Briony Hanson: So congratulations, Gus, and thank you so much for coming to talk to us. We now have a quick opportunity to have a brief chat, while the audience gathers their thoughts after the emotional couple of hours they've been on with Milk, to look back on how you got the position of being able to make Milk, and the films you've been involved with. We'll see a couple of brief clips, and then we'll be joined by your esteemed colleagues Dustin Lance Black and James Franco to talk about Milk itself. So let's start with a broad question: you're known largely as a writer-director, even though you've also worked on many films purely as a director, including Milk. Do you find it a very different discipline, working from material that you've written or adapted yourself as opposed to picking up somebody else's script?
Gus van Sant: No, I think that once you're directing, you're kind of in a certain mode, where you're taking whatever is on the page and forming it into the film that you think it might want to be. So whether it's my writing or not, I still try to work with it in the same way.
BH: Would you say you're a very hands-on director? Are you obsessed with the minutiae of every department, including the script, the actors ...
GVS: No. Because the minutiae has the ability to become ... You just saw Milk, right? In Milk, it's period, it's the 1970s; there's a lot of stuff that goes on in the art department, costumes ... So you can really lose your shit, basically, if you go and try to figure it out. One pair of pants can take hours. So you have to let it go and let the art department and the costume department and the hair department take over. Sometimes, you get concerned about stuff that comes into the frame, but I don't really allow it to. You can do this, certain people have done it, in particular Kubrick. But Kubrick budgeted his time so he would spend a year or two preparing everything, really going over everything and selecting things over a long time. So unless you're able to do that, which I'm not – or at least I haven't set it up that way – you're not generally doing that.
BH: And has that changed over the years? If you think back to your first film, Mala Noche, when you presumably more or less did everything, has your engagement with the performers changed now?
GVS: In Mala Noche, I did do most everything. But I did it in a certain way, for instance finding a location that already has a lot of stuff in it. That already is the thing you want, so the art direction is already done. And then the casting, I did it with just a couple of friends. It was very hands-on. The lighting I did myself.
BH: And with Mala Noche, you were the writer, director, producer, editor ...
GVS: Well, I adapted a diary by a poet named Walt Curtis, who made a very vivid faux diary of this story. That was a huge source, so I was adapting his written word.
BH: You had total control, in those days, albeit with no money. Do you miss those days when you could make every single decision?
GVS: Yeah, I miss the days where it seemed like it was a smaller group. But you still didn't really have that much control back then, because the actors were still under their own guidance, so you weren't literally controlling everything. They weren't hugely professional actors, so you had to use what they could bring to the scene rather than literally guiding them through the scene.
BH: Let's have a quick look at Mala Noche.
[runs clip]
BH: It's even more beautiful than I remember it. You made that film in 1985, but it wasn't the first film you'd made. It was the first film of yours to be widely seen, it made you an international festival star. Was it a film that you'd been nurturing and obsessing about for a long time, or did you have a million different projects on the go and this one just happened to be the one that got going?
GVS: No, this was something that I'd worked on for a few years, just raising the money or more saving the money. Raising the money consisted of me indenturing myself. But also, I was working on the script for a couple of years while I was working in New York ad agency. Then I went to Portland, Oregon, to shoot it.
BH: I was reading a review of it today and it said that the film is like looking through a peephole, because it was such an authentic portrait of this time and place. Was this a world that you knew, or something that you were able to interpret from the Curtis book you were talking about?
GVS: It wasn't a world that I knew. I kind of knew some things. Portland's very small, and the old town area was a place that I'd been many times, but it wasn't a world that I particularly knew – the world of migrant workers that were in Portland. In the summers, they would stay in the old hotels and they'd work out in the fields. This was in 1975. Buses would come in and take workers out into the fields, and they'd send the money home to Mexico. Some of them would, instead of going home for the winter, they'd try to brave it. But there was no work in the winter and the younger guys, like the ones in the film, got into trouble because there was nothing to do and they were bored and they'd wander around the city without any work, just waiting for spring, so they could work. That wasn't a world that I knew, but it was one that Walt Curtis knew, because he worked in a grocery store on a street in the old town, next to some of those hotels.
