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Tag: Bill Skarsgu00e5rd

  • Gus Van Sant on His Comeback Film ‘Dead Man’s Wire’, the Unintentional Movies He’s Made and Why He Still Thinks About River Phoenix All the Time

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    Gus Van Sant is still moving.

    “I think a lot of the films I’ve made, even unintentionally, have been based on real things,” Van Sant says with his familiar mix of understatement and curiosity. “That’s a genre, I guess. I’ve always been drawn to what makes people do what they do.”

    In “Dead Man’s Wire,” Van Sant’s latest film, which premiered at AFI Film Festival on Saturday, that fascination becomes electrified — literally. The historical true-crime drama, based on the real-life 1977 Tony Kiritsis hostage case, unfolds like a pressure cooker between desperation and spectacle.

    “When I read the script,” he recalls, “there were links embedded in it — you could click them and hear the real 911 calls. Tony talked so fast, like Scorsese on a cocaine bender, cracking jokes and losing his temper. I thought, ‘This is an amazing character.’”

    Van Sant’s words carry a quiet thrill, the sound of an auteur who has spent a career balancing empathy and danger. From “Drugstore Cowboy” and “My Own Private Idaho” to the Oscar-nominated “Good Will Hunting” and “Milk,” he’s never chased a single genre; only human behavior.

    “The story had this weird barnstormer energy,” he shares. “We were meeting in the Soho House, and the producer said, ‘We have to start shooting in Louisville in two months.’ That was the most appealing thing — just hitting the road like Huckleberry Finn.”

    Now 73, Van Sant is nostalgic when talking about creative chaos. “The best thing about film is still the accident,” he says. “River Phoenix used to love when something unexpected happened on set. He’d come alive inside those moments — he could feel his character reacting in real time.”

    That memory lingers, as does the one of the fog machines at the 1998 Oscars that made him physically ill while “Good Will Hunting” (1997) lost most of its awards to “Titanic.”

    “I’m allergic to stage fog now,” he says with a chuckle. “So I never use it on set.”

    It’s been seven years since his last theatrical film (“Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot”), but Van Sant is back with a story that echoes his fascination with real American tragedy and absurdity — a director drawn, as ever, to the ragged edge between empathy and obsession.

    With “Dead Man’s Wire,” Van Sant delivers his most arresting and charged work since “Milk.” The film hums with the restless energy that defined his early 1970s-like masterpieces while showcasing a sharpened maturity in tone and control. Skarsgård gives a career-best performance, grounding Tony Kiritsis’ volatility with flashes of humor and heartbreak, while Dacre Montgomery and Colman Domingo deliver richly textured performances. Dark horses for the Oscars? Of course. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be considered. In particular, Van Sant’s direction is at once intimate and explosive, framing the chaos with empathy, allowing the audience to feel the pulse of desperation behind every decision. The film’s screenplay, adapted from real events by first-time screenwriter Austin Kolodney, is infused with humanism and dark wit, standing as one of the year’s finest.

    In a wide-ranging interview with Variety, Van Sant talks about his past, present and future in the industry he’s spent over four decades mastering.

    ‘Dead Man’s Wire”

    Stefania Rosini SMPSP

    Looking at your filmography, this fits with your interest in real-life characters and crimes.

    Yeah, I think so. A lot of my films, even the fictional ones, are based on something from the real world — a news story or an article. “Drugstore Cowboy,” “Elephant,” and “Last Days” all came from that impulse. It’s not “true crime” like television, but it’s about what makes someone act a certain way — that question inside the crime.

    How did you settle on Bill Skarsgård for Tony and Dacre Montgomery for Richard?

    Casting was probably as important as the script. I was at a spa one weekend, listening to ambient music, trying to decide if I should jump into this project immediately — we had to start shooting in November. I’d always wanted to work with Bill. I’d offered him roles before that didn’t happen. He has this fascinating career — horror films, yes, but he’s like Lon Chaney, the man of a thousand faces. He’s also 10 years younger than the real Tony, which made it interesting.

    Dacre I knew because of his audition tape for “Stranger Things.” It’s one of those legendary tapes actors pass around — perfect lighting, perfect eyelines. I didn’t even watch the show at first, just his scenes. He felt new, unpredictable, and that was what the movie needed.

    And Colman Domingo as the radio DJ — it’s such an inspired choice.

    We actually modeled that character after the DJ in “The Warriors.” That was in the script. We had a few actors pass before Colman came aboard. He was working with our producer, Cassian Elwes, on another project and said, “I’d love to work with Gus.” He was perfect — his presence grounds the film.

