by Helen Barlow at the Venice Film Festival
Who would have known that Gus Van Sant’s dark comedy Dead Man’s Wire, his first film in seven years, would be one of the biggest surprises at the Venice Film Festival? Or that Dacre Montgomery (best known from Stranger Things) would hold the fort not only as one of the few Aussies at the festival, but to make up for the fact that his now good friend and the film’s lead, Bill Skarsgard, wasn’t able to be there as he is shooting an action film, The Mosquito Bowl, in Queensland?
“I want to give a huge shout out to him,” Montgomery said at Dead Man’s Wire Venice press conference. “We spent a month in a room together, connected by a piece of wire, and I haven’t honestly made a better friend with a cast mate ever. A bit like Gus, he forced me to get out of my head. I never socialise while I’m shooting and he forced me to come and socialise.” He calls Skarsgard “a very special human and great creative.”
Based on a real 1977 event, the film follows Indianapolis businessman Tony Kiritsis (Skarsgard), who kidnaps his mortgage broker Richard Hall (Montgomery) after falling behind on mortgage payments for a block of land he was hoping to turn into a shopping mall. Over 3 days, he ties Hall’s neck with a wire connected to his shotgun, which will go off if the police interfere. As well as $5 million, a guarantee of no prosecution or jail time, he wants an apology, all of which Hall’s father and boss, played by Al Pacino, refuses to give him, even if his son urges him to comply.
The whole situation evolves into a media circus (Colman Domingo is fab as a disc jockey who Kiritsis calls with his grievances) and the film is reminiscent of Sidney Lumet’s 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon in which Pacino starred.
“When Gus rang me and said that Al Pacino is going to be playing my dad, I lost my mind,” Montgomery recalls. “Then Al took me and my partner, Liv, out for dinner in LA and we both discovered that he has such a deep love for movies, and I’m a total cinephile and he felt like an old soul. I don’t drink and he doesn’t either, and he has a sweet tooth, and so do I, and we ended up eating cookies all night.”
Pacino invited them to see the nearby Actors Studio, as he had a key. “He’s like, ‘I love acting. Let’s go down. Let’s do a monologue.’ It was a very special moment.”
While Montgomery’s actual scenes on the phone with Pacino were voiced by someone else, they did meet for a rehearsal. “I don’t think it gets more iconic, maybe Marlon Brando and a couple other people. He’s just such a generous performer, which is really special for me.”
Montogomery recalls how Van Sant initially rang him for the part. “He said, ‘I want you to play a 56-year-old,’ and I’m 30, for the record. So, we got hard at work doing a lot of different cosmetic things. But I think it’s a joke, but it also is a testament to Gus, which I think is to say that everything is malleable. It’s an ever-evolving process, which was a big learning curve for me, because when I create a character, I feel so definite and set in my ways and so rehearsed and so studied and so in my own bubble. The great thing about Gus is that he kind of forces you to think outside of that, and it becomes an ever moving, evolving thing, your character and the story throughout the shoot as inspiration strikes him.”
Van Sant was partly interested in the story because his family is from the Midwest. “I’d never shot in the Midwest, so I was quite interested in the locality. And, of course, the story was quite bizarre, and the whole contraption which he had made in order to not get killed was outrageous and a strange way to abduct somebody. The reasons why he was abducting Richard Hall was heroic in his opinion, though it was a misguided heroism.”
While Montgomery says the movie on paper read more as a dramatic thriller, it became an irreverent, dark comedy as they were shooting.
“Bill and I, Tony and Dick, are kind of the odd couple in a way. I feel like in parallel to shooting, Bill and I developed the same kind of weird relationship. I felt that he was a very intense performer like me, and we just ended up laughing like I’ve never laughed on set before. And it was funny. It bled into Tony and Dick’s relationship, and I think it humanised Tony as the little man who’s trying to confront capitalism and all of the topical things that we’re talking about. But more broadly, I think also hopefully, we humanise Dick as well. Not all people who are children of powerful people are also equally as awful. I think it was really valuable in those few scenes to see the power that you know his father has over his child when he’s trying to pursue something and be something. So, there’s a really interesting dynamic dissected in one room over the course of an hour and a half of the film.”
Dead Man’s Wire screened out of competition at The Venice Film Festival