BH: When you look back at this film, which we all had an opportunity to do last year when it was rereleased here, it really looks like the rehearsal ground for a lot of the work that followed. Particularly the ones that came directly afterward, such as Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, but also up as far as Last Days, which has similar types of characters: slackers, lowlifes, bittersweet tender gay romance and so forth. Did Mala Noche help you? Presumably it opened doors financially into the industry, but did it unlock ideas that you were having about work that you were going to do in the future?
GVS: Yes, I guess it introduced me to Portland again. Those films that you mentioned are all north-west stories: My Own Private Idaho was about street kids not too far from these blocks. About 10 blocks south, there was a whole other situation going on, with homeless street kids and male prostitutes. Drugstore Cowboy was based on a book by a guy who came from Tacoma, near Portland, so that was a north-west story. And also, Last Days was Kurt Cobain, and he was in Seattle, so that was a very north-west story.
BH: Clearly, a lot of Mala Noche is improvised, and a lot of your films have an element of improvisation. Is this something that you do differently now? Have you learned different ways to use improv to put together a decent character portrait?
GVS: I guess so. The first time that we really started improvising was not so much in this film as in Drugstore Cowboy, since there was a novel and the movie came from some of the actors really favouring sections of the novel that weren't in the script. So they would learn those pieces. If they went off the script, I really didn't mind, so they would go off on little areas on their own and then come back to the screenplay. In the period of rehearsal, we were making stuff up and improv-ing as well.
BH: Is it something that you do kind of upfront in the development period, when you're all sitting around the kitchen table? Or is it something that you allow to go on on set?
GVS: No. In that case it was, but later, we were working with no script at all, so those were necessarily dialogue sequences that were made up.
BH: As I've been looking back on your films, there's one that really sticks out as being different, if only because it is a comedy, a very black comedy, which is To Die For. Did you find that a very different experience? And also, why have you never gone back to comedy?
GVS: Well, Buck Henry was the screenwriter; Joyce Maynard wrote a novel about an incident in New Hampshire, the Pamela Smart case, where she had seduced a young student and convinced him to kill her husband so they could spend the rest of their lives together, and then turned her back on him after he killed the husband. Joyce wrote a somewhat light novel, but it wasn't really a straight-ahead comedy. But Buck Henry adapted that book, so he really gave it a whole other spin, sort of like a comedy with blackouts, one-liners and jokes, that weren't in the book. So it was the element of Buck Henry who brought us into that realm.
BH: So it was a very different kind of project for you to take on?
GVS: Yeah. I guess. I had wanted to do a comedy. I have often wanted to do Dude, Where's My Car 2. [audience laughs] Or a Judd Apatow movie.
BH: Your time will come.
GVS: But Gerry was kind of funny, too.
BH: Kind of. But I was struck, while watching Milk, just how many little funny moments there were, which I hadn't noticed to start with. Anyway, we'll move on to Good Will Hunting. Let's show the clip and then talk about it.
[runs clip]
BH: So there you were, about four or five films in, and suddenly you have the budget for a helicopter shot and big star names. How was that experience for you? One would assume that the bigger the budget, the more fun you have, and the more you're able to put your own visual sense on screen, or perhaps it's not the case?
GVS: Actually it was a similar budget to To Die For, but yeah, they were getting bigger at that point. The helicopter shot wasn't that expensive. It wasn't stock, but we just hired a guy to do it. We weren't even there. We just hired him when we were editing.
BH: That's very convincing. But was it a good experience?
GVS: Yeah, it was great. I had never had a positive leading character – somebody that wasn't an antihero, or who wasn't more of a guy that you're supposed to be on the side of. Which is kind of the reason I did it. But also, it was really well written, and I knew the characters in it, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and Casey Affleck. I knew them through Casey. But Matt had tried to get a role in To Die For, so I knew him, too, and I knew him as a good actor because in To Die For, he was trying very hard to play a character who was a lot younger than he was.
BH: And given that they'd written the script, was it on their say that you were the director?
GVS: Yeah. They had a hand in who directed it, but I think their biggest contractual item was that they star in it. Which was really difficult, because they were not stars at that point. And the movie company was really trying to get them off as stars because they had Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio lined up, I guess. So they really had to fight, they had to insist that they act in it. Which was fine with me. In the end, it was really, really good.
