Gus Van Sant is an Academy Award–nominated filmmaker whose work spans four decades of American cinema, from independent classics like Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho to mainstream hits like Good Will Hunting and Milk.
In this episode, he talks to Matthew about Dead Man’s Wire, his new film about a bizarre and largely forgotten 1977 standoff in Indianapolis, when a struggling businessman walked into a mortgage office, wired a shotgun to his hostage’s neck with a so-called “dead man’s wire,” and held a mortgage executive captive for nearly three days. Van Sant explains how he stepped into the project after another director dropped out, how the film’s tight schedule forced him to shoot the movie in less than three weeks, and why the story interested him less as a conventional thriller than as a portrait of desperation.
“I’m imagining that something’s interesting to me,” he says. “And I imagine that it’s interesting to other people.”
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