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Home , Corey Haim, Finding Forrester, John Sayles, Laura Ziskin, Mala Noche, My Own Private Idaho

Gus Van Sant Regis Dialogue with Scott Macaulay, 2003

Scott Macaulay: We're here at the Walker Art Center for Regis dialogue with American filmmaker . He'll be discussing the unique artistic vision that runs through his entire body of work. Gus was first recognized for a trilogy of films that dealt with street hustlers, , , My Own Private . He then went on to experiment with forum and a number of other films including , Psycho and even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

Gus is perhaps best known for his films, Goodwill Hunting and , but all of his work including his latest film, Gerry, has his own unique touch. We'll be discussing Gus' films today during this Regis dialogue. I'm Scott Macaulay, producer and editor of Filmmaker Magazine. I'll be your guide through Gus' work today in this Regis dialogue.

Thanks.

Gus Van Sant: Thank you.

Scott Macaulay: It's a real pleasure to be here with Gus Van Sant on this retrospective ... Which is called on the road again. I guess there are a lot of different illusions in that title, a lot of very obvious ones because a lot of Gus' movies deal with travel and change and people going different places, both locations within America but also in their lives. But another interesting implication of the title is that this retrospective is occurring on the eve of the release here and also nationwide of Gerry, which is really one of Gus' best and most moving films but it's also yet sort of another new direction for Gus as a filmmaker.

I don't know. It's almost like looking at back at these films, I could imagine maybe being here 10 years from now with another retrospective and a whole another films in the next 10 years. One of the things I'm looking forward to doing is talking to Gus about the films he's made in the past, and maybe some of the directions for the future and where his head is at as a filmmaker right now. Welcome.

Gus Van Sant: Thank you.

Scott Macaulay: Maybe we should just start like all the way back in the beginning and we have a series of clips to show tonight but starting with the first two films; Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy, and maybe how you even got to the point of making those films coming out of painting and the background that's not so typical for a lot of filmmakers especially today.

Gus Van Sant: Yes. I started out as in junior high school making eight millimeter films which was typical of maybe the period and the time. My parents lived in Connecticut in a suburb of New York, Darien, Connecticut. It's close enough

Feb 28, 2003 1 that I could go in on the train to see certain things that ... Oh, I was a painting at the time so I was influenced by American underground cinema. I had a summer job when I was 16 and I bought a book that was about the American underground cinema. I could read about the films and I could pretend to make films like Stan Brakhage and people like that. Being a painter, I thought along those lines. I never really considered the idea of making a dramatic film.

I continued on like that until I got into art school and went to Rhode Island School Design in Providence, Rhode Island. The painters that were coming back, the graduating painters that would go to to try and get art shows with their work were discouraged and sad. I decided to major in film because I thought maybe that was a better angle. I didn't know what ... At the time I was a freshman in college. I didn't know whether the degree itself, what it sat on it, whether it made a difference so I thought maybe if it had film it would be better. But I didn't think that gout galleries would be asking to see my diploma anyway.

I majored in film and went to Hollywood after that and worked for a filmmaker named Ken Shapiro, who was a comedian and he had made a film called the Groove Tube. He was going to make a sequel to the Groove Tube at Paramount. That was my introduction to the film business. I had a good time working for him and he eventually got very discouraged, sort of like the painters at RISD. He quit the business. He made Modern Problems first with Chevy Chase then he quit the business and told me that I shouldn't try and make films, that I should get into some other business.

At that time, I was making, later on, Mala Noche in '87. That kicked me into this film career.

Scott Macaulay: You obviously left Los Angeles, you went back to Portland to make that film, Mala Noche?

Gus Van Sant: Yeah. I had also lived in Portland, Oregon. My junior and senior year in college, my family moved to Oregon and so I had a lot of ties to Oregon. I used to go back there every summer to hang out with friends. I was a sound man on a film called Property. One of the actors was Walt Curtis and he had written this novella called Mala Noche and that's what I latched on to that and adapted it into a film

Scott Macaulay: Because of that whole notion of going back to your hometown and maybe working with people locally, I mean based in LA, now in the 90s a lot of people have done that but you were before that curve a little bit in terms of making films originally. At what point did you-

Gus Van Sant: There was a film, Northern Lights, which was made here. I think was-

Scott Macaulay: Rob Nelson.

Gus Van Sant: ... '84, Rob Nelson. This thing was in the air of how to do it, you do it yourself local film, how to open it locally, how to invite the mayor and the governor to your opening and get a lot of press and try and get interest in your firm. But Northern Lights was specifically local Minneapolis production, which was one of the original ones. I guess John Sayles was shooting in New Jersey. Yeah. Feb 28, 2003 2

Scott Macaulay: Yeah. Was there ever a point before that where you thought, "Okay. Well ..." Tried to write the Hollywood script or work on the Chevy Chase movie instead of the ...

Gus Van Sant: Yeah, I know I worked on those movies and I did write a script earlier than Mala Noche and filmed a film called Alice in Hollywood which I shot when I was in Hollywood. It was an Alice in Wonderland, somewhat of a retelling of Alison Wonderland except set in Hollywood. I didn't like it and I cut it down. It didn't really go over very well so I made it shorter.

Scott Macaulay: Now Walt Curtis, who you met on Mala Noche, he provided the material for Drugstore Cowboy a little bit, right?

Gus Van Sant: No.

Scott Macaulay: No? What am I saying? What am I ...

Gus Van Sant: Well, Curtis was a local Portland poet, probably the most renown street poet in Portland and still is. Then another friend in Portland had an unpublished novel by James Fogle who was spending time in Walla Walla State Penitentiary for robbing drugstores. That's how I found Drugstore Cowboy, was through this friend who had the unpublished work named Dan Yost. His name was Dan Yost.

Scott Macaulay: How did Drugstore Cowboy become this slightly bigger movie with better known actors done in a very different way than Mala Noche?

Gus Van Sant: Well Mala Noche was a $20,000 film with just local actors and it played the San Francisco lesbian and gay film festival, and then it played the LA lesbian and gay film festival. At that festival in LA, it was seen by local Los Angeles critics. They gave it an award at the end of the year at the same time as I was trying to sell a Drugstore Cowboy as a film idea. They gave it this award which was the best independent/experimental film. If you left up the experimental part, it was the best of that year which it was easy to do. [inaudible 00:09:36] and we sort of got Drugstore Cowboy going, fueled by the script and by, I think at that time we were trying to talk into being in it. He was interested and then also the award helped it go through, at least for me.

Scott Macaulay: Right. Well let's watch a clip from that. Do you want to set this up in any way? The dog the-

Gus Van Sant: What is the ... Oh, it's the dog?

Feb 28, 2003 3

Scott Macaulay: Yeah.

Gus Van Sant: I think-

Scott Macaulay: It's pretty self-explanatory so let's go into a clip from Drugstore Cowboy.

Speaker 3: Stereo by the month. You can choose any of these great systems for only $25 a month.

Bob: Hot dog.

Speaker 3: That's why [crosstalk 00:10:21]-

Nadine: Speaking of dogs, do you think that Rick and I could get a little pup? Just a little something to hold and pet when you guys are gone?

Bob: No. No, no, no fucking dogs.

Rick: Why Bob? What do you got against dogs?

Bob: Look, no fucking dogs and that's final.

Dianne: Why don't you tell them what happened to the last one we have, Bob?

Bob: Dianne, if you wanted them to know so much, why did you tell them? I don't want to just gossip, you know?

