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Gus Van Sant Gets Paranoid
Indie maverick connects with teenage self in latest film
Gus Van Sant is the perfect picture of an American independent moviemaker. He grew up on both coasts—in Portland, Oregon and Darien, Connecticut—before earning a degree at the Rhode Island School of Design, and then settled in Portland, where he still lives and works. He made his first big impression in 1985 with Mala Noche, the slyly subversive story of a gay man with a crush on a Mexican immigrant who’s wrong for him in just about every way.
Van Sant earned another burst of critical acclaim—and a long list of awards—for the 1989 road movie Drugstore Cowboy, starring Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch as heroin addicts who fuel their habit with drugstore robberies. More praise came his way for My Own Private Idaho (1991), starring River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves as a pair of mismatched hustlers. More awards rolled in, and even though Van Sant’s next movie—the 1993 adaptation of Tom Robbins’ novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues—was disappointingly received, he showed growing mainstream appeal with the 1995 comedy-thriller To Die For and the 1997 drama Good Will Hunting, an Oscar-winner for supporting actor Robin Williams and screenwriters Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who also starred.
So far, Van Sant’s story reads like that of many independent auteurs who make their names with low-budget personal features, then go mainstream as quickly as they can. But this auteur is different. Right after the audience-pleasing Good Will Hunting, he directed one of the most idiosyncratic pictures ever made: A shot-by-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, in color, with a contemporary cast. Hitchcock purists were dismayed, but Van Sant said he meant the film as an artistic experiment rather than a box office winner.
After directing the 2000 drama Finding Forrester, about a reclusive author (Sean Connery) and a black prep school student (Rob Brown), Van Sant went really radical, showing he still had a diehard independent vision. Gerry (2002) is a minimalist drama about two young men lost in a desert; Elephant (2003) won the Cannes Film Festival’s Golden Palm and Best Director prizes with its mesmerizing portrayal of two teenagers who unleash a Columbine-like Armageddon at their school; and Last Days (2005) gives a moody, elliptical account of a Seattle rock musician who resembles Kurt Cobain at the end of his rope.
Now there’s Paranoid Park, which won the 60th Anniversary Prize at Cannes before its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival last fall. Adapted by Van Sant from Blake Nelson’s novel, it’s about a teenage boy named Alex (Gabe Nevins) who hangs around the Portland skateboard scene, worries about the breakup his parents are going through and becomes more than a little paranoid when the cops start asking questions about the death of a local security guard, which Alex may somehow be involved in. Ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle filmed the movie in 35mm, using both tripod and handheld camerawork, and there’s also Super8 footage shot from skateboards. It’s the ideal style for Paranoid Park, one of Van Sant’s most powerful pictures.
An artist with many talents, Van Sant is also a rock musician, a music video director, a photographer and a novelist. He’s now in production on Milk, about Harvey Milk, the San Francisco city supervisor who was assassinated in 1978 after becoming America’s first openly gay man elected to a major public office.
I first met Van Sant as a member of the New York Film Festival selection committee when we invited My Own Private Idaho to Lincoln Center in 1991. It was a pleasure to catch up with him again more than 15 years later for a wide-ranging talk about his latest movie and his remarkable career.
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This story was published in the Winter 2008 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
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Kodak at Cannes
Since 1987 Kodak has been the official partner of the Cannes Film Festival, sponsoring the Camera d’Or prize that is awarded yearly to the best feature film by a first-time director. The tradition continues in 2008 when, for the fifth consecutive year, the festival will also hand out the Kodak Discovery Prize for Best Short Film.
“Cannes draws a huge number of filmmakers from all over the world every year, which gives Kodak a great opportunity to host our customers and show them how committed we are to the industry and to motion picture innovation,” says Kim Snyder, Kodak’s president and general manager of the Entertainment Imaging Division.
Posted 05.8.08 | News/Commentary | No comments yet...
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