Gus Van Sant: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Gus Van Sant.


GUS VAN SANT: GOOD WILL HUNTER
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the December 1997/January 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.

Gus Van Sant has long been recognized as one of America's most audacious and original filmmakers. Born Gus Van Sant, Jr. in Louisville, Kentucky in 1953, Van Sant graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, soon after traveling to Los Angeles where he landed a job as an assistant to director Ken Shaprio (The Groove Tube). Van Sant debuted as a director in 1985 with Mala Noche, the story of an ill-fated love affair between a homosexual clerk and a migrant worker. The work established him as an original voice and won the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for best independent film.

Drugstore Cowboy, his following film in 1989, was an unapologetic look at a drug-addicted "family" led by Matt Dillon that supported itself by robbing pharmacies across the pacific northwest. The film was a critical and arthouse hit, and set Van Sant as a voice for the young. His study of a gay hustler in My Own Private Idaho (1991), was praised for its lyricism, find performances and contribution to the canon of gay and lesbian cinema. It also contains what many feel is the late River Phoenix's seminal performance. His adaptation of Tom Robbins' novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues in 1994 received a critical trouncing that would cause many filmmakers to reassess their careers. Van Sant, however, bounced back the following year with To Die For, a blackly comic examination of the American obsession with fame and celebrity, featuring a career-redefining performance from Nicole Kidman and a witty, caustic screenplay by Hollywood legend Buck Henry.

Van Sant's latest effort is Good Will Hunting, from a screenplay by two of its stars, Matt (The Rainmaker) Damon and Ben (Chasing Amy) Affleck. Robin Williams co-stars as a determined psychologist who attempts to get through to a working class prodigal math genius (Damon) who buries his intellect under a veil of self-destruction and apathy. Minnie Driver also stars in one of the year's smartest and heart-felt films, which is sure to recognized on Oscar night and, quite possibly, put Van Sant's name into the (dare we say it) mainstream of American filmmakers.

Gus Van Sant recently spoke to Venice in a dubbing stage on the Disney lot about his enigmatic work and career.

You moved around a lot as a kid. How did this shape your perceptions?
Gus Van Sant: My father was a salesman of men's sportswear. In my lifetime we lived in Kentucky, Colorado, Illinois, California, Connecticut and Oregon. It made it easy for me to adapt to different places, but not necessarily to blend. They were all very suburban, very similar places.

When did you discover the arts?
When I was about 12 years old. I had some very influential teachers in my school in Connecticut. Painting was my original interest. I had a great art teacher. I had another teacher in 9th grade named David Soan, who used to show films and let the kids in his class make 8mm movies. So I started to do that with the family camera.

What were your first films about?
They were animated. That's also the sorts of films he was showing us in class, from the Canadian Film Board. Very experimental sorts of things. Schools in the 60's had a lot of very experimental aspects to it, which is why the English teacher was showing, essentially, art movies in class. It was the era of Marshall Macluhan. My English teacher actually wrote a book called Stop, Look and Write, that was sort of an experimental look at how to write. He even showed us Citizen Kane. Seeing that at 14 was a major influence on me. I don't know what would have happened had Mr. Soan not been there and he hadn't shown that film to me. Pretty amazing stuff for a public school. I was interested in film initially more as a painter than as a dramatist.

So you really had an introductory film education in high school before you even hit film school.
Yeah, we even made a 20 minute 16mm film at my high school in Oregon that was the equivalent of what you'd do as a senior project in most college film programs. So the first year of film school especially was quite easy for me.

Who are some of the filmmakers who influenced you early on?
A lot of avant-garde filmmakers from the 60's, like 80 or 90 of them, that I would read about during the 60's. Sometimes we'd see their films at the Museum of Modern Art or something like that. There were the Kuchar brothers, Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, Stan van der Beek...

There were parts of My Own Private Idaho that I thought hearkened back to some of Kenneth Anger's work, with the leather and biker imagery.
I never got to see any of his films until film school, but he took the same role on influencing me as the other guys. But it was mostly about reading about his films that influenced me. As a kid in the suburbs it was hard to see those kinds of films.

What about any of the European filmmakers from the 60's?
Yeah, a little bit. Fellini and Alexandro Jodorowsky. El Topo was one of the films I saw when I first came out, around '68 or '69. Bergman was another one...Truffaut, Goddard, Antonioni, Passolini. Lina Wertmuller was also very popular when I was in film school.

You went to the Rhode Island School of Design initially to study painting. What made you change over to film?
Well, you didn't have to declare your major until you were a junior...It didn't seem like painting would really be a way to make any kind of money or to support yourself. There were a lot of these art students that either wound up staying in Providence, or the people who went to New York City as painters, and remained unemployed. It was a long road to be traveling. There was a reward at the end of the long road, perhaps, but there wasn't a lot of hope...the painter students who'd come back to speak at the school, they'd reel off these statistics of how many painters were living in New York City and how many actually made it and it was pretty staggering.

So you looked on filmmaking as a more pragmatic way of making a living?!
Yeah. (laughs)

What did you do immediately after film school?
I actually traveled to Italy and visited all the working Italian filmmakers sets. We just sort of observed or sometimes would have interviews with the directors. We saw Fellini while he was shooting Casanova. Wertmuller was shooting Seven Beauties. Pasolini was finishing Salo. Tinto Brass was finishing Madame Kitty.

What was the set of Salo like?
We didn't actually go to the set on that one. One group of students got to watch him dubbing. Another that I was in got to go to his house and talk with him.