Dianne: We had a dog once. His name was Panda. Cutest little puppy ever did see. That little guy used to follow Bob wherever he go. Anyway, what happened was the police were after us during a raid on a drugstore in the city. Little Panda got out of the car and ran away. We looked everywhere for him, but there just wasn't any time. The heat was on us and we had to get out of there.

We thought the little guy got hit by a car or something. No, police had him. Somehow they knew he was our dog. They followed him all the way home. He led them to us. They put us in jail and they put little Panda to sleep. Feb 28, 2003 4

Speaker 8: For a brighter coat, whiter teeth and a more even disposition. There should only be one choice. Rich gravy. No cereal. Gravy.

Bob: Nadine, do you have any idea what you've done to us by just mentioning dogs in a home?

Nadine: No. What did I just do?

Bob: You have no idea?

Nadine: No, I don't Bob. What did I do?

Bob: You just put it a 30-day hex on us, that's what you did. Our luck just flew out the window for the next 30 days. You got a calendar so we'll know when this hex ends? What month is it anyway?

Rick: Jesus, Bob. You never told us anything about not mentioning dogs.

Bob: The reason nobody mentioned dogs, Rick, is because just to mention the dog would have been an hex in itself.

Rick: All right, well now that we're on the subject, are there any other sacred things we're not supposed to mention that are going to affect our future?

Bob: Yeah, as a matter of fact there are and we might as well discuss it right now [inaudible 00:13:13] we're shut down for the next 30 days.

Hats. Okay, hats. If I ever see a hat on a bed on this house man, like you'll never see me again. I'm gone.

Dianne: That makes two of us.

Nadine: Why a hat?

Bob: Because that's just the way it is, sweetie, and there's mirrors. Never look at the backside of a mirror because when you do, it'll affect your future because you're looking at yourself backwards.

Feb 28, 2003 5

No, you're looking at your inner self and you don't recognize it because you've never seen it before. Anyway, you can freeze into motion your future and that can be either good or bad. In any case, we don't want to take any chances. The most important thing is the Goddamn hat. Goddamn hat on a bed is the king of them all.

Hell, that's worth at least, what? Fifteen years bad luck or even death. I'd rather have death because I couldn't face no 15-year hex.

Dianne: Relax, Hon. Let's go lay down a while.

Bob: Yeah.

Dianne: You've been on the go for days now. This 30 days thing ain't going to kill us.

Scott Macaulay: You look at that clip and you see just an incredible ensemble of actors. Matt Dillon, , very early, early role. James LeGros, Kelly Lynch. I think, at that point, did extremely glamorous roles. Could you talk a little bit about of maybe putting together the ensemble of actors in your movie, both in this film but maybe also, just generally? Because I know for example in Finding Forrester, you have a big movie star and then a first time actor in that film. What guides your decisions to cast people in roles in your films?

Gus Van Sant: Well, I've usually tried to cast ... Well, and previously I'd cast pretty much unknowns. I wasn't used to the whole ... When I made Drugstore Cowboy, I wasn't used to the whole system of calling in actors that were professionals or working with somebody like Matt Dillon. It was very new to me.

Heather Graham was somebody that had been in a Corey Haim movie called Licensed to Drive which I had seen actually, which was funny in itself. She was really good at being drunk. There was a scene where she gets really drunk and the two Coreys put her in the trunk of the car. I thought she did such a good job of playing this character that I was really all about her being in the movie. She was really interested in being a movie partly because her parents hadn't let her be in Heather's, which had a number of things going on and the parents didn't approve of, she was wasn't 18. But now, she was coming into our offices she had just turned 18 and she was determined to sign on to a project that was going to make her a little more independent from her parents.

She was just was my favorite choice. There was a lot of discussion about whether she was the right choice. James LeGros who was Rick and Kelly ... Matt was a given and then the other characters were mixed and matched around them. There were lots of photographs that I took of different people to weigh them against each other and finally ended up with these four.

Scott Macaulay: I know you've done a couple of projects working with non-actors. How does your treatment of people who have never been on a film set before different from the way you'd drag someone like Matt Dillon?

Feb 28, 2003 6

Gus Van Sant: Well, since I came through college and through making Mala Noche with non-actors, I was very used to working in a certain way with my actors by letting them do what they wanted and tried to figure out exactly what was the best way to shoot them doing whatever it was they wanted to be doing, and also giving them the feeling that they could do anything that they wanted. That there wasn't anybody like the director who was going to jump on them for doing something incorrectly, which I think on other films maybe they were used to but I couldn't really tell.

I was sort of just giving them a lot of rope whether they were non-actors or whether they were actors and just trying to coax out of everybody just the most relaxed performance that I could get out of them.

Yeah, well I just made a film called Elephant with all non-actors, high school actors. There's the same thing that comes up again and again almost every time I work with any given person, which is I try to recognize the things that they liked to have happen, from the director but generally, I'm relying on just being open to their suggestions and having them help make the thing happened.

Scott Macaulay: How about the relationship to the script and their own dialogue? Do you let people have a high degree of input into that or can people change lines or can people ...

Gus Van Sant: I was always encouraging, like on Drugstore Cowboy for instance, there were ... Well, there was also the book. There was the screenplay and there was also the book. Sometimes Matt would find old passages and want to put them into the screenplay which was fine with me, I encourage that. I encouraged pretty much everybody to not really worry about sticking specifically to the words in the script just because they might be on a roll and if they hit a bad passage they should just keep going, they shouldn't really stop in their tracks. They should just use that as part of it.

Yeah, I kind of didn't really care about ... I mean after you do a take, you find out from the script crew usually that in fact there's a whole paragraph is missing and so you'll go back and do it again if you want.

Scott Macaulay: How about on the later films in particularly and Finding Forrester where both films have big icons of cinema in them. It seems to me that there's maybe another element that comes into play because you don't just have Robin Williams but you have his persona that people have grown up and know from all these other films having. To what degree do you work with that or work against that or does that factor into your ...

Gus Van Sant: Well, I felt that with Matt Dillon because he had a career going and here in Drugstore Cowboy was ... It was a good role for him and also it was ... I was very aware of handling an image, a premade image, a guy who had like a personality. You were part of the image handling area of his business, and which I always found fascinating and scary because I didn't want to mess it up or do something bad on it.

I guess with somebody like Robin Williams or who were the bigger actors, it wasn't really that much different. By then, I was used to working with guys that had these huge images. Robin was doing something that was, maybe something he hadn't quite done before. Everybody knew in Good Will Hunting or Feb 28, 2003 7 at least Robin and I both knew without talking about it that he wanted to be something other than a funny person. He wanted to be a serious teacher at the community college in Boston. He was all about being very ... Almost not himself when he showed up in Boston to shoot his part and being serious.

Then there was an occasion when he couldn't, handle it and he had to tell some jokes which would happen on the set maybe later once he finally found the character.

Scott Macaulay: The next clip we have this from , but maybe could you talk a little bit about getting from Drugstore Cowboy to that film, which is a script that-

Gus Van Sant: Well, Drugstore Cowboy was ... Mala Noche was such a small film and Drugstore Cowboy was something that even though it came from really a similar place. It was a local writer, a local Oregon writer, who was writing about his real life which was quite similar to Walt Curtis writing about the streets of Portland and the wino grocery where he worked and the two Mexican kids that used to come by his shop. Fogle was writing about his life as a robber and a drug addict. They had very similar flavor. I had always thought that Drugstore Cowboy would be something much smaller with, perhaps, non-professional actors but now we'd, we'd gone and gotten Avenue Pictures and Matt Dillon involved and so it was a much different profile.

