Gus Van Sant on Dead Man’s Wire and the Luigi Mangione fallout

In 1977 Tony Kiritsis took an employee hostage in Indianapolis, attaching one end of a wire to a shotgun trigger and the other to the hostage’s head, demanding $5m and an admission of guilt; the 63‑hour standoff ended with its final moments broadcast live. Gus Van Sant has dramatised those events in Dead Man’s Wire, which cuts between the volatile captor, played by Bill Skarsgård, and the media circus around him, including a DJ played by Colman Domingo, a frustrated TV journalist played by Myha’la, and a cameo from Al Pacino as the mortgage company boss.

Van Sant says he was oblivious to the case at the time – he didn’t have a TV or a newspaper subscription – and recalls meeting Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975, pitching a way of transferring literary thought into film that Pasolini dismissed. Now based in LA, the director’s four‑decade career spans queer landmarks, mainstream crowdpleasers and arthouse experiments; it has been seven years since his last movie and almost two decades since Milk.

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