格斯·范桑特访谈（thefilmjournal）

An interview with Gus Van Sant

By Kaizaad Kotwal

Kaizaad Kotwal is a professor at The Ohio State University's Theatre Department. Originally from
India, the author has his B.A. in Theatre, Art, and Economics and an M.A. in Theatre. His dissertation research concerned Virtual Reality and Cyber-Technologies for Theatre and Cinema. He is also an actor, director, producer, writer and designer with over 150 credits to his name.

Internationally acclaimed filmmaker Gus Van Sant was honored at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, recently with a retrospective of his cinematic oeuvre. Van Sant came to the Wexner to introduce his latest film Gerry, which will open nationwide at the end of March.

Van Sant and I sat down for an extensive chat about his work, his life and the times we live in. Exuding a shy demeanor at first, once he got to talking about the passion of his life, cinema, Van Sant opened up completely.

Van Sant's latest film, Gerry, a dazzling and intelligent piece of cinema about two friends (Matt Damon and Casey Afflec) who get lost in a desert, is a mature and breathtaking work of art. Van Sant says that he is "very happy with the finished product." He relates how the "process of shooting in the deserts of Argentina and Death Valley really hard." In addition, this was the first time that Van Sant has worked with a basic script outline, but no dialogue. Instead, he and the actors improvised throughout, creating not only an organic end product, but also a process that was constantly shifting and morphing, much like the varied landscapes the two protagonists find themselves lost in. Van Sant says that he always uses a certain amount of improvisation and script flexibility in all his projects, especially as in Drugstore Cowboy and Mala Noche.

Van Sant admits that he "liked working with no dialogue." In fact, Van Sant's career as a filmmaker has allowed him to constantly try new things within the often staid paradigms of how to make cinema. "There are lots of ways nobody has done things," he says, and this seems to have been his raison d' etre throughout his career.

With Gerry, or other pieces where he has allowed things to grow organically, Van Sant says that he is drawn to the idea of the cast and crew "acting and reacting to what might be." "In Gerry," he adds, "the characters are getting into a lot of trouble and this reaches ridiculous proportions because the size of he trouble was large as well." It is this troubled journey that is the kernel of truth seeking in Gerry and while the film has dark and tragic undertones, the organic process has allowed the film to have many very funny moments of existential angst and human endurance.

That same dark angst and humor put the Nicole Kidman vehicle To Die For on the map. Not only did it acknowledge Kidman as a serious actor, but it jump started the star career of Joaquin Phoenix and put Van Sant in the Hollywood mainstream.

Van Sant's true Hollywood bonanza came in the form of Good Will Hunting, a critical and box-office hit that gave him the clout to do anything he wished. The film notched up 9 Oscar nominations and Robin Williams finally won a statuette and screenwriters Ben Affleck and Matt Damon took home the original writing prize that year.

Gerry is Van Sant's third collaboration with Damon who had a small cameo in the director's Finding Forrester. Van Sant talks very highly of Damon whom he calls "a really good actor." "In fact," he continues, "Matt was supposed to have Joaquin's role in To Die For." The reason Van Sant ended up opting for Joaquin over Damon was because "Matt had a bit too much of the football jock in him and the character needed to have a more helpless aura about him."

Like the great filmmakers before him, Francois Truffaut and Ingmar Bergman, or like his contemporaries like Pedro Almodovar, Van Sant is keen on the idea of working with the same ensemble of actors over a period of time and in a number of different films. "This appeals to me," he says, "but I want to do so with unknown actors as opposed to famous ones." He wants to opt for the anonymity because "with unknown actors you are better able to buy them as the authentic character," as opposed to stars who are less able to completely shed their personas to be able to slip completely and unrecognizably into the skin of their characters.

Not being comfortable in one's own skin is a character trait embodied by many of the protagonists in Van Sant's films. From My Own Private Idaho to Gerry and from To Die For to Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the central characers in all these films are searching for a sense of belonging, are longing ot be at home with themselves and those around them. I ask Van Sant if he identifies with this, if he is consciously drawn to such characters and stories. "Yes, I probably am drawn to this motif," he admits, "but it is probably at a more subconscious level."