When that came out, it made pretty good money but it also caught the attention of different folks in the business and other actors. All of a sudden, it became a lot easier to get whatever it is the next thing was going to be going. I naturally pulled out the third of the trio of like screenplays that I had which was My Own Private Idaho, which I was assuming that this might be one of my only times that I had a chance to do something like My Own Private Idaho because things were going so well, I was on a roll and I was just going to go for it.

It did take a little while to find people that were interested in doing it but before we found a home for it, we'd sent the script to both and . Both of these guys said that they wanted to do it. That's what brought the money in because other people in Hollywood ... River, at the time, was like the Leonardo DiCaprio of the day. He was saying no to all these projects in Hollywood so people were getting the idea that he was going to come over and work on My Own Private Idaho so we found financing really through that unintentionally.

Scott Macaulay: Let's see the clip from My Own Private Idaho. Now still amazing about that film is just how formally inventive it is with the Shakespeare material dropped into the film. That seems, at the time ... How did people at the time take that element when you were sending the script out? In all of your films, you keep coming back to kind of formal experiments and really trying to shake up the narrative structure of filmmaking and this is the first really obvious one.

Gus Van Sant: The script is published. It was written on an early Macintosh Plus, I think it was called and so you could mix up the type faces. I had one line would be like in Helvetica bold italic and then the next line would be Charcoal underlined. It was really kind of wacky looking. Also, the print was oversized. It was only 70 pages. It was the origins of some things I've been doing recently where you're not using what ... A career type face on a

Feb 28, 2003 8 screenplay, which is sort of the standard industry standard and trying to blend in with everybody and making it like exactly 118 pages which is also industry standard, not 117 or not 119 but just doing what you wanted.

There were some problems with the screenplay. The actors didn't have a problem with it, but the business people did. I remember there were a couple of people that didn't really know what to make of it because of just simply the typeface oddness and there were chapters that had whimsical even bigger typefaces that were huge 128 point chapter headings. I was trying to eat up space, page space. Because we were usually suggesting things on the screenplay not ... If there was a funeral between Scott Favor's father and at the same time another funeral happening for Bob Pigeon on the other side of the cemetery.

It would basically just say that even though when we shot it, it was an entire four-minute scene or something like that. Things were quite condensed. There weren't really spelled out as much as you might have in a traditional screenplay. Then on top of it, you have Shakespeare right in the middle of it. It's the first 30 minutes are somewhat ordinary dialogue and then even the dialogue was iffy, but it wasn't really ever guiding you anywhere. It was just sort of there. Then all of a sudden everybody lapsed into Henry IV for another 20 pages.

The reason for that was I was working on a number of different screenplays about the same kids, which there was Mike and Scott. There was an entire Shakespearian version of, of My Own Private Idaho and there was also another story called Something Else which was about a German auto parts salesman and Mike, and then there was another one about two characters that went from Portland to Europe looking for their family. I, at one point during the editing of Drugstore Cowboy, I just put them all together and combined them into one piece.

Scott Macaulay: Okay. Let's see the clip from My Own Private Idaho.

Scott Favor: Getting away from everything feels good.

Mikey Waters: Yeah, it does.

Scott Favor: When I left home, the maid asked me where I was off to. I said, "Wherever, whatever. Have a nice day."

Mikey Waters: You had a maid?

Scott Favor: Yeah.

Mikey Waters: I've had a normal family and a good upbringing, but I wasn't a well-adjusted person.

Scott Favor: Depends on what you call normal.

Feb 28, 2003 9

Mikey Waters: Yeah, it does. Well, normal like a mom and a dad and dog and shit like that. Normal. Normal.

Scott Favor: So you didn't have a normal dog?

Mikey Waters: No, I didn't have a dog.

Scott Favor: You didn't have a normal dog?

Mikey Waters: I didn't have a dog or a normal dad, anyway. That's all right. I don't feel sorry for myself. I feel like I'm well- adjusted.

Scott Favor: What's a normal dad?

Mikey Waters: I don't know. I'd like to talk with you. I mean, I'd like to really talk to you. I mean, we're talking right now but ... You know. I don't know. I don't feel like I can be ... I don't feel like I can be close. I mean, we're close. Right now, we're close but, I mean, you know?

Scott Favor: How close? I mean ...

Mikey Waters: I don't know. Whatever.

Scott Favor: What?

Mikey Waters: What do I mean to you?

Scott Favor: What do you mean to me? Mike, you're my bestfriend.

Mikey Waters: I know, man. I know I'm your friend. We're good friends and it's good to be good friends. That's a good thing.

Scott Favor: So ...

Mikey Waters: So I just ... That's okay. We're going to be friends. Feb 28, 2003 10

Scott Favor: I only have sex with a guy for money.

Mikey Waters: Yeah, I know.

Scott Favor: And two guys can't love each other.

Mikey Waters: Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean, for me I can love someone even if I, you know wasn't paid for it. I love you and you don't pay me.

Scott Favor: Mike ...

Mikey Waters: I really want to kiss you, man. Goodnight. I love you though. You know that. I do love you.

Scott Favor: All right. Come here, Mike. Let's just sleep. Come on. Just go to sleep, come on.

Gus Van Sant: [inaudible 00:33:20]

Scott Macaulay: The what?

Gus Van Sant: Well, that scene, there's a big story that goes along with that scene which I've told a bunch of times but I should probably tell it because the original screenplay had in that particular scene had about a page and a half of dialogue. We had shot most of the movie and River had decided that we should save the scene until the very last day. We were in Seattle and it was on a stage and there was a gas fire and everything.

The night before we shot it, River came over to ... We were somewhere eating and he was at a different table and he came over and he had like all these napkins and had rewritten the whole page and a half so that there were six or seven napkins. He wanted to know whether we could do the scene like he had written it. It looked like a mess and I couldn't read it. I said, "Well if as long as Keanu's okay with it, you can, ..." and apparently Keanu, "So you guys can learn it and if it doesn't work out, we'll just go back to the original."

When we did it on the day of the shoot, River said he wanted to have a particular wide shot and he started telling me where to put the camera that we were going to shoot one take of the wide shot, one take of closer two shot and one single on each person. Just one time through each time and I think it was eight minutes each time through and we were done. He really took charge of that scene and wrote a whole lot of other things into it that weren't into it because originally the scene was about just these two hustlers who they don't really have real sex in their lives. They do discuss having sex but just as a diversion because they're bored and they're in the desert so he made it into this whole other thing of his character being in love with Scott. Feb 28, 2003 11

Scott Macaulay: I find it really interesting because one thing about your films, I think they're all very, very precise, that there's a real control. You watch the films, you feel this real control yet at the same time you always seem to me someone who's looking for the accident or looking for that spontaneous moment, or looking to change something, or looking to lose a little bit of control on that process. Directing films is so much about ... From the whole way that film productions are organized is extremely regimented like the army kind of thing.

The fact that it changed a lot but also on the last day of shooting because then you have to think back, "Well, how did it affect everything else in the movie?" Do you try to have moments like that and in your productions? Do you look for ways that you can change things in-

Gus Van Sant: Yeah, definitely. In that particular case, I think what was going on was there was a bigger scene that we had shot early on in the movie where River being the lead of the film, I think, felt he hadn't reached like his thing, whatever his River Phoenix moment was going to be in the film. He'd missed it and he'd had it in great films like Stand by Me, there was this great River Phoenix moment. I think that he was saving it and calculating how to make the moment come and he pretty much did it.

Scott Macaulay: Wow. When you're-

Gus Van Sant: I mean, loss of control is you try and ... It helps to go a little bit out of control. We could have always changed it and gone back

Scott Macaulay: But even something much bigger level like Gerry. I think when I talked to you before in an interview about the film you were saying, "I didn't even know if this film was going to work until ..." It was like, "Not until we were actually doing it."

