Tribute to John Dahl

The best film director from Montana

Billings just hosted the sixth annual MINT Film Festival, an event that I am hoping will continue to grow, as it has managed to do despite a serious setback with the shutdown from COVID. This year the grand finale of the festival was a showing of a film that was made in 1994, and directed by a man who grew up in Billings. John Dahl graduated from Senior High in 1975, and he went to film school in Bozeman, back when that program was just in its infancy. So the fact that he went on to become a successful film director is quite an accomplishment.

The Last Seduction was Dahl’s third film, after two very good low budget features, Kill Me Again, starring a very skinny Val Kilmer along with his then-wife Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, and Red Rock West, which featured one of Nicholas Cage’s more understated performances. Red Rock West was particularly good, so I remember being very excited when The Last Seduction came out, even though I didn’t even realize that Dahl was from Billings at the time.

Dahl and one of the stars of the film, Bill Pullman, were at the screening Saturday night, and it was great to hear the backstory of how this film got made, and what happened after it was finished, because apparently nobody involved in this production realized what a great film they’d made. Dahl talked about how the producers took a look at what they’d shot after five days, which was customary at the time, and decided to let them continue to shoot the film although they weren’t all that excited about it. And once it was finished, the producers had no intention of doing anything to promote it.

But the film managed to get a screening in France, and the crowd there went nuts, so the producers decided to schedule a couple of screenings, one in New York and one in LA, just to see if an American crowd would feel the same way. Well they definitely did, so the film was finally released around the country and received rave reviews.