Prying a bit deeper I wonder if he has this proclivity because of his sexuality and/or because he has chosen to always stay a bit outside of the Hollywood mainstream. "I guess it's just my standard emotional position in life," he admits, "being on the outside, you know?"

In terms of fellow filmmakers, whom he considers to be important voices, both stateside and internationally, Van Sant is once again drawn to other so-called outsiders. He mentions the august names of Thomas Vinterberg, Bella Tarr of Hungary, Abbas Kiarostami of Iran (Taste of Cherry, Ten), and Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark). From the U.S he is drawn to the work of Todd Haynes, also one of the few openly gay directors working in Hollywood today, whose Far From Heaven was nominated for 4 Academy Awards this year. Van Sant says he liked Haynes' most recent film a lot. While all these filmmakers tackle different subject matter with varying cinematic styles, Van Sant sees one similarity in all of them. "They are all doing something that's beyond simply telling a story," he concludes.

Not that telling a story is irrelevant for Van Sant. But the more important aspect to filmmaking is how one tells that story because according to him, even the simplest stories can be told in the most compelling ways and the most compelling stories can be botched by inept execution.

While Van Sant's films have not always been critical or box-office hits, he is demure when asked to name those of his own films that he is partial to. "They are all equal to me," he said.

We then shift focus to the current state of affairs in the U.S. and the world, particularly vis-a-vis the impending war in Iraq. I asked Van Sant whether stars and celebrities should use their clout to speak out against the war, or in favor of the war for that matter, as Bruce Willis recently did by calling up President Bush himself and asking if he could enlist to serve.

"They should," Van Sant said. I remind him that many celebrities, particularly like Sean Penn and George Clooney have recently come under a lot of fire, both from the White House, and from certain segments of the American people, for protesting the President's insistence on a war with Iraq.

"I think that the complaints are probably based on whether the celebrities are considered to be serious or not," he said. Nevertheless, Van Sant believes that people should use their positions to speak out, pro or con. He said he remembered seeing a People magazine, right after the 9-11 attacks, where actors were photographed giving blood and helping in other ways. The White House or the public didn't mind that, he seems to infer from that anecdote.

Van Sant, quietly yet emphatically states however, that the current "insane Republican administration is very much like the McCarthy witch-hunts" of the 1950s. Referring to the Bush regime as very "reactionary," Van Sant says that they are very eager to find "scapegoats to blame things on."

"The nineteen-fifties grew out of this bizarre obsession with McCarthy," he continued, "and famous people like those in Hollywood were blacklisted and harassed as a form of terrorism to keep people away from the ideas" that went against the establishment, the government. He sees many parallels between that era and the times we are living through currently.

We ended our discussion with the seminal moments of people in his life that led Van Sant to where he is today. After a lengthy pause, his brow furrowed, Van Sant said that, "I can mention teachers who profoundly impacted my life."

From the ages of ten through seventeen, Van Sant lived in Darrien, Connecticut, and two teachers, Robert Lavigne and David Sohn made quite an impact on the future auteur.
"Lavigne was my seventh grade art teacher," he said, "and he himself made a lot of art which inspired me and got me very excited." "He was also quite a disciplinarian which was good," Van Sant added.

In the ninth grade, Van Sant came in contact with Sohn and in that class they made films, the start of what would become his life-long dedication.

Even though Van Sant has been making films for a while, and as he approaches middle age, it seems as though Van Sant's best work still lies ahead of him. What makes him the maverick that he is, is the fact that Van Sant is not afraid to try new things, he is insistent on making his audiences think, and he seems to have a real gift for telling stories about people yearning for true connections, about those human emotions and yens that live on the outer fringes of our consciousness and subconsciousness.

Van Sant continues that odyssey of charged and important films with his next feature, a film called Elephant, which he said is "about high school violence." Elephant will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on the French Riviera, later this year in May.

格斯·范桑特访谈

Gus Van Sant: "A cinema that might have existed"
By Sean Axmaker
August 3, 2005

"That moment is where all of it just stopped abruptly."