BH: Given that they'd written it and they were starring in it, were they able to step back and let you do your job as director?
GVS: They did. Yes. I don't know why, but they did. I guess because they knew the script so well because they'd written it and rewritten it over, I don't know, five or six years. They were capable of continuing the writing process and "ad-lib" as we went. I was never really diverging from the intention of the script anyway, so they pretty much just let me go. But they were sort of tired of it by the time we did it because they'd literally been enacting the scenes – that's how they wrote it: enact the scenes, then write them down – so I guess they were happy just to have it happen.
BH: And did you feel you were able to bring your own personality as a director into it?
GVS: But I was trying not to bring my own personality into it; I was trying to just get out of the way of the script. I was trying to make something that I thought was in their minds.
BH: Straight after this, when presumably you had the cream of the crop of scripts coming your way after the Oscar success, you could have done anything. And you chose to do a kind of formal exercise: the Psycho shot-for-shot remake. What was your interest in that? Was it a project that you'd been wanting to do for a long time and then suddenly you were able to get money for it?
GVS: With Psycho, I was sort of angry at Hollywood trying to remake movies, because it seemed like they would rob the screenplay and forget all the other inputs, whatever else existed. For instance, in a movie like Casablanca, they would take the script and they would actually change the script. So I said, "Why don't you just shoot it exactly the way it is, because it's a great movie?" This was my sort of anti-remake statement. And it wasn't until after Good Will Hunting that they were willing to let me do that. Universal was the company that I would go to for meetings, and every time they'd ask me what I wanted to do. The first time I said something like, "Why don't you remake something like Psycho without changing it?" And subsequently, after they laughed at me that time, I'd bring it up again the next year, and the next year, until finally, when Good Will Hunting was up for awards, they wanted me to do something at Universal. And I said the Psycho-don't-change-anything shoot, and their response was, "We think that's a really brilliant idea." [audience laughs] So then they were willing to do it and the ball was in my court, to decide whether I wanted to do it. Danny Elfman said the critics would kill me, which they did. But I still thought that it was worthy of experimentation, even though I was at a weird point, with the nominations and everything.
BH: And was it what you expected?
GVS: No, no, I expected it to be a huge blockbuster.
BH: No, no, not the reception, but the film itself.
GVS: The actual film itself, yes. We tried. But if I look at it now, I see that it's almost impossible. Even if you try to copy a film shot by shot, you still can't. It's still your own film. I'm not really the same type of person as Alfred Hitchcock, and you really need that thing that he was in order for Psycho to work in the way that it should.
BH: In terms of critical response, the films that you've made, from Cowgirls to Good Will to Psycho to Milk, you've had very different critical and commercial responses. Do you care? Does it affect the way that you turn to the next project? Or are you able just do things for yourself?
GVS: I guess I care if the objective is to care, if the objective is to get a good response. But a lot of times I know that growth is contingent on the audience or the critics. But not caring to the point of ... for instance, I guess in the French estimation, success is if the audience riots and tries to bring the theatre down. That's like, progress. So sometimes I do think of good reviews.
BH: We're going to have a look at Elephant, which got amazing reviews and, of course, success at Cannes.
[runs clip]
BH: For those who haven't seen the film, I think it illustrates very well your use of circular, long takes, with people walking through the school. Was it a technically difficult challenge?
GVS: Only in certain ways, like the camera, we had to pull the iris. But it really wasn't that hard. The concept in the beginning was kind of hard to coordinate – we had to reshoot the first day – but eventually it was pretty easy.
BH: One of the outstanding things about the movie is the way you mess with the structure; you endlessly see the same thing from different perspectives. Was that in your original script, or was that in the edit, which was also done by you?
GVS: That was in the script. It's similar to the thing that happens in Béla Tarr's Sátántangó, which some of you have probably seen, this overlapping of action from different sides, that was the inspiration.
BH: And you edited this yourself as well.
GVS: Yes.
BH: And how you'd originally written it worked in the edit?
