Outlaws, hangman, and the great outdoors: Director Michael Hansen on 'All Men Are Wicked'

Three men. Each hanging from the posts of a Hangman’s old ranch gate and all are accused of the same crime. But of the three of them, who really did rob the stagecoach and steal $1,200 in bank bonds and who’s just hanging? In Michael Hansen’s, “All Men Are Wicked” we follow these men are they hang — upside down — for their crimes.

You may know him as a child star on “Zoom,” or he may just be a name you know from Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High school, but Hansen, 33, of Yarmouth, is making a new name for himself as a director. His newest film, “All Men are Wicked, " will be screened at the Woods Hole Film Festival on Aug. 1. I sat down with Hansen to discuss the film and how he found himself hanging upside down in a deserted part of Colorado.

As a writer, Hansen said he struggled to tell modern stories, saying people usually end up telling “cellphone stories.” He wanted to write a period piece that lived outside the modern world and could be told through the landscape it was shot in.

“I like Westerns,” he said. “I like period films. I like the details. Those are the things that like for me keep me interested after two years and I knew from having been out there before that there are places in this country that look exactly like they did not only in the 1880s but, you know 10,000 years ago and if we could just get to those places, they would sell the film for us.”

Buying an acre of wilderness to be his movie set

And after a quick Google search of where he could find the cheapest land in the country, Hansen found himself in the San Luis Valley in Colorado looking at an acre of land for $1,000 — which he thought was originally a scam. So, he and Peggy O’Sullivan, co-director and co-producer, and two other producers set out to go see the land for themselves.

“We went out along with other two producing partners with the GPS coordinates and were able to find the parcel and it was absolutely perfect,” he said. “We contacted the realtor, who was shocked that we were interested in the property, we sent them money and we just prayed that the deed would come in the mail.”

Six months later, he found himself with a deed to the land in his hand, in the middle of nowhere Colorado, preparing to make a Western of his own creation.

“I feel like I have this idea of a Western that comes more through cultural osmosis, maybe than directly from Westerns,” said Hansen. “Come from The Looney Tunes or whatever. There is a way that I want to see it that I usually don't and it was just about trying to do that.”

Filming began in 2021 and lasted for almost a month. Hansen and O’Sullivan lived in his Chevy Express Van throughout filming while cast and crew crammed into an Air BnB in Alamosa or in RVs and other cars.

“We were sort of like a little family packed in there for a month,” Hansen said.

And though the living situation might not have been ideal, the filming locations were everything Hansen could have hoped for. Their acre of high desert land surrounded by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and a silver mine provided all the “set design” Hansen needed to sell his outlaw tale.

Hansen struck gold in an abandoned silver mine

“I was able to find a man named Jack Morris, who owns a mine in Creek, Colorado, called Last Chance Mine,” Hansen said. “It's an authentic silver mine from the 1880s and he was the only person who got back to me after reaching out to many mines all over the state. He basically said sure, you can come in, you can use the mine however you please … just let me know what you need (from) me and when you're done. Which was, you know, like an angel sweeping in.”

“All Men Are Wicked” follows three outlaws, Barry (Austin Cohen), “Catfish” (Hansen), and Raphael Sikic (Hiram Frost) as they hang — upside down — for their alleged crime of robbing a stagecoach. Most of the acting — spoiler alert — was done upside down and was one of the reasons Hansen decided to step in front of the camera.

“I didn't want to ask any actors to do that if I wasn't willing to do it myself because it is pretty dangerous,” Hansen said. “If you Google it, the internet tells you you'll die if you do this. So I didn't want to ask anyone to test this theory for me. Also, I knew I could do it.”

Breaks were taken and actors were only hanging for minutes at a time, but with a least 30 pages of dialogue to be delivered upside down, Hansen handed over some of the directorial work to O’Sullivan.

“There was no way I was going to be able to like being upside down, do takes, flip right-side-up, watch playback and repeat,” he said. “We basically just had to get ourselves upside down, blast out the whole scene as many times as we possibly could before passing out, and then it was really just up to her to tell me whether or not she thought I did ..." a bad job.

For 'All Men Are Wicked,' all crew are Cape Codders

Since Hansen is a Cape Cod native, naturally, his film cast and crew ended up being almost entirely made up of Cape Codders too, including videographers Manx Taiki Magyar and Izzi Caplan of Big Tree video.

“Basically 90% of the crew was from Cape Cod and some of the actors were too,” he said.

Looking toward the future, Hansen hopes to film another historical piece this time set on the Cape — a goal largely influenced and encouraged by his fellow Cape Codders in the cast and on the crew.

“One of the requests I got from them was this was a great time, but you know if you could figure out a way to make one like where we live, that would be pretty cool next time,” he said.

“All Men are Wicked” will screen at the Woods Hole Film Festival on Aug. 1. The film graced the screen at the Independent Film Festival in Boston earlier this year and Hansen hopes to take it to some other festivals and to the Toronto film market and hopefully find it a home with a distributor.

“it feels good to have been accepted into the film festival,” he said. “It feels good knowing that probably this film will have a home somewhere. We'd like to do like a small theatrical run for it … Maybe just locally or maybe here, in New York and around some of the locations where we shot it.”

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: 'All Men Are Wicked': Meet director of film at Woods Hole Film Fest