Last Days, a film "inspired by" the last days of Kurt Cobain, made its world premiere at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, but director Gus Van Sant appropriately gave the honors for North American premiere to Seattle, the city where Cobain first made his music and found his fame, and where he took his life in 1994. It's something of a homecoming for Van Sant as well, who has made his home in Portland, Oregon, some 200 hundred miles south of Seattle, for over 20 years.

Michael Pitt is undeniably Cobain-like as Blake, a reclusive, accidental grunge rock icon, under long shaggy locks and behind hazy eyes. He looks like he's coming off a decade-long high as he mumbles and stumbles through his decaying manor in woods, dodging phone calls and ducking housemates while mumbling incoherently and periodically passing out. The story is pure speculation, Van Sant's fantasy on what might have happened during those final days of self-isolation, but he loads the film with distinctive imagery - from Pitt's wardrobe to the architecture to the damp, murky forest that envelopes them all like some primeval landscape - that makes a definitive connection to the real events and complicates any kind of reading of the film.

Subject matter aside, the film forms a kind of trilogy with Gerry and his award-winning 2003 drama Elephant, experiments in narrative deconstruction and reconstruction. Van Sant once again takes an impressionistic, non-linear approach, the better to plunge us into the experience. The film slips and stutters back and forth through the story, often so subtly that it takes a while to register, creating a queasy disorientation. The film soon feels out of time and suspended in the atmosphere of decay and deterioration and emotional disconnection. It's a defiantly uncommercial, individualistic mode of expression that Van Sant has been exploring with great success. Last Days is the epitome of these explorations and a beautiful marriage of subject matter and style.

Just hours before the film unspooled as the Closing Night event of the 2005 Seattle International Film Festival (where it not only divided audiences with its impressionistic, non-linear style, and its defiant refusal to provide any answers, but gave fresh fuel to Seattle's notorious Cobain conspiracy nut Richard Lee, whose grand design has been amended to implicate Gus Van Sant in Cobain's death), Van Sant sat down for an interview with me to discuss the film and his inspirations.

Sean Axmaker: Why is Last Days "inspired by" rather than "based on" the death of Kurt Cobain?

Gus Van Sant: There was this idea to do a biopic, like The Doors, that would have the story and maybe the Kurt and Courtney relationship and the band and they would be arguing over their recording of "Never Mind" or arguing with Butch Vig [the album's producer]. That was my instant conception, which was probably about a year after he died.

And then I guess I just changed it and decided that it would be maybe something I could do on a low budget at my house. I had a house that was kind of like their house, a 1905 Arts and Crafts house in Portland. I thought I could shoot it in 16mm and I would cast someone that wasn't like him. I was going to cast this 14-year-old kid who was in an early Thomas Vinterberg film called The Boy Who Walked Backwards. Then I decided that it would be just these last couple days that were just sort of missing, where nobody knew what had happened to him, that it wouldn't literally be about him. It would be a poetic piece, I guess.

And then, as time went on, it changed back. I was obsessing over locale and Mike [Michael Pitt] decided that his hair should be long and blonde. So that changed it a lot, because when I first met Mike, he looked kind of like the 14-year-old Vinterberg actor. He was 17 and he didn't look like Kurt, which was one of the reasons that I cast him. But as time went by he grew older and everything became something else. So there is a striking resemblance, although there still isn't an account of what happened on those particular days. There are certain accounts from, say, the detective, from his point of view, but then everyone else is not there.

SA: So where did this account come from?

GVS: Just in my imagination.

SA: So it's fiction.

GVS: Yeah, so that's another reason why it wasn't really a straight biopic.

SA: Within the fiction, there are certainly a number of very striking parallels to the real life events. The house, for instance, and the setting. By the time you add in the hair and the eccentric wardrobe, it's hard to think of Blake as anyone else by Kurt Cobain. Why did you put all these very specific signifiers into the film?

GVS: As well as imagining it, there were some things that I was familiar with. And Mike was doing his own thing. The whole idea of looking like Kurt was really his. I was afraid of that and I was going "Yeah, but it's corny and it'll be like a hair movie," and he was like "I can always change it." And then I started to like it.