Gus Van Sant: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I wasn't sure. Same with a lot of the films, I wasn't sure.

Scott Macaulay: Yeah. Because it seems to me there's probably two different personality types of directors and the ones who just want to know like, "Okay. This is going to work as I've planned it so precisely," but is it important, I guess, for you in the movies to have those elements? Is it more fun or more interesting?

Gus Van Sant: To not be sure if it's going to really work out? I think that usually, there's certain films where you think that you're pretty much positive something's going to work out because it's so spelled out on the page and then there's projects where you're really leaving it open so that you're going to have to find it while you're making it. It's definitely more exciting to not know and it really pushes you to go into strange, I think, places that you wouldn't go if you had it all written out.

Scott Macaulay: Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix were friends before the movie, right? Feb 28, 2003 12

Gus Van Sant: Yeah. They had done Love You to Death and they knew each other, yeah.

Scott Macaulay: In the new film, Matt and Casey we're friends. What does that prior relationship of two people bring to ... Maybe more particularly Gerry because he's a current ...

Gus Van Sant: Well in Gerry, Matt and Casey being really lifelong friends. They knew each other since they were probably, Casey was five and Matt was nine, something like that, that long ago. They had grown up together as neighbors so it was quite a lifelong acquaintance and friendship. That was a little different, I think, because they were huge friends.

For Keanu and River, they were kind of soul mates. They had only known each other for a few years but there were ... It definitely helps.

Scott Macaulay: Yeah. I wanted to ask you is the next clip we have coming up is To Die For. One thing which ... It was interesting about your career is that there have been a number of different ... The films are very tremendously yet they all seem to have a sense of experimentation and stylistic unity even while the film seem very, very different. I guess, how do you pick a film or how do you choose a project and especially when it comes, for example, something like To Die For which is very different from the earlier films. At that moment in your career, why this particular film and then just on a bigger level, what guides how you think about the next film that you want to do?

Gus Van Sant: Well we made Even Cowgirls Can Get the Blues-

Scott Macaulay: Even Cowgirls Can Get-

Gus Van Sant: [crosstalk 00:40:19] but that also different than the previous three films coming from a bestselling novelist, Tom Robbins, and one of my favorite books. I was pretty much going for the best seller and doing my dream project when I did Cowgirls.

To Die For, was a film that had been ... It was an idea of to make a film from Joyce Maynard's book, which was also called To Die For, based on a true story in New Hampshire of a cable weather girl who talks her young lover into killing her husband. It was also the idea that I would be the director and would be the writer because we had an association through our agent. We were the package; Laura had the book, Buck wrote the script and I directed it, which was more of a, I think, standard Hollywood concoction like a new thing for me.

I was basically at the time I was meeting people like that and doing things ... Having meetings like that. Really, at the time I was just playing along. I was saying like, "Yeah, that sounds interesting," and so forth and eventually the script was ready to be shot and I was due on the set ... I didn't really think that it would ever get to that point but I kept just saying yes and then finally got sucked into it. I'm glad that it was there because Feb 28, 2003 13 during the middle of the shoot of To Die For, Cowgirls came out and did horrible business. I was in my second job or this other job when this happened which was nice to have. But it was definitely a different ... It was a studio project more so than say like a New Line, which was the studio that did Cowgirls and My Own Private Idaho.

It had a little bit of a different flavor. It was a smaller budget for a big studio. They also didn't really know what they could do with it because it was a dark comedy and they didn't really have that in their plan of how to release things. They tried to sell it or at least they tried to test it as a romantic comedy and it's so not a romantic comedy. They would get test audiences into the theater telling them that it was a romantic comedy between and Matt Dillon.

I guess all the people were going on Friday night dates to go see this romantic comedy and it probably wrecked their date and so then they wrecked our score. When we asked them what they thought of it, they just thought it was horrible. It didn't test well and it went to Cannes. In Cannes, the press really liked it which saved it because the studio just assumed that it was a disaster. They released it and we're happy with it. It had a happy ending.

Scott Macaulay: Right. Let's see a clip from To Die For.

Suzanne Stone: Here's what I found out, that all of life is a learning experience. Everything is part of a big master plan but sometimes it's hard to read. I mean it's like if you get too close to the screen, all you can see is a bunch of little dots. You don't see the big picture until you step back. But when you do, everything comes into focus.

Hi, my name is Suzanne Maretto. Oh wait, I'm sorry. Suzanne Moretto is my married name. My own name is Suzanne Stone. That's my professional name, Suzanne Stone. It's not like it have any negative feelings about the name of Maretto. Maretto is the name after all, of my husband who I loved very, very much.

Sorry. It's also the name of his parents, Joe and Angela Maretto and of lovely and talented sister, Janice Maretto who have been like a second family to me and who I regard as I do my own family particularly since my recent tragedy and I just through knowing and being late to them have given me what I think is a very precious and valuable insight into the different kinds of ethnic relationships that are part of the very things I've been trying to explore as a member of the professional media.

Scott Macaulay: This is a film that plays a lot with time and flash forwards and flashbacks, and voiceover and different points of view. Tell me a little bit about the editing of this film. Was all of that in the script? Did it find another shape as the project went on?

Gus Van Sant: Yeah. It started out as a ... Even in the beginning, her being a monologue about everything being little dots that you don't really see the big picture until you stand back, that was Buck Henry's concept for how he built the story and the script, that was little bits of information all the way through the telling of the story and you didn't really see the whole picture until the movie was ending. It was definitely something that was built from little one-minute sections throughout.

Feb 28, 2003 14

It did change. The order of the sections changed as we were editing. I remember Buck saying that it was one of the features of the screenplay that we could actually mix up the different sections very easily because they were contained jokes that he had written. Through this tragic testing situation, we were constantly editing the movie to make it better and we just made it different. I don't know if we made it better, but we did change the order of the telling of the story so that you learned things as you went along a little differently than originally in the script. As a guide a little bit, we used a Citizen Kane and Rashomon to tell different parts of the story and with saving other ones for later.

Scott Macaulay: In projects like To Die For which are being developed from another source like Buck Henry script, I guess, how do you or do you ... Is it important for you to have some personal element in the project or some part of the project that you are maybe pushing it more towards your own thematic interests or ...

Gus Van Sant: On To Die For, I was pretty much dealing with things in a probably a new way. It was a new area. It was the suburban community which I loved and essentially grew up in. It was the first time I really was dealing with characters like that. I think there was a lot of things that I put in from myself emotionally I'm not sure.

Stylistically I wasn't trying to take charge in the same way that I could take charge in some of the other stories because in the other stories I was the writer and I was able to digress and go off into wild areas. That was up to Buck this time. Buck wrote different passages that sometimes didn't end up in the film and sometimes seemed like they came from one of my films. But essentially I think it's like a combination and I'm very strongly a Buck Henry film.

Scott Macaulay: Talking about editing, how have your ideas of editing changed over the years? Because the Gerry, the new film, very, very different concept. I think even talking last night at dinner you were telling me on the new film you did a cut on your iMovie on your laptop, which is obviously very different in this movie which is going through a big testing process and edit for weeks and weeks and weeks. Then I think you told me your latest film is maybe a hundred shots or something. What caused that evolution?

