Gus Van Sant is perhaps best known as the director of Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting. A crowdpleaser that focuses on the relationship between a gifted but troubled young man (Matt Damon) and his therapist (Robin Williams), and his reluctance to break free from the cocoon of small-town Southie in Boston.
But when you consider this against some of his riskier projects – Gerry with its barely speaking two-person cast wandering the desert, Elephant recalling the horror of Columbine, that shot-for-shot remake of Psycho or “forgery” as Van Sant dubs it – we get a very different picture of the filmmaker. The Art of Making Movies is as coherent and linear an appraisal of his work as you will find, and yet it also reminds us that this is someone who rarely sticks to the script.
Van Sant is first and foremost an artist, a painter and photographer who came to film through his obsession with the likes of Kenneth Anger and Alejandro Jodorowsky. In cinema, he hoped to achieve what literature could do in a line. That is, to invite contradiction by evoking one particular time while speaking from another.
Originally a painter and photographer (feast your eyes on those screen-test Polaroids), Van Sant came to film through his obsession with the likes of Kenneth Anger and Alejandro Jodorowsky. In cinema, he hoped to achieve what literature could do in a line: to invite contradiction by evoking one particular time while speaking from another.
Then, to construct open-ended and elliptical worlds around peripheral figures in society – the outcasts, outsiders, drifters and hustlers. He often asks amateurs to portray their reality, whether it’s a supporting role in My Own Private Idaho or the lead in Paranoid Park.
Van Sant’s default mode is poetry and suggestion rather than exposition or resolution. A practice informed by intuition and spontaneity, then fired by constraints. This is a director whose core credo is “continuity is the enemy”. It shouldn’t work. But it has … and it probably will again.
Attempting to make the mundane into something more profound and feature-length is risky. Gerry was tedious but Elephant felt far more compelling in how it resisted our need for quick answers to a burning question. By casting a detached, non-judgemental gaze, the film held a mirror to a contradictory society as writer Katya Tylevich puts it in one chapter.
Acclaimed cinematographer and Wong Kar Wai collaborator Christopher Doyle has worked with Van Sant on two projects: Psycho and Paranoid Park. He describes the director’s pursuit of purity like this. “How do we get down to no interference? How do we get down to a point where the film is making itself? We don’t add lights, we remove lights. We remove the obstacle. Get rid of shit and something true will shine through. Gus creates the construct, he creates the architecture. And the details take care of themselves.”
Several anecdotes in the book affirm his experimental impulse. The way unexpected additions and omissions can reveal deeper meaning. Take Ricky Jay’s detective in Last Days. How he makes up the dialogue in the car about Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo and his rivalry with American Billy Robinson who apparently ripped off Foo’s act (as Chung Ling Soo).
We learn that Soo died by misadventure on stage after attempting to catch a bullet in his mouth. Eerie echoes of the death of Kurt Cobain, on whom lead character Blake (Michael Pitt) is based. The car scene hints at the subtle dark humour that has laced several of Van Sant’s projects and the ordinariness of events that often proceeds something as catastrophic as suicide.
In My Own Private Idaho, that poignant campfire scene between Mike (River Phoenix) and Scott (Keanu Reeves) almost didn’t happen. In the first script, Mike suggested they have sex out of sheer boredom. “Sex had become something he traded unsentimentally since love had long become distorted to him,” thought the director. Phoenix felt that was too frivolous.
So Van Sant stepped aside and Phoenix added six pages, drawing out Mike’s longing for intimacy and romance, and challenging Scott’s assertion that “two guys can’t love each other”. Their exchange became one of the seminal moments in 90’s queer cinema and opened the door to later box office successes from Brokeback Mountain to Moonlight.
Rather than become a Hollywood darling, the director prefers the role of provocateur. Undeterred by an aborted attempt to adapt Victor Bockris’ biography of Andy Warhol, which would have starred Phoenix as the Pope of Pop, he agreed to direct a musical about the artist featuring a Portuguese cast who speak in English. Whatever next… (Well, this.)
The Art of Making Movies is an enticing commentary on his career up to 2020 and should interest anyone that appreciates art and cinema, even if they aren't that into Van Sant's films. The director pulls us into studio meetings where he often frustrates and resolves to stand by his vision. He puts us on set as if his films are taking shape here and now, and offers sharp recollections beside vivid photos and storyboards.
In conversation with Tylevich, he is also able to look back with a newfound perspective, usually through the prism of art but with an enduring aversion to convention. “I either try to be out of control or never really feel like I am.”