SA: And there is his whole performance. The way he shuffles and mumbles, it's such a complete transformation of character that it's creepy. Was that your conception of the character, or was it Michael's?

GVS: No, it was Mike's. He was just doing his own thing. I would say "That's too much" or "A little more," but it wasn't really about me directing him. That's him creating the guy.

SA: What is it about the suicide of Kurt Cobain that so resonated with you that made you want to make this film?

GVS: Being from Portland, we sort of lived in the shadow of that music. Whenever I would go to Europe, especially around '91, people would ask about the music and they would want to know about that, which I really didn't know that much about, although I was in a band in Portland in 1988. And I have a friend who was a rock promoter who promoted most of the alternative shows here [in Seattle] and in Portland. So I had some reference, but it wasn't like I was at all of the shows and was digging the music. So I can only give a partial answer. But I think that moment [Cobain's death] is where all of it just stopped abruptly. There was this big thing that came out of the sky and stopped alternative music. And it became fake alternative music the day after. It was so abrupt. Even though none of that is in the movie, it was probably the impetus: the notoriety of this character and what it meant. That was probably one thing, having been part of something similar myself in Portland, having gotten something going and having stayed in Portland and having had an awkward relationship to my own city where I came from, and having bought a house that cost a lot of money, which he had also done. He had done these things that were similar. Living in LA some of the time, going back and forth, all that stuff. I guess I just drew parallels.

SA: Why did you shoot the film in New York rather than in the Northwest?

GVS: We looked at a lot of houses here. We asked the people who owned Kurt and Courtney's house. We looked at a lot of houses that resembled Boston area houses on the water in Portland. But we could never find the right house. They would all be kind of weird and new inside and, even if it was old, it didn't seem right as far as being a movie version, a fictional version. The one that we shot in, in Garrison, New York, was one of the first houses that we scouted. There were a lot of mansions like that in the area that were old, railroad tycoon or Wall Street tycoon summer houses. We had one in Portland we were actually going to shoot in, a house that I had actually lived in at one time, owned by a friend of mine, but they had started to get cold feet. They wondered if they could still have the garden club on Tuesdays and we realized it wasn't going to be something they were used to, so I thought, "What about that house in Garrison?" So we went back. We really tried to stay in the Northwest because we cast there.

SA: You mentioned the decay inside. That sense of decay really pervades the film.

GVS: A little heavy-handed.

SA: Even out in the forest, which is boggy and wild with underbrush, there is a primeval quality. It's like the house is being reclaimed by the wild.

GVS: I wanted to make a film about John Muir a long time ago. I'd heard that Ken Kesey had written a script about him and there are a lot of different things named after John Muir in Portland. I'd read some of his books and I was fascinated with a character that walked across the United States, walked up and down the west coast, walked around the globe, and created a lot of the parks. And as it turned out, really just by coincidence, the house that we shot in was owned by the son of the railroad tycoon who was actually the president of the Natural History Museum in New York and had introduced John Muir to Teddy Roosevelt. Muir had actually written a lot of his book right there on that hill. Not at that house. He had spent time in that house that we shot in, but there was another house over the hill. I learned this while were we in the middle of shooting. I think he's walking through the woods partly because he's doing a John Muir thing. It's almost as if he's walking from some distant place all the way up the coast to Washington. Who knows where he was walking from? It used to be he was walking from a facility, rehab or something.

SA: It felt to me like a walkabout, that he had left the house to get away and into nature. But you never see where he came from.

GVS: It wasn't explained. There are a lot of things that aren't explained.

"We haven't crashed and burned."

SA: The first time I saw the scene where Blake passes out, sitting against the door, and Asia Argento opens it and he falls, and then you see it again from another perspective, it took me a second to register that it was the same scene. Why this non-linear approach to this experience?