GVS: No. The original idea was that each person would tell their entire story before we went to the next person. And so in the edit we actually cross-cut so that we told segments of each person's story cross-cut with the other stories. Because it seemed to play better.
BH: The key thing about this film, of course, is that it's not the story of the Columbine killings, although it's obviously based on a lot of the same material. What made you not do a straight retelling of that particular incident?
GVS: I think that this film, and Last Days, and also Gerry, were based on kind of non-information. For instance, there wasn't really information about the kids who killed their fellow students at Columbine. And there wasn't information about Kurt Cobain's last three days. And there wasn't information about the two boys who got lost in the desert and one killed the other, simply because there's only story to listen to. Since there was this big mystery in all three, they are just movies that sort of imagine what may have happened, visually. I guess in the execution I was trying to insert the sort of greatest hits of theories, as almost like clues, or tinctures of ideas that would make the audiences' imagination carry through and think about the event themselves. At least two of the films were based on very extensive news coverage, so there were a lot of theories going around.
BH: And presumably, you thought back on those experiences when you were thinking about Milk and how you were going to tell his story. But I read that you had a moment of thinking of doing a similar thing, where you would pick a character who wasn't Harvey, who worked in a camera shop but not in San Francisco ...
GVS: That was a sort of get-around, because there was another project, and not to confuse it with the real Harvey Milk, and maybe have the license to go into some things that weren't in Harvey's real life, and to show a fictional character that resembled Harvey. It was a passing idea; I never did it.
BH: Let's find out what you did do, and let's introduce your colleagues – the screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and star James Franco. So welcome and thank you for joining us, an unexpected treat. I know that you've all got your own perspective on this, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the kind of license that you were able to take with the story of Harvey, given that he was a real character with real things that happened to him, and given that many of the people that he was involved with are still around to have an opinion on the portrait you've drawn. Lance, how free did you feel to come up with your own interpretation of him as a character?
DLB: I tried to be as loyal to his story as possible, but you know, it's almost impossible to do that in two hours. So most of the fictionalising had to happen in the timeline – things had to compressed, characters had to be compressed. So it's mostly just telescoping over anything else. His relationships had to be distilled into Scott and Jack Lira, even though there were other relationships that were not in there. But for the most part, I just tried to be as true to these people as possible. These were the people who gave me their stories; it's all based on their first-hand stories, it's not based on a book or documentary or anything like that. It's mostly me and Cleve Jones getting in a car and driving up to San Francisco every weekend for a couple of years and just meeting them all. And thankfully, they were all very understanding. I explained to them early on that I wouldn't be able to tell all their stories, and I couldn't use all the characters, so some people would have to go and others would have to be combined. They sort of got it. I think they just really wanted to see their father figure, this man who had been so inspirational to them, I think they just wanted to see his story told. There's fiction in some of the history, but I feel, I hope, it's very, very truthful to who the man was and what that movement in that period was like.
BH: Forgive me for suggesting this, but I imagine that neither of you two [DLB and JF] were born when Harvey Milk was assassinated?
DLB: I was.
BH: Just.
GVS: James was, too.
JF: Yeah, I was about five months old.
BH: But what was your interest in this story? How did you first come across him and why did you want to make this film?
DLB: Well, I first heard this story when – I was fortunate, my stepfather moved my family to the Bay Area from Texas, so I grew up in this really conservative area, in a Mormon household and as a closeted kid. You know, you don't come out in Texas to Mormon parents. So when I moved to San Francisco, I got into theatre and I was lucky that I had this theatre director who just sort of spotted me. You know, you can kind of tell, I was pretty quiet. [chuckles from audience] What are you laughing at? [more laughs] So, he told me about this out gay man, and that was a revelation to me, I'd never heard of such a thing. In Texas, if you're out, you're probably a goner, especially in the 80s. He said that this guy was actually beloved by his city and celebrated and elected to public office. And I was just blown away. As a teenage kid, I just had no clue that that was possible. So his story has just always been really inspirational to me. I think it saved me in many ways, at least it let me start growing again. Closeting for adolescent kids really stunts their growth; it did mine. So it was the first time that I was able to dream again and I held on to that for a very long time. In 2004, I was very fortunate that a friend introduced me to Cleve Jones. I was supposed to be writing a rock-opera about his life, that was the job. But he kept telling me stories about Harvey. After that first meeting, hearing all these stories about this real guy, not this myth or this legend or this idea and saint figure I had in my head, I thought that was a fantastic story, too. And I left that meeting feeling that it was important to get Harvey's story and his message back out there. It's personally important and, I think, politically important.