Gus Van Sant: Well I had always shot things even Mala Noche in a pretty traditional manner of mixing an establishing shot with closer shots of different parts of the action. I think somewhere after Finding Forrester, I just started to admire the filmmaker, Béla Tarr and some other films like Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman and maybe some a film like Jacques Tati's Playtime. I started to work with big long pieces of film instead of dividing it up so much as a way to just break away from maybe something that I was getting used to doing and maybe a little tired of delivering.

Scott Macaulay: Did you explore that style on the second film now after Gerry?

Gus Van Sant: Yeah. There's another film called Elephant that we made after Gerry, which was also made with really big long single takes as opposed to dividing them up and cutting them up.

Feb 28, 2003 15

Scott Macaulay: Because in some ways shooting that way, you get rid of the safety net that you have from when you shoot in more traditional way, you have bits of coverage. You can say, "Okay. The actor's performance isn't good in this angle, I can do this or I can cut to this person over here," but it's a-

Gus Van Sant: Yeah, if you're shooting traditionally like the word I was used to shooting a lot of my job was figuring out how you could piece together the scene. You had the scene written down or at least you had the idea of what the scene was going to be and part of my job seemed to be always thinking in the back of my head, "Oh, I can always cut away from that moment if I didn't like it," and it was always about patching it up.

When we started working with single long pieces of film, I was no longer thinking in terms of patching. It was more trying to get a cohesive piece which, yeah, there was no safety net pretty much. Although we did do it a whole bunch of times so we tried to get it right.

Scott Macaulay: Because the new film has just a much slower tempo than the previous films, and in terms of embracing this kind of style which focuses on action and watching people do things, what's been behind that? That's something that you see in balance films although I think you do it in a different way. I think there's ...

Gus Van Sant: Well, yeah, the slower tempo in Gerry and Elephant has somewhat of a slower tempo as well, is pretty much, I think, a choice to have a slow tempo because I think you can make pieces that are very long takes and have superfast tempo if you want if you organize it that way.

I think for Gerry, I was trying to really get into the feeling of these guys just hiking and being travelers in the desert just so that you could pick up on that emotion that they have or the feelings that they have.

Scott Macaulay: How much of that do you think ... Because films are being edited faster and faster and faster to the point where the rhythm of the viewer is so much different than it was 10 years ago.

Gus Van Sant: Yeah. It's a little bit of a reaction to maybe some things that go very, very fast. Although I just saw City of God and I thought that was great, but that's super, duper fast editing. I think it might be ... I'm not really positive. I started to think that I was just being, like with the earlier films being made during the senior George Bush's Administration, that they were leaning a certain way and when the Clinton Administration rolled around, I was making Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester and now that Bush is back and ... It's like I'm doing something else. I'm not sure if that relates but there is a pattern.

Scott Macaulay: The next clip we have is from Finding Forrester and actually down here at the Walker today, one of the curators took us down and showed us a photograph that actually inspired the sets of production design and of the central location in the movie. The clip we're going to show has a ... I remember seeing when I saw the movie in the theater thinking how kind of ballsy it was to put somewhere over the rainbow just with all of its different illusions underneath the scene that we're about to see.

Feb 28, 2003 16

It seems to be in all of your films, whether it's William Burroughs and Drugstore Cowboy or the music choices film, or the choice, for example, to make so much of the score in Finding Forrester . You're bringing in other elements that have different intellectual references or different emotional references for the viewer, you're, it seems to me, you're creating almost a collage of these different ideas in the film. Could you talk about that in general, but then also in Finding Forrester, what were the different ... When you've got that script, which was another one, which I don't think you developed, how did you make some of those decisions to go for the Miles Davis or to reference these specific photographers or ...

Gus Van Sant: Well, yeah this is very much like a collage that ... All the films that I'd worked on where I was always involved in that especially Idaho which was, you know, collaging different elements including three different screenplays, just collaging them together and I've done a lot of collage work in my past. I think maybe films are natural to like ... You pull these different elements together. We needed to have ... Is that what the next clip is? It's Finding Forrester?

Scott Macaulay: It's Finding Forrester, yeah.

Gus Van Sant: We needed to have a place that Sean Connery lived in and I just happened to see a photograph in the New Yorker that looked like a place he might live and just gave it to the Art Department and they just whipped it up.

Scott Macaulay: But, of course the place is in Cuba.

Gus Van Sant: It's in Cuba. Yeah, but it looked like it could be anywhere. My previous art director would never have done that. He would have said, "This is Cuba. We're not doing it." It was bigger. It was also a big space and in the screenplay of Finding Forrester, Sean's character lives in a very cramped space that has lots of books stacked around. We opened up the space a little bit.

I don't know, the choice of the music, it starts to just become ... You start to make certain choices. I think Miles Davis is just somebody that I've really liked, and the Over the Rainbow piece was built for Zelle playing. He plays that song sometimes. I think that what happened was we were asking him to improvise over that scene that I think we're going to show of a picture book and looking through Forrester's past and he just naturally did this Over the Rainbow theme because it was a song that he's very much into and we used that.

Scott Macaulay: All right. Let's see the scene from Finding Forrester.

William F.: Punch the keys for God's sake. Yes! Yes! You're the man now, dog. Jamal, whatever we right in this apartment stays in this apartment. No exceptions.

Scott Macaulay: Because I know you're also a photographer but are there specific photographers whose work has influenced Feb 28, 2003 17 you as a filmmaker? When I saw this film, I remember thinking that cinematography, some of it had that same energy. I was thinking of Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand, they're classic street photographers in New York in the '60s-

Gus Van Sant: We always talk about William Eggleston.

Scott Macaulay: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Gus Van Sant: Harrison and we pretty much every film that ... He made Gerry and Finding Forrester with me, and the new one called Elephant. We're always talking about Eggleston pretty much, and then sometimes we talk about a few-

Scott Macaulay: Well, what is it about Eggleston's work that-

Gus Van Sant: I guess the color and the light. Sometimes the subject.

Scott Macaulay: Yeah. Because I want to open up for questions but we should go onto the last clip which is from Gerry. Do you want to set up this clip at all?

Gus Van Sant: Which was it?

Scott Macaulay: It's towards the end of it. It's the mirage.

Gus Van Sant: By the mirage?

Scott Macaulay: Yeah.

Gus Van Sant: Let's see. I think one of the things about Gerry was that similar to Idaho, it had had a very strange screenplay but to the extent that there actually was only practically an outline, it was no longer even a screenplay. We wrote dialogue, Casey wrote a bunch of dialogue. Matt and Casey together wrote some dialogue when we were together preparing for the film. Then the dialogue we decided was, or at least Casey and Matt decided the dialogue was no good. It was very cold where we were working at the time and we started using the screenplay pages to start fires in this cabin and we pretty much got rid of them. They were still in the computer but we got rid of the pages.

A lot of those dialogue things that they wrote remained in the film although just in their heads. We didn't have Feb 28, 2003 18 pages but they just would remember them and so it was an odd process. In this case, this particular scene was something that Casey just thought up the night before we shot it and we were shooting. By then, we were shooting in Death Valley. It was much hotter in Death Valley. It was 128 degrees.

Scott Macaulay: That's another thing about this movie is if you really see the process of making the film in the actual footage and that this is about two people who are lost in the desert. At this point in the movie, I think you're shooting the movie in sequence, you see how sunburn they are, you see how tired and fatigue people seem to really be. Anyway, Gerry.

Gerry (Matt D): I hate you.

Gerry (Casey A): Not really though, right?

Gerry (Matt D): Not really. It's just really hot on my front and really cold on my back.

Gerry (Casey A): There's a man perched on the ledge 10 feet in front of us. Don't look. I see you, man.

Gerry (Matt D): Did you hear that?