GVS: It's similar to the way that we did Elephant, and there were different time spaces that people were having that would sometimes cross and you would see, "Oh, this guy was developing the picture at the same time as the other kid was getting dropped off at the office and they converged." I got the idea from a B閘a Tarr movie called S醫醤t醤go, which happens in much larger pieces. An hour and a half of film will go by and then it will cross, and another hour an a half will go by, and at two and a half hours, there will be this crossing and you go, "Oh my God, this is the same period of time," but it's much more profound because it's such a big film. I'd done, like, a mini-version in Elephant and in the original script for Last Days we were following each character separately. It got changed in the editing. I guess Blake's character was more powerful so we wanted to be with him more. But originally Asia had her own journey and the detective [played by Ricky Jay] had his own piece of time, a 20-minute thing.

SA: When we see that scene with Blake and Asia played a second time, it actually plays differently. Is it like a memory as opposed to some objective presentation of reality?

GVS: Yeah, it's not like we're using two different cameras. But the whole point of doing it that way is just a way to tell a story. Instead of an objective for a character, instead of a quest or a goal for the lead character, it's just another type of thing to occupy the audience as they are seeing this other thing. It's a story technique, really, filmically. It's also the way I think our lives are. We go through a day and when we check in with our friends, you hear, "Oh, I was actually there at the same time," and they might have seen the same thing. So you retrace your day and piece it together from different points of view around the dinner table. So it's sort of the way we understand reality, I think. Goals are also another way we understand reality. It's a convention, a cinematic convention. Instead of, say, in Lord of the Rings, the quest for the ring is the goal of the characters, which I guess is like a MacGuffin in a Hitchcock movie.

SA: As you pointed out, there were also conflicting reports about those last days. Is this a comment upon those conflicting perspectives?

GVS: They were just different points of view. I don't think that they were ever conflicting. There were always just little pieces of what just happened. Somebody saw him [Cobain] in the park. We left that out but used the park. We didn't show someone actually stopping and seeing him but we showed him go to a park, seemingly next door to his house. There were these touch and go instances of things that I'd heard, that he had been in a club. I'm not sure where that story came from. I had written down as a list of things that Kurt Cobain liked to do or maybe had done in the last couple days. Making macaroni and cheese is not something that somebody said he did then, but it was something somebody said he did at other times in his life.

SA: There is a disturbing sense of isolation and alienation throughout the picture. In parts, it is a powerful portrait of extreme depression, to the point where Blake literally flees from everyone around him, but it's disturbing the way everyone avoids him. It feels like he's been abandoned emotionally by everyone around him at the time he most needs some contact.

GVS: That was what I was assuming he would be doing, partly because of, perhaps, drugs, but also because he was "the master of the house," so the other people were steering clear of him. Or maybe it's just the way they were used to acting in the house. They were also people that he would maybe jam with; they weren't necessarily people he didn't talk to. It's just that he was actually in hiding because he had apparently left rehab prematurely. He was supposed to spend 28 days in, but he left after two days, so he was hiding out in his own house and avoiding people who might be looking for him. He had done something wrong, he had left prematurely, and there were people calling and saying, "Why did you leave?" and he didn't want to listen to that. I mean, this is me imagining it. So they were helping him hide out and keeping out of his way.

And I think he was maybe used to doing that, he was maybe used to being alone so he could think and write and do the stuff that you normally would do during the day. I think it's a typical kind of scenario for an artist or a writer or a painter, that they have to go off into their world to create. And not necessarily being apart from the people in the house because of, say, just drugs. As far as I know, what really happened might have been something far different.

SA: It seemed to me that there was more going on than simply avoiding him because of that. When Asia opens the door and he falls onto the floor, practically out cold, she doesn't help, she walks away from him.

GVS: Because she thinks he's dead. That's what I'm inferring. She's thinking, "Oh, it's happened," and then she just goes upstairs and says, "Scott, somebody's at the door." She doesn't want to be the one that finds him. She's freaked out and she leaves before the others figure out what's going on.

SA: Who is the woman who visits Blake and asks him if he's spoken to his daughter [played by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth]?

GVS: She's like a manager or sort of a fix-it person that the record company has. Or she might be somebody that's connected to him or she might just be a friend. But she's somebody he really likes and she goes up and says, "Hey, get it together." Probably nothing like that happened during those two days but I threw it in there.