BH [to JF]: And was he a figure that you were familiar with?
JF: No. It was only when I was researching this movie that, the sad and shocking thing that I found out was that nobody had told me anything about Harvey Milk and I grew up less than an hour away from San Francisco, in Palo Alto. A lot of people say that, that they never knew this story, and it's amazing. They don't teach this in history class in schools. At the very least, growing up in the Bay Area, you'd think I'd have known something, but I didn't, so that's why I thought this was one of the important things about this movie: to get his story out there. There had been an Oscar-winning documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk, and some great books about him, but it didn't reach my generation.
BH: So what was it about the script that made you suddenly want to take part?
JF: Well, I was interested before I even read the script. Fortunately, the script turned out to be really good. I'd heard that Gus was doing this movie about a guy named Harvey Milk, and I'd known Gus a little and wanted to work with him. So I found out about who Harvey Milk was, and saw the documentary and thought what an amazing guy and what an important story. And I heard that Gus had been trying to do this for a while, he'd tried to do this 15 years before or something, so I thought it must be a really important story for Gus as well. So I had my favourite director working on a movie that was really important to him, so I thought, he'll be at the top of his game, it'll be great.
BH: You've played real-life characters before, and you've also played characters, such as Harry Osborn in the Spider-Man films, where there's an enormous weight of expectation from an audience with a very clear idea about what the character you're playing is supposed to look like and sound like. Did you feel the same about this?
JF: Yeah, comic-book fans can be very uh ... helpful. [audience laughs]
BH: Did you feel a weight of expectation about getting Scott right? And how did you research? Or did you just leave it to the research Gus and Lance had done?
JF: Well, it's slightly different – I've played James Dean, and if anyone wants to judge my performance, they can just rent East of Eden and compare them or whatever. Scott Smith wasn't a public figure in the same way. But I wanted to get it right to honour his memory – the real Scott Smith died in the mid-90s – and also the people who were involved. It's just more inspiring to me as an actor to study different kinds of behaviour, it really gets me out of myself. So I did everything I could to find material about him, but most of it was about Milk, at least in the books and documentary. So I had to get a lot from the friends.
BH: But he doesn't feature very much in the documentary.
JF: No, even though he was quite an important part of Harvey Milk's life. They were together about four years, and he was there for the really big turning points in Harvey Milk's life. Harvey was from an older generation – I think he was born in the 30s – and had lived in the closet for most of his life. So Scott was there when Harvey decided he wanted to come out. Harvey had been an investment banker, so he gave all that up and moved out to San Francisco. And Scott went with him and opened the camera shop with Harvey. And when Harvey decided to run for office, Scott ran the first couple of his campaigns. So he was really there through a lot of the most important things. And even when they broke up, he was in his life and after Harvey died, he was called the Widow Milk. I still don't know who came up with that ...
GVS and DLB: He did. [audience laughs]
JF: OK, so he called himself the Widow Milk, so I guess he thought he was still pretty important to Harvey Milk's life, and he did inherit all of Harvey's possessions. So he was a big part of Harvey's life, but it was hard to find solid material to really build a character on, other than the stories I got from the friends. Until, finally, the director of the documentary, Rob Epstein, got out this old interview with Scott from the late 70s or early 80s that I don't think anyone had seen in over 30 years. So I finally got to really hear what he sounded like and see how he behaved. So, I hope I was accurate to him, I doubt anyone here knows if I was or not, but the people who were there knew and after the premieres, they'd come up to me and say, "Yeah, you really caught the spirit of him." And that's enough for me.
BH: Gus, were you concerned that Harvey Milk was just unbelievably dear to the community, particularly the gay community, of San Francisco? Was that something that you were anxious about when you were putting this movie together, representing him fairly but not making him a kind of saint or making it too reverential?