    Fans always ask if you’d ever revisit “Drugstore Cowboy.”

    Actually, there are screenplays that the same writer wrote — James Fogle. There were four different ones, and one of them is called “Satan’s Sandbox,” that I think James Franco wanted to do, but that was the one I kind of preferred. It’s set in San Quentin prison. And actually, when we met him and made the movie, he was in Walla Walla State Penitentiary in Washington State, and so he had some stories when they were out of prison, like “Drugstore Cowboy,” when they were running around, selling drugs and stealing drugs. So there are other ones, yeah, there are other ones that exist.

    River Phoenix was so prolific in your cinema journey. He definitely is one of the core reasons I, myself, fell in love with movies. How often does he cross your mind?

    I mean, I think about him all the time — there’s a picture on the wall of him. He was sort of like, you know, a very great collaborator. And we only did that one piece, and we were planning on — he was planning on being in what turned out to be “Milk.” But that didn’t happen till later, before he died, so there was a project that we were talking about. But, yeah, he was very spontaneous. He loved to improvise. That was his favorite thing. And I don’t think he got to, necessarily, depending on who he was working with, go off the page and improvise. It probably wasn’t the type of films that he was doing — he was doing traditional pieces that were pretty much, like, securely in Hollywood. You know, he was doing traditional pieces, that’s what he was offered.

    And in that environment, you’re not making a film like — you know, like you’re mentioning Scorsese — where they improvise whole scenes. And when we did, he found out that I liked it, you know, that I was okay if he just did something for like five minutes that wasn’t even in the screenplay, because then he could actually research stuff, and he could feel very open about what he was playing. So that was kind of magical, that he liked it, and he had not been able to do it. So he was very excited about it, because he wasn’t normally doing it.

    I don’t know, there’s lots of things. His upbringing was such that he didn’t really have a lot of film history connected to his memory banks. He was homeschooled, so he didn’t have a lot of teaching that he knew about concerning war. His homeschooling consisted of, like, no war. So characters like General MacArthur weren’t in his world — he didn’t know who they were. And then conversely, he didn’t know what humor was. He didn’t know what, like, a quote-unquote joke was, until he was nine, he said.

    He found that out because he went to a traditional school — a public school — and kids were telling jokes. It was an era when kids were all about jokes. He didn’t know what they were; they were just like a foreign thing to him. He also didn’t have a smile, which people don’t necessarily know. He told me that — he said, ‘Well, I don’t have a smile.’ And I said, ‘You’re kidding.’ And then he smiled and showed me his smile, and I said, ‘Oh yeah, I don’t see that smile in your films.’

    So he had this interesting thing — for a movie star, an interesting absence of that kind of giant smile. But meanwhile, he was very funny, and his most favorite thing was just to laugh and tell stories.

    You’ve been nominated twice for an Oscar. What do you remember about those mornings?

    Mostly that I didn’t realize when the announcements were happening. I woke up to a bunch of phone calls. It’s the big Hollywood prize — it feels great. At the ceremony for “Good Will Hunting,” they unveiled this huge Titanic ship set, and fog rolled out everywhere. I got so sick sitting there, I swore I’d never use fog on my sets again.

    There’s a lot of talk about the “death” of cinema. Do you believe that?

    Not at all. Movies always follow technology — from nickelodeons to iPhones. What matters is the gathering, that communal experience. The art form isn’t dying; it’s just shifting. The best films of the 1920s were miracles because nobody knew what cinema was yet. We’re in another one of those periods of discovery.

    Can we expect another film soon? Or do we have to wait another seven years?

    I hope so. I did the Gucci project and six hours of “Feud,” so I haven’t been idle. There are hundreds of ideas — digital files full of them. Some might take decades, like “Milk” did. But they’re there, waiting.

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    Clayton Davis

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  • ‘Boy Kills World’ Review: Bill Skarsgård Is a Deaf-Mute Avenger in an Action Film So Ultraviolent It’s Like ‘John Wick’ Gone ‘Clockwork Orange’

    ‘Boy Kills World’ Review: Bill Skarsgård Is a Deaf-Mute Avenger in an Action Film So Ultraviolent It’s Like ‘John Wick’ Gone ‘Clockwork Orange’

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    In “Boy Kills World,” Bill Skarsgård has burning eyes and model cheekbones, sinewy arms popping out of a dirty red athletic vest, and a feral pout that makes him look like Jean-Claude van Damme crossed with Lou Reed. He plays a deaf-mute avenger, known only as Boy, who kills people in insanely violent ways. Yet through it all, the character retains his innocence. He’s a wounded wild child in a man’s body.

