There’s no such thing as a typical Gus Van Sant film.
With the possible exception of Steven Soderbergh, no American filmmaker working today has had a career marked by such radical shifts in style, budget and artistic ambition as the 73-year-old director from Louisville, Kentucky. From edgy indies to blockbuster crowd-pleasers, prestige Oscar bait to experimental movies, Van Sant has spent the past 40 years delighting, surprising and confounding his audience.
His early films — the “Portland trilogy” of 1988’s Mala Noche, 1989’s Drugstore Cowboy and 1991’s My Own Private Idaho — were gritty, realist dramas about outsiders: migrant workers, nomadic drug addicts and gay hustlers. The mid-’90s saw Van Sant pivot to more studio-friendly fare: the glossy camp of the 1995 dark satire To Die For, featuring Nicole Kidman in a career-making wig, and 1997’s Good Will Hunting, a $225 million global hit that introduced the world to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
But at the height of his studio success, in between his first Oscar nomination for Good Will Hunting and his second for 2008’s political biopic Milk, Van Sant veered in an entirely different direction.
His “death trilogy” — 2002’s Gerry, 2003’s Elephant and 2005’s Last Days — was a sharp turn into art house experimentation. Loosely scripted and influenced by European auteurs Béla Tarr and Chantal Akerman, these films favored long, choreographed shots, languid pacing and a disregard for Hollywood conventions. Around the same time, in 1998, he made his notorious shot-for-shot color remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a $60 million studio picture that now plays like a conceptual art installation.
“I think it goes back to the beginning, when I started making short films with my friends,” Van Sant says of his frequent shifts in style. “We were experimenting, scratching on the film, drawing on the film, animating directly onto 8mm. But we were also going to the cinema in this small town in Connecticut every Friday, watching war movies, or cartoons, or whatever. We’d watch Bonanza on TV. The experiment became: Could I extend my experiments in film into dramatic storytelling, to make something that looked like the things I would see on TV?”
Elephant, Van Sant’s experimental school-shooter drama that won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 2003
Fine Line/Courtesy Everett Collection
Van Sant credits his high school English teacher David Stone with introducing him to experimental cinema, showing 14-year-old Gus Canadian Film Board shorts and Citizen Kane in class. “Things like Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, the Kuchar brothers, Ron Rice — people like that.”
Other early influences included a stint assisting Ken Shapiro, director of 1974’s pre-SNL sketch spoof The Groove Tube. “Lorne Michaels was actually working for him as a writer when he pitched Saturday Night Live to NBC,” Van Sant recalls. The job gave him a taste for counterculture comedy and the nuts and bolts of indie production.
At the same time, he was bingeing on films from an emerging queer cinema scene. Apart from John Waters — whose 1972 cult classic Pink Flamingos played every Friday at midnight at New York’s Quad Cinema — “there weren’t really other gay filmmakers that I knew,” he says. “In Hollywood, there was a queer scene, though it wasn’t called that. At the gay film festival at the Vista Theater, [the American entries] were mostly old Tennessee Williams adaptations with gay themes, alongside Danish, Swedish, Dutch and Spanish titles. But no new American films. Americans weren’t really making independent queer films.”
So Van Sant made one. With $25,000 he’d earned in New York advertising, he financed Mala Noche, a 16mm black-and-white adaptation of the Walt Curtis novel about an almost-romance between a gay store clerk and two young Mexican immigrants.
“Walt Curtis wasn’t a typical city gay man,” says Van Sant. “He was more the kind of queer man who would get kicked out of a gay bar. So Mala Noche wasn’t about mainstream gay culture. It was about a sidelined, independent gay man.”
The film arrived during a golden moment for American indie cinema, fueled by upstart distributors like New Line, Orion and Miramax and the booming home video market. “Around the same time I made my film, Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch were making their first movies — She’s Gotta Have It and Stranger Than Paradise — all in black-and-white and all low-budget.”
Van Sant credits his chameleon-like approach to filmmaking to the way he shape-shifts when working with actors: “One director — I can’t remember who, probably Frank Capra — was asked, ‘How do you direct different people?’ And he said: ‘If they want to hear Chopin, you play Chopin. If they want to hear rock ‘n’ roll, you play rock ‘n’ roll.’ I’m obsequious enough to mold into their needs, to understand what they want to do and how to make that thing happen.”
Milk, for which Sean Penn won a best actor Oscar in 2009.
Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection
He has often gravitated toward real-life stories: Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy and Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot were all adapted from memoirs; Milk was a biopic; To Die For satirized the Pamela Smart murder case. His latest, Dead Man’s Wire, premiering out of competition in Venice (where Van Sant will receive the Campari Passion for Film Award), is based on a bizarre 1970s hostage standoff in Indianapolis. Bill Skarsgard plays Tony Kiritsis, a former developer who wired a shotgun to his mortgage banker’s neck in a bid for a public apology and a payout.
The project originally was set up with Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage. When they dropped out, producer Cassian Elwes — who had worked with Van Sant on Gerry — called to offer it to him. “Werner is so extreme that you start to see the extreme qualities in the story,” Van Sant says. “I also really knew the quality of this Midwest, middle-class life. My father [and] my grandfather were these types of Midwest small-town businessmen.”
Van Sant is currently developing another real-life tale, a project about disgraced crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried.
“Working with real stories is less about what I can bring to the story than about the story bringing itself to you, feeling like it’s something you are connected to,” he says. “With Sam Bankman-Fried, I just thought this is an amazing sort of car crash in the crypto world. And then someone sent me a script about it.”
There might not be anyone out there quite like Gus Van Sant. But asked about a kindred spirit, even a possible successor, he names Sean Baker.
“It’s amazing what he’s doing. The fact that Anora just swept the Oscars shows there’s hope. He comes by a style that’s where I’ve always lived: You make something with small intentions but find the humanity within those intentions,” says Van Sant. “You don’t let the money take over your sentiment as a filmmaker. You cast people that are new, that haven’t been used before, and simplify the set to not have too many working parts. If you see a shot of a Bergman set, there’s like four people. Or watch Godard making Breathless. There’s a shopping cart and two guys.”
This story appeared in the Aug. 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.