What was your impression of him?
He was very smart, but that was my impression of a lot of these guys as a 20 year-old student. Italy itself was quite interesting because it was sort of like being inside a Fellini film. So I could see where Fellini had gotten a lot of his material--from his own culture. The directors all had their kind of (quirks) that you would expect. We had lunch at a table with Lina Wertmuller and Giancarlo Giannini. None of us spoke Italian and sometimes we'd be interpreted through someone who did but...basically it was just being there. Our guide was Gideon Bachman, who still lives in Italy, writes and works on film projects there. He was the guy who knew all these filmmakers and got us in. Then after that I moved to L.A. because I didn't speak Italian...

What was Hollywood in the 70's like?
It was great. I went to a lot of places and met a lot of people and got a lot of advice, but again, there was no work to be found. So after about eight months of looking for work, I read this interview with Chevy Chase where he mentioned this old friend of his named Ken Shapiro. And I knew Ken Shapiro's movies, The Groove Tube I'd seen...Someone had told me early on in my journey to Hollywood that you could contact anyone you wanted, just call them up. You could call Hitchcock if you wanted and bug him for a job...So I realized that that's what I should start doing. So I decided to call Ken Shaprio as opposed to Hitchcock because that seemed slightly less intimidating...So I showed Ken some movies and he gave me a job and I worked for him for about two years on the Paramount lot and also at his office at his house. I learned a lot working with him. He was hot off The Groove Tube. This was 1975. There was a big group working for him before I arrived, including Lorne Michaels, who was writing a script for him before he went to make Saturday Night Live, which essentially used a lot of the ideas that were in The Groove Tube. Then when Lorne Michaels pitched the idea for SNL, they invited Ken to go along with them, but he felt like he had other important things to do and didn't want to get involved in what was essentially a pilot, even though it was live skit humor. So really all of his friends left and went to New York to work on that show. Meanwhile he was embarking on his career at Paramount, which at the time seemed like the better of the two deals. But, as you know, Saturday Night Live became this huge institution that unbelievably still exists today. But he was really like one of the creators, if the not the creator of Saturday Night Live, but he never got to see anything of it, even though it was really a spin-off of The Groove Tube.

The first film of yours that got you recognition was Mala Noche, right?
Yeah. It was my second film as a director. My first was called Alice in Hollywood in 1979. I also did a short film from a William Burroughs short story. I moved to Portland to make Mala Noche. Around 1980 or so, I got really fed up with L.A. I was writing screenplays on spec that weren't selling. I was getting editing jobs when I could. I was mostly working as a temporary secretary. Then when my father offered me a job working in his warehouse in New Jersey I realized that made about as much sense as working as a temporary secretary in L.A. So I moved to Portland...and Mala Noche took four years to make. Things were cheaper in Portland. I had friends who were filmmakers up there who had equipment. At the time the TV news was still being shot on film, so it was easy to get extra stock if you knew somebody. In those days video got a bad rap, I think. Now with the MTV generation, people are used to looking at film done in distressed super 8, video and all kinds of formats. Now you've got a moviegoing public that accepts any sort of distressed format...you can present it at Sundance and nobody will care that the image isn't perfectly pristine. It's all about your ability to tell your story in a way that isn't putting the audience to sleep... Filmmakers should try to shoot film every single day. It's almost like a weight lifter who decides he's going to save all his strength and not train until the day of the competition. Well when that day comes, he realizes that he should've been preparing by lifting weights every single day instead of just waiting around for the competition to finally start. It's the actual process of doing the work that's the most important thing. Shoot on video. Shoot on High-8. I've seen a lot of great things on video that couldn't have cost much.

You cast legendary author William Burroughs in your breakthrough film Drugstore Cowboy. Tell us about him.
He was very interested in the screenplay. He didn't want to play the character Tom the way he was originally written in the screenplay, which was as this sort of pathetic loser...he wanted the character to have some more pride. So he came up with the idea of making Tom be a junkie priest. So he pretty much created the stuff in his scenes on his own.

A lot of people consider River Phoenix's performance in My Own Private Idaho to be his finest. They've also drawn a lot of parallels between his character in the film and the way he died. Did you perceive any hint of the self-destructiveness that eventually killed him?
I never really saw his death as a self-destructive death. I see it more as a sort of calamity. A sort of mistake that was made on a wild bender that I don't think was related to self-destructiveness, because he really wasn't a self-destructive person. He got that rap though, I think, from the press, who have created a whole angle on his situation. I remember Johnny Depp saying that that kind of death can happen to anybody. And if people think that it can only happen to someone like River and not to them just aren't watching out. The media is its own sort of entity, its own sort of animal. River had a certain public image that went against the grain of how he died. It was like "how can a vegetarian possibly do drugs." It's like they felt they'd been cheated and lied to by this guy...If he had been hit by a truck it would have been different, which is really how I look at it, as a tragic accident. To me River really was a symbol of hope and good cheer. He was probably one of the greatest persons I've ever met.

Tell us about how you became involved with Good Will Hunting.
I read the screenplay and I knew the two guys who'd written it. Matt had tried out for To Die For and Ben I'd met on the set of To Die For where he was visiting his younger brother Casey, who was in it. As soon as I'd read it I was scrambling to find their numbers and finally got Ben on the phone and said "I'm in! I want to do this right away, as my next project." It's kind of an amazing thing to have happen, because they'd just gotten it set up at Miramax and hadn't really been around very long...but the screenplay was really good enough to attract attention right away. I was just lucky enough to get ahold of it first.

We spoke before about your advice to first-time filmmakers. Any more words of wisdom to impart?
Get plenty of rest and exercise and do your homework before you shoot. Don't wait until you get to the set.