    Raised on a mountain by a martial-arts trainer called the Shaman (Yayan Ruhian), who may remind you, at first, of the Zen master in “Kill Bill: Volume 2,” Boy had his past taken away from him by a vicious totalitarian regime. During the Culling, an annual ritual where law and order is maintained by the state-sanctioned execution of criminals in the street, Boy saw his little sister, Mina (Quinn Copeland), executed right in front of him. Now he’s getting his payback.

    “Boy Kills World” is the first feature directed by the German-born Moritz Mohr, and he draws on a panoply of sources: video games and graphic novels, “The Hunger Games” and “The Purge,” the “John Wick” films and the decadent action fandangos of Matthew Vaughn. Yet the movie is more deliriously violent than any of them. In pursuit of his enemies, Boy slashes and gouges and decapitates. He bare-knuckle punches with a split-second intensity that magnetizes the camera to his every move. He unleashes machine-gun fire with the dexterousness of a ballistic surgeon, and he doesn’t just kick — he turns his body into a twirling homicidal battering ram. The action is the point, but it’s not the whole point; “Boy Kills World” succeeds at creating a toxic cartoon fascist world. The film’s astonishing levels of violence are about what it takes to overcome its version of evil.

    If you were asked to define the difference between the films of the early ’70s and the movies of today, the answer would be obvious: Back then, a lot of movies — even those from Hollywood — had a boldness and storytelling purity and humanity; today, too many movies are overcooked franchise popcorn. Yet there’s another way to characterize the difference. In 1971, Stanley Kubrick released “A Clockwork Orange,” and it’s no exaggeration to say that it deeply shocked people. It was a singular and disturbing vision — a sociopathic dystopia — that flirted with a kind of sick-puppy voyeuristic horror. When you watched the “Singin’ in the Rain” scene, it was extending the boundaries of how transgressive a work of art could be.

    So what does it mean that in a movie like “Boy Kills World,” that level of cheeky violent sadism has become not so much disturbing as it is a pure lark — the new extreme threshold of mainstream entertainment. The fact that this is what we now seek out for kicks may be scarier than anything in “A Clockwork Orange.”

    Yet the pop culture of the last 50 years has primed us for it: the slasher movies, the video games, the high-body-count delirium of the “John Wick” films, which may have been the first films to package this kind of relentlessness as cutthroat jollies for the megaplex. The kill-kill-kill spirit of “John Wick” made a film like “Boy Kills World” possible, yet “Boy Kills World” takes it all a step further. It’s the action film as slasher movie as gonzo damaged-superhero movie. It’s a depraved vision, yet I got caught up in its kick-ass revenge-horror pizzazz, its disreputable commitment to what it was doing.

    Boy, who can read lips, understands most of what’s happening around him, and he reacts to events by talking directly to us on the soundtrack, in an exaggerated he-man voice (like Mel Gibson’s in “Mad Max”). You could say that the movie, in a way, cheats the fact that he can’t speak, but Boy’s quips-from-his-inner-voice lend “Boy Kills World” a graphic-novel funkiness.

    Boy has gone out into the world to right its wrongs, but what’s standing atop the pyramid isn’t the usual stoic power addict. It’s a dysfunctional family of rulers who are at each other’s throats. Mohr, working from a script by Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers, has fun fleshing out these baroque villains. I enjoyed Brett Gelman as the bearded brother who’s like a diamond-district chiseler who thinks he’s a brilliant screenwriter, and Famke Janssen as the matriarch who’s losing her mind. As the dynasty’s media ringleader, Sharlto Copley does his showboat thing (and gets what he deserves). Mohr stages one spectacular sequence — the slaughterhouse version of a winter-wonderland television commercial — that would make Alex from “A Clockwork Orange” applaud in glee.  

    There’s a big twist — or really, two in one. The state soldier, named June27 (Jessica Rothe), who speaks in slogans flashed onto her digital combat visor turns out to be closer to home than we think. And a character we assume is heroic is revealed to be an emotionally broken monster. All of that succeeds in holding our attention, and the climactic fight — a threesome — is shot and choregraphed with brutal visual wizardry. It’s all held together by Skarsgård, and the trick of his performance is that you never catch him playing dumb. Yet Boy is often a beat behind what’s happening. That’s what makes us warm up to him — that he’s a blood-spattered avenger in spite of himself. He turns the old ultraviolence into child’s play.

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    Owen Gleiberman

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