Gerry (Casey A): There's a lot of dinosaurs in the area. I conquered Thebes.

Gerry (Matt D): When?

Gerry (Casey A): Two weeks ago.

Gerry (Matt D): How'd you do it?

Gerry (Casey A): Well, I got ... I did more than that, actually. Such a Gerry. I ruled this land for 97 years and I'd like it ... I had all the sanctuaries built and then this hot lava leaked out of a volcano and half destroyed one of the sanctuary ... To Demeter, I guess it was but I didn't have the marble to rebuild like the sculptures and to fix the sanctuary, but I already had all these docks to like Caledon and Argos and everything. Everything.

I was trading with like 12 cities and I had a really good army but the river had ... The river just flooded and it flooded out like four of my docs and I couldn't import the marble to rebuild the sanctuary. She got Demeter really pissed off and so she made my fields infertile so I couldn't grow the grass, I couldn't grow the wheat,

Feb 28, 2003 19 feed the horses and there was no ... I couldn't ... And there was nowhere for the sheep to graze and the goats and so my people are going hungry and restless, and then ...

And so I couldn't trade because the rivers had flooded. And so Knossos, one of my vassals, got really upset with me and turned against me and they attacked me because I couldn't train any sheep because I didn't have the wheat, I didn't have a ...

Gerry (Matt D): You couldn't train any sheep?

Gerry (Casey A): I couldn't train the horses because I didn't have the wheat, and so when they attacked me, I just got ... They just dogged me. I actually went to send my army out to defend the city and like you can only send them out if you have 12, if you have 12 trade horses and I had 11. I was one horse shy of saving my city.

Gerry (Matt D): So then you didn't really.

Gerry (Casey A): Oh, I had conquered ... I just conquered Thebes and then that happened.

Scott Macaulay: Last night at dinner, Cheryl mostly actually was asking about the sound design of this film which is quite hypnotic over the course of the movie. Maybe you could talk a little bit about ...

Gus Van Sant: The sound design wasn't really anything that I think was occurring on the set. But later when ... We actually got a visit from the sound editor, Leslie Shatz, who's a San Francisco guy, who's done a bunch of work in San Francisco. He drove from LA where he's living now to Death Valley to visit us. He walked into the little Cantina where we were having refreshments at the end of the day. Casey and Matt were sitting next to me and he said that he had gotten a copy of Laura Croft in Tomb Raider and was playing it and he was seeing what I was talking about.

I'm very embarrassed. I said, "What do you mean Laura Croft in Tomb Raider?" Although I had told him that he should listen to it because I liked the sound design in the game. I was embarrassed that we were using it in front of Casey and Matt. I didn't want them to think that I was using a video game soundtrack in their movie but it was sort of influential in certain ways. That particular game has a really interesting sound design and so we were cuing off that in constructing loops that we used not very much, but in the beginning of the movie and at the end of the movie there are these sound design loops that repeat in odd ways in a certain pattern that we prescribed.

That's one of the things and there was ARVO parts music which plays a big part in it, and then the rest of the work that Leslie Shatz did which was kind of gingerly tossing in little things here and there.

Scott Macaulay: It's just funny the people talk about movies being like video games today but ... Like the Tomb Raider movie is actually nothing like the Tomb Raider game. In a weird way, this movie is closer. In Tomb Raider we were Feb 28, 2003 20 just walking around a lot and I think in the new ... I saw a tiny little clip like a few seconds long of the new movie that also there's something about the camera, the point of view, the way you're following people that seem to influence [crosstalk 01:10:24].

Gus Van Sant: Right. Yeah. Camera-wise, we were trying to queue off of certain at that particular video game but we couldn't really do that because it has its own motion but there was an odd influence.

Scott Macaulay: Right. Maybe we should open up for some questions. Bring the lights up a little bit. Right here in the front.

Audience: Recently some festivals such as Sundance, which you both recently screened at has come under a lot of scrutiny for being too commercial. I'm just wondering if you could offer your opinion if it's still an important voice for independent film or that there's too many studio films that are coming out at those festivals and they aren't getting the independence a chance?

Gus Van Sant: Where did you hear that?

Audience: News Week. . Buzz around the festival

Gus Van Sant: That the films at Sundance itself are too commercially oriented?

Audience: Yeah, and that a lot of them have been picked up before they ... Or haven't officially been picked up that have been looked at by studios and that it's just the last, final pitch occurs at the festival.

Gus Van Sant: Right. Yeah. It's interesting going to Sundance with Gerry.

Scott Macaulay: Which didn't have distribution.

Gus Van Sant: No, we didn't have distribution. We found a distributor at Sundance barely but we think film became the distributor. I'm not really sure. I've been to Sundance in '91, I was a judge. I didn't get into Sundance with Mala Noche. Even back then, in Mala Noche days it was 1987 they had Glossier Films, Desert Hearts and Parting Glances, and so the $20,000 film was pushed aside. I think there was always a little bit of that, I think, as years go by at Sundance. There's lots of different examples of, even us going to Sundance with and myself and that there's a lot of showbiz flare at a place like that.

I do think that there's a lot of attitudes at Sundance in general which aren't necessarily about money, it's just about hype, I guess, that ... Or it isn't necessarily about the films, it's more about the hype in general that maybe is overrun, became overrun maybe around 1990 by agents in Hollywood. Feb 28, 2003 21

It's true. It goes up and down depending on what films are selected that year. Jeff Gilmore and the group, they try and push it back down into its roots and then sometimes it flares back up.

Audience: All right. We didn't touch on the film Psycho tonight and I wanted to ask you a little bit about what you get from doing a remake of a film like that? I also heard that you might be making a remake of the Stepford Wives, which I'm delighted about but would like to hear what motivates you to make either of these [crosstalk 01:13:58]?

Gus Van Sant: No, Frank Oz is doing Stepford Wives.

Audience: Oh, is it?

Gus Van Sant: It was a misprint, I think, in the Liz Smith column. But Psycho was an idea that came from visiting with Universal Pictures from way back in the Drugstore Cowboy days in 1989. I met, at the time, all the different people that were executives at Universal and Casey Silver was the President. Amongst these executives I met was a guy who among other things was in charge of remix, which I kind of like went, "Oh." Because I basically don't like the idea of the way remakes are done. If I see the Big Sleep, I want it to look like the Big Sleep. I don't want it to look like a strange, new approximation without the original directors, I guess, vision.

I tend to think of remix as something where you're robbing a screenplay from a lesser known 1950s noir film and changing it, changing the ending or just changing the whole thing and then using that as a guide. It just seemed an odd practice. My response to meeting that guy was just to suggest something that I didn't think that they had tried which was, "Why don't you go for one of your hits and remake it but don't change it just to see what would happen because I haven't seen that done yet." They laughed at me and I went on my way. We talked about other things.

But every time I went back to Casey's office at Universal, I would bring this up because I thought that it was a valid idea of something to do. They do all kinds of things and why not try that? Eventually, they always just chuckle when I mentioned it.

Then when we did Good Will Hunting at the end of the year, it was nominated for all these and I was one of the nominated parties. During that week it, you're very, very hot and all the studios want to have something to do with you. My suspicion is that if you do go up and grab the award, like the Universal president can lean over to the Paramount president and say like, "We've got him in his next movie," just for that moment. They want to get something in place so that they can have that moment. They called my agent and they said, "Is there anything that Gus wants to do? One of his favorite projects?" It's Universal calling. I said, "Yeah. Tell them Psycho, don't change anything. Shoot and color a new cast." They called back and said like, "We love that idea." Then I had to decide whether or not to actually do it. It took a while. The first person I told about, it was who had done the score of To Die For and who had become a friend. We were in the Mercer Hotel in New York and we were having breakfast. I said, "I want to do Psycho and we make it and not change it." His reaction was like, "The critics will kill you. They will

Feb 28, 2003 22 kill you." He meant it. I assumed he was right. I had to make the decision in face of this idea that you would get killed.

