On February 8, 1977, Tony Kiritsis walked into the Indianapolis offices of Meridian Mortgage with a sawed-off shotgun. Unable to make his mortgage payments and convinced that his broker, Richard O. Hall, was attempting to seize his property, Kiritisis decided to take the man hostage, using a “dead man’s wire”— a device that connected the trigger of his shotgun to Hall’s neck, ensuring Hall would die if he tried to separate himself from Kiritsis.

For the next 63 hours, Hall and Kiritsis remained wired together as Kiritsis called the police himself, steered Hall through the streets of Indianapolis on a police-escorted trek to his apartment, and repeatedly phoned into a local radio DJ to explain his reasoning and demands, all while a media frenzy swirled about. 

Shockingly, a real-life story as cinematic and fantastical as this one waited nearly 50 years to receive the big screen treatment, but Oscar-nominated director Gus Van Sant has finally turned the Tony Kiritsis hostage standoff into the thriller Dead Man’s Wire.

“I didn’t know anything about the story,” Van Sant tells Playboy, but he was quickly drawn into the saga when he received Austin Kolodney’s script, complete with hyperlinks to the astonishing, see-it-to-believe-it footage of the real events. “[Kiritsis’s] homemade fight against his mortgage company was quite elaborate and strange and dangerous and suspenseful. It really gave you this amazing picture of what the film could be.”

That film, starring It’s Bill Skarsgård as Kiritsis and Stranger Things’s Dacre Montgomery as Hall, also features Cary Elwes, Myha’la, Colman Domingo, and Al Pacino. While Van Sant was extremely prolific in the 1990s and 2000s, directing hits like My Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Elephant, and Milk, Dead Man’s Wire is his first feature film since 2018’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. His return to directing came together quickly. 

“Cassian Elwes was in the SoHo House bar in LA,” Van Sant says, remembering bumping into his Gerry producing partner in September 2024. “I walked past him, said, ‘Hi,’ and he said, ‘Oh, I want to talk to you about a script I have.’ So I doubled back and sat down.” Three months later, Van Sant was on location filming in Louisville, Kentucky, and in September 2025, just a year after the fateful SoHo House meeting, the film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival to strong reviews. 

In January 2026, ahead of Dead Man Wire’s theatrical release, Van Sant sits down with Playboy to discuss the movie’s whirlwind production, injuries on set, and how the Luigi Mangione shooting has changed the way audiences view the film.

Playboy: The titular dead man’s wire attaches Dacre Montgomery’s neck to Bill Skarsgård’s gun, so they’re stuck together for most of the film. How did you build this apparatus, and did it affect filming at all to have your two leads basically tied together at all times? 

Van Sant:  It was interesting for their characters, because they were together all the time, and they started to have a rapport that was fun and interesting and funny. The apparatus itself, I was very afraid of how we would build it. But then, in the end, we used the actual apparatus that Tony used, which was a real wire. We were afraid of it cutting Dacre’s neck. And Dacre liked that. He liked that it hurt and that it was sometimes bleeding. We’re like, “Are you sure?” We had a medic on the set and so forth, but in the end, it seemed to work for him. It seemed to work for Bill, too, because sometimes he’s just jerking Dacre by the neck, and somehow they had a rapport, so it seemed safe. 

Playboy: While I was preparing for this interview, I read that when you got the script, the producers said, “We need to shoot this in two months.” Can you tell me about the state of the film when it arrived to you, and how you prepared for that shoot? 

Van San: This is a typical Hollywood story. The movie was all set, ready to go, and then the leading actor and director both left the project. [Cassian Elwes] had the money set up, and he needed to shoot soon, because of the incentive from the state of Kentucky he had been awarded. He needed to spend it within a couple months, or else he wouldn’t get it. I spoke to him in September. His idea was to shoot in November, which was in about a month and a half. In the independent film world, that’s not an unusual situation. It does sound a little scary, but I liked that it would be fast, and we would go to work right away. I guess because I was not doing anything, and I thought this would give me something to do, I was like, “Yes, let’s do it.” Because of Bill’s availability, it moved by another month and a half, so we got basically three months to prepare, which is standard in the industry, even if you’re doing a regular film at a studio. There’s always this green light situation. You can only do so much until you have money to hire your collaborators, who are going to do the costumes, the sets, and the real physical work. It always seems like you don’t have enough time, no matter how much you’re planning and how much you know. It sounds weird, but it was more exciting than it was difficult.

