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Gus Van Sant Gets Paranoid
Indie maverick connects with teenage self in latest film
(Page 3)
MM: Looking at your career, it seems to me that you started out with a strong independent vision, then made some relatively mainstream films and then returned to a riskier, more experimental approach. Do you see it that way?
GVS: I started out in the 1970s living in Hollywood and making a film called Alice in Hollywood… about a guy who was, I guess, me, looking for work in Hollywood. It was an attempt to meet Hollywood on its own turf, with no money, and I realized this was going in the wrong direction. It was hard to meet even independent filmmakers on their own turf when you didn’t have money, and I only had $25,000 in my pocket to make the movie. So I kind of regrouped [working in Madison Avenue advertising] and saved money for my next film, which was Mala Noche. I tried to adjust my abilities and my interests and to work smaller—going into a place that was more personal, and picking a story I had almost never seen on the screen, so that its value lay in the fact that it was rare. That’s where I started, and I never really got out of that.
MM: But your films soon had major names and larger budgets.
GVS: Drugstore Cowboy was meant to be a low-budget project at first… and so was My Own Private Idaho. After those I was able to do bigger things, so I did Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which was sort of another Alice in Hollywood, except that now I had the ability to option a bestselling novel. To Die For resembled some of the earlier films, but it was done with Sony Pictures, and it was more of a constructed studio film. It wasn’t me finding the material, it was me signing on to a film.
MM: How about Good Will Hunting, which was an enormous hit and scored you an Oscar nomination for Best Director?
GVS: It was me signing on again. Good Will Hunting was me doing something very earnest and serious, which I’d never done before. I knew it was a challenge, even though it looked like selling out! (laughs) I wanted to see if I could just step in and do a Hollywood film… It was sort of an experiment. But the films like Psycho and Gerry and Elephant and Last Days and Paranoid Park have all been going backwards into the area I came from.
MM: Those pictures are made on a smaller scale, and they don’t aim for a multiplex audience. Can you continue making films like these indefinitely? Or do you have to make a mainstream film now and then to stay bankable?
GVS: I don’t really think of those films [as] being for a smaller audience. They have their own cinema language that isn’t trying to be the popular language, but I can never tell whether the audience might latch onto them or not. They are lower-budget movies, so they don’t have to over-perform.
MM: You come out of a great generation of independent moviemakers—Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch and many others. Do you feel an ongoing connection with directors like them?
GVS: Oh, yes. I was editing Mala Noche when I first saw Stranger Than Paradise, and Jarmusch definitely had an effect on me. He was doing something that was kind of similar—he would latch onto a frame and just hold it, and scenes would play out in a very austere manner. Eastern Europeans really influenced me—Béla Tarr is the big one, and Andrei Tarkovsky, Miklós Jancsó and Aleksandr Sokurov. But Stranger Than Paradise was doing a similar thing a decade earlier… David Lynch and John Waters are influences, too.
MM: Do you feel the American independent scene is in a healthy state at the moment?
GVS: Yeah, I think so. But things are kind of splintering, and there’s a different sort of communication with the Internet and YouTube… Somebody can make a film anywhere in the world, and that same day they can have it distributed internationally by posting it. It wasn’t like that when I made short films in the 1970s!
MM: Can you see yourself using the Internet in the future?
GVS: Sure I will, when there’s more standardization. Right now it’s a little low-res. (laughs) But as soon as it’s got its resolution together, I think all the filmmakers will want to use it.
MM: What’s in your immediate future?
GVS: Right now I’m just doing the Harvey Milk film, which is a pretty standard project. But as long as there’s financing to do the kinds of [unconventional] films I’ve been doing, I’ll keep doing them. And if you keep your budget down, it’s pretty easy. MM
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This story was published in the Winter 2008 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
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