Artistically, I think there was an art side of it. We're here in a center where I think today, I went through the show there was about seven different examples of appropriated art.

Scott Macaulay: Share what you mean.

Gus Van Sant: It's something that we used to do an art school, appropriation. It was on an artistic side, there was an idea of what would happen if an entire film was able to be appropriated because the expense is great enough that it's an opportunity to just try something like that to see what would happen. Also, just stylistically, what would happen. Just would it be anything like the original.

Just all those different questions made it a very attractive thing and so I just went ahead and did it and got killed.

Audience: Of the budget for Gerry has been described as a micro budget. Could you tell us what that means in numbers?

Gus Van Sant: Micro?

Audience: Yeah.

Gus Van Sant: It was a-

Audience: I mean, these days-

Gus Van Sant: Three million.

Audience: ... in today's dollars?

Gus Van Sant: Well, micro is really ... Scott Macaulay: Micro would be like-

Gus Van Sant: Scott makes films for like 30,000 ... 30 now? $70,000. I mean, that's micro but for us it was 3 million so actually quite a lot. Depending on what you're talking about. We actually, from what we decided to do with Feb 28, 2003 23 the image and with the ... How the camera was working and what we needed, we were trying to save money but you ended up spending that much.

Audience: Hi.

Gus Van Sant: Hi.

Audience: I was just wondering on the topic of the pacing in the film and a really slow pace film might discourage the movie financially sometimes. I was wondering if you could discuss any temptations that you might have to make a movie more commercial and might resist or so on.

Gus Van Sant: In regards to Gerry?

Audience: In general.

Scott Macaulay: Have you seen the movie? Gerry?

Audience: No.

Scott Macaulay: Okay.

Audience: I guess not-

Gus Van Sant: You mean just a response to us talking about how slow it is?

Audience: Yeah, partially that and if there's any other temptations. I don't know if speeding up the film might be temptation to make it more commercial.

Gus Van Sant: No. I'm very happy with the pacing of the film. I think you have to see it-

Scott Macaulay: Yeah.

Gus Van Sant: ... before you judge because you have to ... You might love it. Feb 28, 2003 24

Audience: Yeah, I was thinking in particular to the-

Gus Van Sant: It might be very commercial.

Audience: ... or particular [crosstalk 01:20:25]-

Gus Van Sant: You mean in general? You mean in general?

Audience: ... maybe some other aspect of making a film that it might be a temptation-

Gus Van Sant: Yes. We were going to talk about pacing actually, Scott and I. It was one of our things we thought about talking about. I think in general pacing, pacing is always very good. What you started out to do and you have to like deal with, so if you're starting out breakneck, sometimes you have to suffer the consequences halfway through the movie when you're no longer breaking your neck because you've got everybody going so fast that ... That's why generally action movies never slowed down. They just go. There might be interludes, pauses but they go right back into it.

I think just a storytelling pacing of something like City of God, it's relatively fast. Certainly the images are very fast and it also doesn't really betray its pacing and then it starts out that way and it keeps going. In the case of Gerry, we started out really, really slow and we had to keep going that way because once you start that way, it looks funny if you don't continue that way.

Yeah. There's ... I don't know what else we can add it. There's so many different types of pacing and I don't think faster slow is good or bad. In the end, you're starting to rely on something else besides the pacing because you can certainly have a really quick pace or a medium pace or slow pace and still lose your way.

Scott Macaulay: But you can have a very fast film that's still incredibly boring. I think it's maybe a misnomer to ... I don't think it's right to say about Gerry was ... To say it's slow or it's a bad ... Because it's really not ... When you see the movie, it's about a different experience. It's a movie, you as a viewer, sync ... You sync into the same experience that the people on the screen are going for and then it becomes a very philosophical, meditative film because of the things that it's bringing up in your own mind as you watch it. I think.

Audience: who was very involved in his filmmaking process as a writer and director and heavily involved in the editing and everything. He was quoted as saying that filmmaking was all great fun except the writing of the script itself. That was the thing that was the hardest for him to crack.

What my question to you is what part of filmmaking is the hardest piece for you and then to get more specific, is there a specific scene or a sequence in one of your films that you consider the hardest to make, that was the hardest thing to crack in your career? Feb 28, 2003 25

Gus Van Sant: Well, for me the hardest thing is ... The script writing part is usually the most pleasant. You might think of it as hard. It is hard but you, at least, have time to deal with it. On the set when you're shooting, for me, is the hardest because there isn't any time. You have a pretty much set amount of time. Because there isn't any time, I usually feel that that's the most uncomfortable and least fun. I don't know as far as cracking something. Billy Wilder's probably talking about cracking like an idea which can be very difficult and maybe the most difficult thing, but it's not as, maybe, as uncomfortable.

What was the second part?

Audience: What specific scene or sequence in one of your films that you look back on and think, "That was maybe the hardest sequence for me to film as a filmmaker." for whatever reason.

Gus Van Sant: Hardest sequence. I don't know. When I remember all the shoots, they all blend together into one big really difficult thing. I mean, some days it's hard sometimes when you have, I guess, fights or things like that. But it really, it's all very consistently difficult.

Audience: I don't think my question's going to come up quite that intelligent but I had two thoughts about Gerry. One is, did that really happen on Wheel of Fortune? The other is, and perhaps I'm not artsy enough to appreciate it, but I wondered why they didn't have water because I couldn't get past that point.

Gus Van Sant: Yes, it did have happen in Wheel of Fortune. I don't know if I can repeat what happened. Can you repeat the ...

Audience: Barrying.

Gus Van Sant: Barrying.

Audience: Yeah.

Gus Van Sant: B-A-R-R ...

Audience: Y.

Gus Van Sant: Blank.

Feb 28, 2003 26

Audience: I-N-G.

Gus Van Sant: I-N-G and she thought it was burying down the road so she put it in a Y. Is that right? I'm trying to think. My spelling is off probably but she thought it was burying. Well, they had soda. It started out with some sodas and then they got lost and there wasn't water. But ...

Audience: But they have survived that one without-

Gus Van Sant: Oh, yeah., Technically, well, depending on the temperature. You mean for three days?

Audience: Yeah. Sorry, I couldn't-

Gus Van Sant: No, they could. They could have. Where we were, however, they could not have because we were in 128 degree weather which, I mean, is incredible. We are working in this every day.

Audience: Do you have water?

Gus Van Sant: We had lots of water. But you really couldn't have survived in 128 degree weather for maybe more than three hours, maybe five hours tops. Then you just start to burn and fall over and die. Your body shuts down. Actually Casey tested that one day because he didn't believe it, of course. He decided that he would walk to the set over a two-mile area. He got sick. He got early poisoning, heat poisoning. Pretty much what's happening is your body's just stopping and you're just caving right there.

No, they couldn't have survived. If it was a different area though, if it was 85, 90 degrees they could have. We weren't really explaining how hot it was. It happened to be very hot where we were. Yeah, it's a technicality. But if you do go into Death Valley, you definitely should watch it. It's very, very difficult.

Scott Macaulay: Bring water.

Gus Van Sant: Bring lots of water and don't stray from the car. It's very ... I mean, that happened to me when I was there and it's not ... It's very dangerous.

Audience: Hello. I was hoping that you would briefly speak about your experience with movie Kids.

