Even a prominent indie filmmaker like Gus Van Sant, the two-time Oscar-nominated director of films such as "Good Will Hunting" and "Milk," can have a hard time getting a project off the ground these days.

But that wasn't the case with "Dead Man's Wire," which tells the story of a real-life 1977 Indianapolis hostage stand-off and stars Bill Skarsgård, Colman Domingo and Al Pacino. The movie was already set up when Van Sant came on board as one of the final pieces of the puzzle, and the crime drama is now in theaters.

"(Producer) Cassian Elwes was putting it together; he had set it up in Louisville, Kentucky, and his director and actor had fallen out of it. And he ran into me and he said, 'Do you want to do this? We have to do it, like, right away,' and that was sort of charming and interesting," says Van Sant, on a Zoom call from his home in Los Angeles last week. "So I was like, 'OK, great!'"

Financing can often be the hardest element for a production to secure, but with the money already in place — "Dead Man's Wire" has close to 100 financiers, and is credited to 24 production companies, 14 producers and 63 executive producers — Van Sant was able to avoid the difficult part about launching a project and get right to work. He started on it roughly a week after he signed on to do the film.

"Dead Man's Wire" stars Skarsgård as Tony Kiritsis, an Indianapolis resident who has fallen behind on his mortgage payments and decides to kidnap his mortgage broker (Dacre Montgomery) and hold him hostage, tying a shotgun around his neck, while he attempts to sort out his financial situation. The fashions and set designs may be a throwback, but the story's themes of hard-working citizens drowning in the system feel very rooted in the present.

It's Van Sant's first movie since 2018's "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot," marking his longest gap between big-screen projects since he broke out 40 years ago with his debut film "Mala Noche." But he hasn't been kicking his feet up and relaxing; he took on a seven-part miniseries for Gucci in 2020, and he directed six of the eight episodes for "Capote vs. the Swans," the second season of FX's "Feud," in 2024.

Part of the allure of "Dead Man's Wire" was it sent Van Sant, 73, back to his home state of Kentucky.

"It was like, 'oh, I get to go back to the place I was born,'" says Van Sant, who spent his early years in Mayfield, about three hours southwest of Louisville. But he didn't know the city well at all — he bounced around a lot growing up, and after graduating high school in Connecticut and college in Rhode Island, he was off to Europe and then Los Angeles — so the shoot reacquainted him with his roots. (Several of the film's crewmembers were also from Mayfield, he says.)

And then there was the script by Austin Kolodney, which drew him in, and had similarities to Van Sant's 1989 breakout "Drugstore Cowboy," another '70s-set story with a crime theme.

"Drugstore Cowboy" follows a crew of junkie thieves (played by Matt Dillon, Heather Graham, James LeGros and Kelly Lynch, the fourth of whom has a role in "Dead Man's Wire") who become a sort of family over the course of the film, a throughline that connects most of Van Sant's films, he says.

"The main thing I've noticed (in my films) is they're pretty much exclusively about people that are forming ad hoc families," he says. "The two couples in 'Drugstore Cowboy' become a little family. The kids in 'Idaho' (1991's "My Own Private Idaho") and 'Cowgirls' (1993's "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues"), it's a family. And 'To Die For,' they're like a little group, they kind of have their own family."

And so on. That comes from Van Sant moving around a lot as a child, he says.

"It was like there was always a new city I was living in and finding new friends," he says. He's gone on to create that sense of temporary family on film sets throughout his career; "Dead Man's Wire" is his 18th feature, and he's hoping to soon start movie No. 19, but is still working to secure the project's funding.

As a filmmaker, Van Sant has had commercial and critical successes ("Good Will Hunting"), commercial and critical duds (his 1998 remake of "Psycho") and cult films that have been admired by a small but loving audience (2003's "Gerry"). And then there are movies like "To Die For" which were seen as ahead of their time in identifying trends and where we're heading as a society.

Van Sant, who paints when he's not making films, says he's pleased whenever his films continue to be discussed.

"I'm very happy they're still relevant," he says, "because they're always about very different things, and maybe those things become relevant at different times."

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'DEAD MAN'S WIRE'

MPA rating: R (for language throughout)

Running time: 1:45

How to watch: Now in theaters

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