SA: I wondered if she was a real person at all. She never interacted with anyone else. She just appears and then disappears, basically bucking him up but not doing anything physically to help him. She gives him some emotional support but she doesn't try to get him out of there.

GVS: I think that's the way it would be. There were accounts of interventions that had gone on that might be more like what really happened, like a group of people sitting down, a much different type of thing. This was just one person coming up and saying, "I can help. We can leave."

SA: Your last three films have gone in a completely different direction than pretty much everything in mainstream cinema. They've moved away from traditional storytelling and narrative structures and become more about capturing textures and emotional states. What inspired you to move into this direction?

GVS: I think I was ticked off when I saw S醫醤t醤go. Susan Sontag was a very big supporter of B閘a Tarr's and she was at a Museum of Modern Art presentation of all of his movies. He introduced S醫醤t醤go and she was there in the front row and she watched this six hour movie for, like, the thirteenth time. Afterwards we all went out had some drinks and talked and as we were leaving I told Susan that I'd made a B閘a Tarr movie, I'd made Gerry. You could call it inspiration or you could call it copying, but she thought it was like you were given permission by somebody to do something you had wanted to do, and I guess that's kind of what it is. I mean, I've lived with Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman since 1975, which this has more in common with than a B閘a Tarr movie, but I never really did anything like it. Always thought about it, never actually tried to do anything like that, but always really admired that movie and never knew why, never examined it enough because it was so rarely shown.

Even from the very beginning, we were always shooting things in big, long takes. In order to cover scenes that were, say, five minutes long, we would do five-minute takes and I would move it from one angle and then another angle and a third angle, all these different angles, and then I would cut them together. And we were always moving around, as a way to combine set-ups. And in the dailies you watch those, you watch the single takes, and it never dawns on you to actually use one of those takes by itself, for whatever reason. I guess it's because it's not a cinema that we're used to seeing. In Eastern Europe it's a cinema that they are used to seeing, but in our cinema, even if you're watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, it's not necessarily a cinema we're used to thinking up or executing.

So I always intercut it, even though we were shooting in those long takes. Gerry was specifically these big long takes; it was different, but then in Last Days, they literally are just are one side of things. We would normally shoot three different sides and cut them together. Like with Blake talking to Kim Gordon, we would shoot his side, and then Kim's, and you would cut together your favorite parts of both performances, which in itself is starting to combine different time frames. One side would actually be shot an hour later or whatever. So you were combining a 2:30 shoot with a 4:30 shoot and back to 2:30 and back to 4:30 and then a 3:30 shot, and it kind of looks like that. You sense it, even if you don't quite intellectualize it; you actually feel these mixed-up times. It's just the cinema that we actually are used to, but as soon as you don't do that, there's a whole different type of cinema going on, which related to something I felt when I was watching B閘a's movies, related to a cinema that might have existed as a parallel cinema that grew up along side, say, D.W. Griffith's cinema. It's sort of an evolution of what already is happening but never allowed to happen, never having permission to let it happen. So we're just doing it. They're also cheap movies so we're not betting the bank on them.

SA: Keeping these on very low budgets, at least by industry standards, seems to have given you a tremendous amount of freedom to take on very uncommercial projects, to take a chance on them. This is the third one on a row. Because these are so small, what kind of success do you need from them to continue on in this vein?

GVS: They've been successful on their own, so we're still able to produce them. We haven't crashed and burned. They've made enough money to sustain them.

SA: You've lived in Portland for the past 20 years or so, far from the hub of Hollywood. Why do you stay in Portland?

GVS: Mostly to stay away from stuff that happens in LA. If I'm in LA, I start to read and see and hear the same things that everybody else does, so you start to have a limited point of view. It starts to be LA-centric. If you're here, you have a different point of view of life. That's probably the main reason, but it's also a nice place. My family is from Kentucky and I grew up kind of on the road, but we ended up in Portland when I was in high school. I can live basically anywhere so I just went back to where I came from.