GVS: Yeah. I was definitely nervous about whether or not Harvey would be portrayed correctly. Part of it was how the script read, the dialogue and what we were planning to do. The other part was how Sean [Penn] worked with it, which is a very step-by-step situation and you can't do anything about it until these steps have started to be taken. And by then you're overcome by the work anyway. And if you choose to do it, it's like taking on something that produces that anxiousness, but you've already decided to do it. So by the time you're there, there's not really any choice, you just work with it. Same thing like the Kurt Cobain thing. There were people who you knew would want to kill you if you got the Kurt Cobain image wrong, or somehow played with it in the wrong way. But Harvey had so many strange sides; he was a very lively character, there wasn't anything that we could be reverential about to the point of being stiff.
BH: It seems you got it right. This is one of the most loved movies that I can remember in recent years – you can't find a bad word against it. At which point did you sense that you had something that was going to really move people? As you were going along, when did you realise that you had a gem on your hands?
GVS: I guess our only way of telling was the test screening in Seattle. The audience gave it a good score, so it was good enough for us.
BH: Do you not get a sense of something like that when you're, perhaps, doing one of the great big crowd scenes ...
GVS: Yeah, there are things that you see and you think that could be really good, but you never know how it's going to work out when it's in the movie. Because the things that you'll think are really great can very easily be laughable. You might think it's great but you never know if, for some reason, it doesn't play or if it's too much. So you're always evaluating in a weird way. If you become too big a cheerleader for your actions, and the actors, and the presentation, and the DP's work and the lighting, then you just become like ... You usually want it to look not that good, and the performances to be not that good, because if every scene is fantastic, there's something wrong. You're always very wary of what's going on, so when you show it to an audience, that's usually when you know.
BH: OK, let's open this out to the audience.
Q1: That was an incredible piece of work. My question is for Gus. How long do you rehearse with the actors and who's present at the rehearsals?
GVS: With every film, it's pretty much a couple of weeks. My first film with rehearsals was Drugstore Cowboy. The producer asked, "Do you want a rehearsal period?" And I had never done a film before, so I said, "Yeah, of course, I have a rehearsal period." And they say, "How long?" And I said, "Um, a couple of weeks." So I started this thing where, for a couple of weeks, we usually just read through it – we did that on Milk – while people are getting to know each other. And there's costumes and hair, so usually the rehearsal is for three hours, it's not very long. Then we start to break it down, do different scenes over the next few days. So, let's say 10 days of rehearsals, you have a chance to get at a combination of characters and scenes: sometimes there are ensemble pieces, sometimes one-on-ones. James and Sean had a couple of one-on-ones one day and then another day, then Josh [Brolin] and Sean had a similar period, and there was an ensemble – so it's sort of dividing it up. But I don't do a Sidney Lumet who, according to what I've read, will map it out; even if he's not at the location, he'll draw the location on the floor. So he's doing more blocking at the same time. We're just doing read-throughs and talking about things that come up, ideas, or fears, or things that people think are important, or additions. But not block it, which you could do. But this is how I've been working, mostly because I arbitrarily chose that on Drugstore Cowboy.
Q2: Lance, this is a question for you. I love the script. I just have a question about Jack. Clearly, the people you spoke to disliked him. He's painted as such a dislikable guy in comparison with Scott. Then he dies, and we see Sean Penn's portrayal of Harvey having to go on working. I just have one problem, and that's the reaction of Harvey in the film to his lover's death. I felt that Jack didn't earn the grief from Harvey. I just wondered how you came to those decisions.
DLB: Yeah, that was right. It was tough for me too. I could have fictionalised it and made him more likable, but that would have been kind of false. Harvey had that pattern. You've having the same reaction that Cleve and Ann [Kronenberg] and everyone else had, which was, "Why the hell is Harvey so heartbroken over this Jack Lira thing?" Because Jack was so awful, and awful to Harvey. But Harvey had this wounded-bird kind of thing. He was mostly attracted to people who were like that and who did treat him like that. It was one of his failings. I think Ann later described him as a co-alcoholic, he sort of enabled people to live like that. Sort of what made him so successful as a humanitarian and as someone to lead a wounded people into recovery, also made his relationships really screwed up. He looked for the same thing in his relationships – completely wounded people – and in a way, he kind of kept them there. He didn't really make Jack get a job, he sort of gave Jack a place to stay and continue drinking. So, I'm with you and it was a struggle. But I didn't want to fictionalise it but instead present it for what it was. And it's sort of a clue into one of Harvey's flaws.