Playboy: So what was the casting process like? Was anybody already attached, or did you have to go out and find everyone? 

Van Sant:  There was no one attached, which was also a luxury that I wasn’t inheriting a cast. I thought about that one for a weekend. I was in a spa, and I really had this problem to figure out. What kind of actor do we try and go for? Because there were lots of different choices. There were people in their 50s. Maybe you could get a heavy hitter like a Sean Penn. Or there were people in their 40s who were more like the real-life characters. Or if you went into the 30s, all of a sudden, you have Jacob Elordi, or in this case, Bill Skarsgård. I’d been really interested in working with Bill already, and had actually contacted him that year on a different project. So I thought, “Okay, we’ll go for Bill.” Then who would be the second person? I knew Dacre Montgomery because of a famous casting tape that he had made. I didn’t know him from Stranger Things itself, but I knew this casting tape. A friend of mine was an actor, and I wanted to know what a good casting tape looked like. He said, “Well, this is the standard. This is the award-winning casting tape by Dacre Montgomery.” So I thought, “Well, Dacre could play the kidnapee.” Both of them said yes, so that was great.

Playboy: Al Pacino has a small role in this as Richard Hall’s father, M.L. Hall. How did you manage to get him involved? 

Van Sant:  My producer, Cassian Elwes, knew from friends of friends who were close to Al that he was doing small parts. So there was this idea that he could play M.L., and it was really just up to us to ask him if he wanted to. We had to be sure that was a good move, which it was, and so he said yes. It was great. Same with Coleman [Domingo]. It was friends of friends as opposed to a casting agent.

Playboy: What was it like directing Al Pacino?

Van Sant:  It was super easy. We had already spoken and done a rehearsal on the phone, so he had his thing down, and it was pretty much just start rolling and do the lines.

Playboy: This story is so fantastical in some ways, but it also feels so timely. Was it going through your mind when you read the script that this film could speak to the present moment? 

Van Sant:  Yeah, I think because it’s a very general idea that he has a loan, and he’s trying to pay back a loan, it would relate to anybody that’s had a mortgage, a loan, or rent, things where if they weren’t able to pay, bad things would happen to them. So I related to it personally, and I felt almost anyone could. Then there were other things that happened in our culture since we started, like [Luigi] Mangione shooting [Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare], and Donald Trump’s presidency, that even more played into the tension in our environment.

Playboy: Yeah, when did the Luigi Mangione shooting take place in relation to shooting this film? 

Van Sant:  It was during our pre-production.

Playboy: Bill Skarsgård is so incredible in this. He always disappears into his roles. Did you help develop his character with him, or did he build those characterizations on his own? 

Van Sant:  It’s pretty much him. I knew of his interesting characters already, like that he had a hand in creating his characters. I was trusting him to create something. And he was in Sweden, so the communication that we had was pretty much like I listened to a tape that he had made that was Tony’s voice, and we would talk about it on Zoom. So it was mostly him working with his voice coach and creating this piece.

Playboy: I loved all the exterior shots when the pair is outside maneuvering the city. You’re obviously filming in a modern-day city, but it has to look like 1977, so how did you manage that? 

Van Sant:  We had to have period cars and period people. There’s one point where they walk through the city, so we had to have a street we could shoot on. But besides that, they’re in his apartment. There are some containable areas, the exterior of the apartment and the exterior of the original building that he walks into, but that’s just three locations, so it was containable.

Playboy: What was the most difficult scene to film?

Van Sant:  Probably the first day. We had a big snowstorm, which was good for the look of the film, because in the original footage of the event, there was snow on the ground. The snow we had that first day lasted, kept on the ground for three weeks during our shoot, which was very good, but everyone had a hard time getting to the set on that first day, and half of the period cars didn’t show up. It was pretty calamitous.