How John Dahl Was Lured to the Dark Side

How did a former Boy Scout from Montana find himself making movies about hit men and addicts?

"It's actually kind of pathetic how much time I've thought about robbing banks and killing people," says director John Dahl, in town recently promoting his latest movie, "You Kill Me." The dark comedy is in the same neo-noir vein as his previous films "Rounders" (1998), "The Last Seduction" (1994) and "Red Rock West" (1992). Making movies about shady characters, Dahl says, "is a way of veering over to that side and having fun with it, and then getting out."

In "You Kill Me," Ben Kingsley plays Frank Falenczyk, a hit man for a Polish mob family in Buffalo. When his alcoholism begins to interfere with his work, his uncle (Philip Baker Hall) sends him to San Francisco to sober up. While there, Frank attends AA meetings with his sponsor, Tom (Luke Wilson), at night and works in a funeral home by day, where he meets Laurel Pearson (Téa Leoni), who proves to be an asset when Frank returns to Buffalo on family business. (See review on Page 34.)

Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely wrote the script in the mid-'90s, Dahl says, but it took more than a decade to get it made, partly the result of a cautious film industry. "People liked the script, but it's not an obvious film," Dahl says. "These are difficult movies to get made in Hollywood anyway. It's well written, but it's dark. [Frank's] an alcoholic and a hit man. [The script] was good enough to get [Markus and McFeely] meetings and to start writing other things" -- they went on to write the Emmy-winning "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" and the "Chronicles of Narnia" scripts -- "but no one was really that interested in making ['You Kill Me']."

Until Ben Kingsley got wind of it, that is. Producers Mike Marcus and Carol Baum sent the script to Kingsley, who agreed to play the lead, and then Baum asked Dahl if he was interested.

"I read the script thinking, 'Is this a good movie for Ben Kingsley?' . . . One of the hardest things to do with an independent film is cast it, and Ben was already attached to it. If I didn't think he was right for the part, then I wouldn't have done the film."

But Kingsley was, and Dahl did.

What's left unexplained, then, is what Dahl is doing making movies like these.

"Being a fan of movies for years, and really liking film, when I first started looking at films and thinking, 'Gee, what kind of films would I like to make?,' the genre that really appealed to me were these movies that twisted and turned and took you to this dark, mysterious place," he says.

"I had this -- I know it sounds corny -- almost idyllic upbringing in Montana: large family, my dad was my Boy Scout leader, went to church every Sunday. [It was ] such a normal, wholesome upbringing that to go to this darker place where people did bad things and were morally compromised, morally challenged, was very seductive and compelling."

It was "a way that you could drive over to the wrong side of town, you could flirt with this dangerous, yucky side of things and still go home at night -- without going to jail," he says with a laugh. "Living, vicariously, this life of crime."

For Dahl, that life arrived circuitously, via several artistic avenues: Dahl played drums and guitar in high school and college rock bands, and after going to art school, he worked as a graphic artist for a year. Then he decided to give filmmaking a shot: "It was a way of combining all the things I liked to do -- the art and the music," he says. Then he adds, "Really, though, I think it was just a way of . . . sustaining adolescence."

Dahl's musical background comes across in the film's soundtrack, which is full of bouncy Polish folk music and a smattering of classic R&B. "I think the hard thing with a black comedy like 'You Kill Me' is getting the tone right, so it's kind of funny but it's also kind of sad," Dahl says.

"What I really liked about this Polish folk music is that it's kind of happy and light . . . but it's also heavy and dark when it swerves into these minor chords."

He adds with a mischievous smile: "It's hard to be too dark with an accordion."