Feb 28, 2003 27

Gus Van Sant: With the movie Kids?

Audience: Yeah.

Gus Van Sant: Sure, yeah. Did you have anything to do with Kids?

Scott Macaulay: I didn't have anything to do with Kids.

Gus Van Sant: I thought maybe Scott ... Scott has done a few of Harmony's movies but my experience was I met Larry Clark who was the director of Kids in San Francisco in about 1993. He had a photo show and I went to the pre- opening and there was a little banquet table with food on it and I was having something to eat. I said hello to him, introduce myself and I also said that I had read in his book that he started Tulsa as film and he hadn't finished the film, and that if he was interested in making films that I would at least try and help him if I could. He was just right on that. We had a meeting the next day with this gallery owner.

There was this amount of money that actually I thought we should go for. He had met Harmony Korine in the park. I guess he called Harmony immediately. He just told him, "Het on the stick right ..." He probably just dictated over the phone what he wanted to happen. Harmony wrote it. In three weeks, there was a script. We tried to bring it around to get it financed and then nobody wanted to do it. It sort of was this great thing that happens with material like that, sometimes.

The script went around to different people. I had sent it to a few places but it ended up with at one point who had said ... I suspect had said to somebody in Hollywood that he thought this was the new fantastic genius writer, Harmony Korine. I was hearing from people like my producer on To Die For, this was like ... By the time this was happening we were shooting To Die For and my producer on To Die For said that she thought that the greatest new writer was Harmony Korine. She had read Kids and she loved it. I was positive that this wasn't possible, that she could never have read this script.

What was happening with the movie was there was this brush fire of opinion going through the film community that Harmony and Kids were the new thing. I think it was ignited, I assumed, by Scorsese and which meant everybody wanted to do it all of a sudden not just one or two people, which had nothing to do with me because by then I had dropped the ball. Then Harmony met Carrie Woods and Carrie Woods had financing. He was an agent that I had originally and they got it done.

Is that what you wanted to hear? My involvement, creatively, when I got a hold of the script one of the interesting things was I didn't think it was very good. I held back my opinion. I didn't feel like I really had to tell them that, that it needed to be a little more clear and I was being the producer all of a sudden. I just said, "They'll figure it out because he's great and he'll figure it out." I thought they did because the film, I thought it was really great.

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Audience: Could you please talk about time-lapse and what time-lapse means to you and maybe how that concept has changed over the course of various films?

Gus Van Sant: Yeah, Old time-lapse. I think it's one of the stuff that I originally did when I got ahold of a camera. Then along with Eric Edwards who shot Idaho and Cowgirls and he shot To Die For, we sort of had a club and we would shoot time-lapse all the time and show each other. Then eventually, I started using it in the films. In Mala Noche, I was using it and I was teaching a class in it as well.

It's relatively a simple thing but it's fascinating. It continued on and appeared through Drugstore Cowboy, Idaho, Cowgirls. Eric did some amazing stuff at night with planets and clouds and then of lost it in To Die For and Good Will Hunting. There's a little in Psycho and lost it in Forrester, and then we came back and Gerry had some time-lapse.

I guess visually it means a lot of things to me. I'm not sure if I can put it into words but it's something that I have latched onto.

Audience: In the Gerry the other evening or last two nights ago, several of us were talking after the movie finished. We were struck by the ending and our different conceptions of what was really going on between the two men at the end. Some had the view that the character that Matt played was very much angry and disgusted and just often. Some have the view that, well he was dying and it was a mercy killing. We wanted to know if you're with Dallas? Was that deliberate? I mean, clearly it was deliberately [inaudible 01:34:10] but some people didn't understand even the movement of the two men at the end. It almost looked like a loving embrace and on the other hand it looked like just shut up.

Gus Van Sant: Right. Yeah, it's a scene in Gerry where one character chokes the other character to death. We had lots of different ideas of why and we ... I was telling you last night, that we actually, have the opportunity and we actually shot something where we were going to explain exactly why. One interpretation is that he couldn't go any further and he wanted his friend to just kill him. I have heard people say that he thought it was ... They thought it was planned out, even, or else that he was just couldn't take them anymore and killed him.

There's some things mixed in there I think with maybe what's going on with the characters. They're seeing things. It's also could be delusional. The death itself could be a delusion. Maybe it didn't happen. Maybe he never choked him. There's a lot of different ways to look at it and I think that they've reached a place in their journey and they're basically dying that they're not really sure what's going on which was the point of what the place that we wanted to get.

The choice was made to not really tie it down and say it's because of this one thing, because then it would get rid of all the other possibilities. I think all the possibilities are correct and it was left that way so that there could be multiple possibilities.

Audience: Specifically decided.

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Gus Van Sant: Oh, good.

Audience: Thank you.

Audience: All right. So much product is coming out of Hollywood these days and it seems like so much emphasis is placed on opening weekend grosses. I was just wondering what you guys thought that gross race was going to mean in a wider scheme for film?

Gus Van Sant: What grosses are going to mean?

Audience: The effect of so much emphasis placed upon opening weekend grosses?

Gus Van Sant: I think that's really meant like an old story. I remember when we were making To Die For, Laura Ziskin would joke that you'd have to give the movie away to get the opening weekend big enough to make the movie happen. That was 10 years ago.

I guess in those 10 years there's, of course, been like the sort of Friday night fights thing, like a USA Today, like prints of grosses, like it's a sporting event and it can be. You could also probably make bets. I know you can make bets in Vegas on which films are going to make more money on the weekend but for the actual filmmakers and for the progress of film, it works adversely because I think it throws the film business into more of the fast buck area and so you tend to, obviously I'm sure I don't need to tell anybody this, but it just lowers the quality, of course, of the ... Until the lowest common denominator.

I think that it's already reached ... Hollywood's decided that the fastest way to make a buck and the movie that's going to actually appeal to the most people the quickest is an action movie. In the last 20 years we've seen, I think something that didn't ... It was more of an action movie, was certainly part of our culture but it wasn't the dominant movie forum. Because of economics, that's now, if you wanted to go see a movie, a new movie from Hollywood opening next Friday, you would probably be going to see an action movie based on those things.

I don't know where I can go from here. It can just keep going. I don't know how to ... Except to just not play into it, how to control.

Scott Macaulay: Yeah. It's like you said, the newspapers; USA Today, print scores my mother will now say like, "wow! That film, it only opened at $7 million." I'll be like going, "Mom, those are only 800 screens." That kind of dialogue we'd never have 10 years ago and I think it has changed the films particularly independent films, like a movie ... There are a number of big independent ... Films that we think of as being big independent hits that actually had terrible box office and [inaudible 01:39:18] like my dinner with Andre, I think, was the 12th week of the run was like when it started to relate my pickup.

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Now everything, whether it's a small film or a big film, it has to do great when it comes out which means that it can't really be a film that ... It can't be a film that people want to talk about or come up with their opinion a few days later or it's like ... It just has to be marketed in a certain way that people can get in there that first weekend. That's become a logic of the business.

But anyway, I guess one last question.

Audience: Hello. I would guess that most people who are here tonight have their own private list of their favorite films. I'm wondering if you'd share yours with us.

Gus Van Sant: My private list of my favorite films. It changes quite a bit. I can say Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, Béla Tarr's Satantango. I don't know. They're the greatest hits that I think is on a lot of people's lists like Citizen Kane or ... Psycho is probably one of my favorite films.

Scott Macaulay: Okay. Thanks a lot, everybody.

Gus Van Sant: Thank you very much, everybody.

Scott Macaulay: Thank you.

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