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Gus Van Sant Gets Paranoid
Indie maverick connects with teenage self in latest film
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David Sterritt (MM): With its edgy mood and offbeat structure, Paranoid Park is an unusual production, which isn’t unusual for you. How did the project start?
Gus Van Sant (GVS): I really liked Blake Nelson’s novel Rock Star Superstar, and when he sent me Paranoid Park in galley form, I really liked it, too. They’re both young adult novels, kind of like S.E. Hinton’s things, and [Francis Ford] Coppola did two movies [The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, both 1983] from her books… I think short young adult novels are kind of perfect for film.
MM: Your take on being young is considerably darker than S.E. Hinton’s view.
GVS: That’s certainly true in Elephant, and in Paranoid Park as well. There’s a kind of Dostoevskian air—a Crime and Punishment air—about Paranoid Park.
MM: You’ve made a number of films about adolescents and young adults. Do you have a particular artistic interest in this age group?
GVS: That’s a good question. One of the things about this period is that it’s the formative part of your life… Once you’re past, say, 25, your habits are kind of locked in place. I don’t consciously guide my filmmaking toward that age, but I do go there somewhat.
MM: Watching the film, it’s obvious that you’re totally in sync with this material.
GVS: Nelson’s novels are set in Portland, which I like; there are very Portland things about Paranoid Park. From afar, I knew the skate culture, which was always part of Portland life… The story is set in a high school, and I knew—because of Elephant—how to handle that.
MM: Were you a skateboarder?
GVS: A very long time ago, in the 1960s, when we had to use regular skates. I was 27 by the time skate culture reemerged in the ’70s, and it was brutal—it really hurt when you fell. I wasn’t really a skater after that, so I missed the hardcore skate culture.
MM: Alex is a pretty hardcore skater in Paranoid Park. Is his life anything like yours when you were young?
GVS: Yeah, actually. He’s a very suburban kid. He goes to the skate park because a friend knows about it, but it’s over their heads. I probably would have been like that when I was in high school. I was a suburban kid, and going into the city was a really big deal for us.
MM: The movie captures the uncertainties and insecurities of adolescence with great accuracy and emotional power.
GVS: There’s a sort of interior life to this story—a secret life. It’s typical of ordinary life that you wander around with thoughts in your head; but in this case, I think Blake was using Alex’s thoughts-—and the way Alex isn’t able to tell the secrets he has—as a metaphor for his feelings about his parents breaking up and the way he can’t share that with anybody. His guilt is associated with the things that happen to him, and also with his age; it’s an age when things become really blown out of proportion. I don’t have any kids, but people who’ve seen Paranoid Park and do have 15- or 16-year-old kids say, “That’s where my kids are at.” (laughs) They have stuff they can’t tell their parents because that’s part of the evolutionary process of becoming an adult, even though the problems may be things they can’t really handle.
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This story was published in the Winter 2008 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
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