did want to pay tribute to Pierson and to the spirit of Dog Day Afternoon, but this is very much its own story,” he says.
Various iterations of the movie almost got off the ground, and for a time, after trekking 14 miles on foot from his Silver Lake apartment to Brentwood to meet with auteur Werner Herzog, he worked on a very different version. But when Van Sant came aboard, they went back to the unfiltered frantic energy of Kolodney’s initial draft. Kolodney was exhilarated by Van Sant’s vision. “This is a story that on the screen needed to be relentlessly tense but also very human yet also darkly funny—and Gus is great at balancing on that kind of tightrope. Tone-wise, I felt he knocked it out of the park, and it hearkens back to the brilliance of films like To Die For,” he comments.
While development proceeded, the zoo job kept Kolodney not just afloat but sanguine in the face of big changes ahead. “I’d see the sun rise with the animals and it was a monk-like spiritual existence,” he muses. “But the wild part was that on a Monday, I had my had last day of work at the zoo and by Wednesday, I was in Louisville on the set of the movie I wrote.”
The Outsider Tales of Gus Van Sant
A cinematic chameleon, Gus Van Sant has explored nearly every mode of big-screen storytelling, from innovative microbudget indies to ambitious Hollywood blockbusters, from provocative formal experiments to heartfelt Oscar winners. But a singular, potent vein has shot through much of his work: a fascination with American outsiders and all that is revealed when observing life from the edges.
His first major feature Mala Noche announced the fully-formed arrival of a powerfully direct, if also lyrical, voice. Shot in black-and-white 16mm on the streets of Portland, Oregon, the film laid bare a hidden, vibrant world of transients, migrants, and convenience store workers living on the margins. With the two films that followed in his “Portland Trilogy” Van Sant would earn a reputation as a sharp poet of American street life. Drugstore Cowboy was a first of its kind, candidly and affectingly exposing the inner lives of young addicts in the Pacific Northwest. Then came My Own Private Idaho, which reimagined Shakespeare’s Henry IV as a love story between a princely mayor’s son and a narcoleptic hustler, and featured River Phoenix in one of his most magnetic performances.
As acclaim grew, Van Sant branched in new directions, adapting Tom Robbins’ counterculture novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Then came To Die For, which took him into satire for the first time with unforgettable results, as the furiously comic takedown of fame showcased Nicole Kidman in a bravura performance as a small-town weatherwoman obsessed with being on TV. This was followed by the runaway box-office hit Good Will Hunting, the rousing tale of a working-class math genius, which garnered 7 Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, the coming-of-age story Finding Forrester, and an abstracted remake of Hitchcock’s tale of outsider horror, Psycho.
His work in the early 2000s included a haunting foray into the off-limits subject matter of high school shootings in Elephant, which garnered the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme D’Or, and a journey into the incendiary political history of Milk, which captured the watershed rise and tragic assassination of America’s first openly gay man elected to public office, drawing 8 Oscar nominations. Following such films as Promised Land and Sea of Trees, in 2018 Van Sant directed Don’t Worry He Won’t Get Far On Foot, an unsentimental recounting of the late quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan’s recovery from alcoholism. For the last few years, however, he has explored television with the critically lauded Capote Verus The Swans about Truman Capote’s complicated circle of female socialite friends.
Born in Louisville where Dead Man’s Wire was shot, Van Sant’s Midwestern affinity for the Everyman, especially the earnest, alienated Everyman, has perhaps never seen a more explosive rendering than in the story of Tony Kiritsis. The film came to him by happenstance, when producer Cassian Elwes presented him with a creative challenge. “Cassian said he had a project he thought I’d be good for, but we’d have to start shooting it in 2 months. I was in the mood to shoot a feature film, and the idea of trying to do it so quickly was exciting to me on its own,” says Van Sant.
He continues, “Only after that, did I read Austin’s script. He had written into it clickable links to original audio and visual content from the real incident in 1977. The first one I clicked on was Tony calling the police from the Meridian office as he’s kidnapping Richard. Suddenly, I was looking at this real guy who was all at once so frantic yet so angry and yet constantly cracking silly jokes on live television. I thought this is an incredible character and the tone was unlike anything I’d seen before.”
That sense of an irrepressible discontent breaking out into the culture is what Van Sant set out to capture, using the speed of the production to enhance the pressurized atmosphere of the film. With little time to prepare, Van Sant immediately leapt into what he knew would be one of the most essential elements: matching the characters to actors willing to dive with abandon into wholesale intensity.
If Dead Man’s Wire operates as a total immersion into mayhem, it does so through a tightly controlled structure and scrupulous layering of textures.
Van Sant took full advantage of having just 19 days to forge the stripped-down focus and fleet-footed pace of a shoot that spurred maximal creativity for cast and crew in minimal time. He did so in Louisville, Kentucky, not only Van Sant’s birthplace but notably that of Hunter S. Thompson, whose groundbreaking Gonzo Journalism unleashed a torrent of manic first-person subjectivity that remade the media in the 60s and 70s. It is also a town that has visibly retained its mid-Century character.
Van Sant had a vision going in of saturated realism—somewhat influenced by sources such as Alan Pakula’s 1971 paranoid crime thriller Klute and the stereotype-busting colors of William Eggleston’s 1970s photography, which revealed an everyday small-town America glimmering with aquamarine busses, sunny yellow gas stations, and cherry red diners. But equally, Van Sant was aiming at how news actually looked in 1977, then still often shot on 16mm film or with analog video cameras that were giving broadcast journalists greater powers to report live from previously inaccessible scenes.
The director further punctuated the action with sudden freeze-frames and recreated still photos that suggest folklore-in-the-making and a past that still exerts itself upon the present. “Throughout my filmmaking career, I’ve often mixed lots of different film resources, from flashbacks and home movies to news footage, to broaden reality,” Van Sant comments.