Q3: The Christian right predominate in the film a lot. Have you had a lot of hassle from them since the making of the film? What's the reaction been from that side?
GVS: I haven't noticed anything, yet.
DLB: I don't think they're thrilled about it, but it's pretty sympathetic. There's a guy out there – an ex-gay or pastor or something who's claiming to be the kid in the wheelchair in the film. Which is funny, because that's actually based on a lesbian woman. [audience laughs] So, I think they're trying to figure out how to combat it but I don't think they've figured it out yet. So we'll see what happens.
Q4: I wanted to ask about My Own Private Idaho – how did you persuade Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix to make it? And why did you keep the ending ambiguous?
GVS: Well, it's sort of a long time ago. It's probably the oldest of my films, in terms of conception. I lived off of Hollywood Boulevard, and I would walk there instead of drive. There was a post office, a library and about 15 theatres which were open and running movies; now they're churches or something. But I would sort of live on Hollywood Boulevard. There were arcades, pizza shops that had a video arcade in the back, and there were always these kids in there. I never really got to know any of them but you could see that they had just come to town, or they had a street life. I was sort of writing about them, but then I read City of Night by John Rechy. And that was the same turf, it was Hollywood Boulevard, but 15 or 20 years earlier. But it did it so well that I abandoned what I was doing, and I realised that what I was writing was so not-authentic. It was me sort of projecting and making up stories. So it wasn't until I was editing Mala Noche; Portland had a very similar scene, and there was a street kid that I got to know, Mike Parker, and I started writing the story around him. So there was that story, which was called In a Blue Funk. There was another story that I wrote about Ray [Monge] who starred in Mala Noche, and that was called My Own Private Idaho. Then there was a third story which was an adaptation of different parts of Shakespeare, such as Prince Hal's story, which I called Minions of the Moon or something like that. So during the editing of Drugstore Cowboy, I boiled them all down into this thing called My Own Private Idaho. We were going to make it very cheap. Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix were our favourite actors of the day that would fit into this project, so just in case they were interested, we sent scripts to both of them. I found out that they were doing it mostly from other film-makers who, when I'd run into them, would say, "Congratulations, River's not doing anything after his next film because he's doing your film." I didn't hear directly from him until a little later. So all of a sudden these guys were in the film. The ending of the film: we filmed a scene where his brother picks him up, and it just seemed too pat, to wrapped up. So we left it a little ambiguous, so an unknown person picks him up.
Q5: I'm a big fan of how your films look. I know you said you don't like them to look too perfect, but to me, they're beautifully composed, especially in Gerry and Paranoid Park. What kind of conversations do you have with your cinematographer, especially if you've not worked with them before? How do you put across your vision?
GVS: Well, Gerry was weird because it was widescreen, it was anamorphic, and the DP was Harris Savides. And on Paranoid Park, it was Chris Doyle. And they're quite different. Harris is quite methodical and low-key. And Chris is – have you met Chris Doyle? Has he been here? He can cause a ruckus. He's lots of things rolled into one. But in the end, they're arriving at similar areas. By the time you're actually shooting, you're kind of doing a dance. If I get tired, sometimes I'd just say, "Hey, Harris, you just decide what goes on, because I just don't know." With Chris, he's definitely ready to take control because he wants to be a director. There were scenes that he shot that were all his own. On Paranoid Park, the most brilliant one was the shower; also Gabe [Nevins] walking down the hallway in very slow motion, that was something that he shot. I had shot an ordinary tracking shot, then we did one that was slow motion with the lights turned up, then he wanted to do one without lights at all. I just thought, it's going to be dark and it'll just be bad, but it was a great shot. He was just always very on the edge, Chris. Gerry, too, was a weird one because we were making it up as we went along. So there wasn't anything preconceived. We would discuss Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr and Chantal Ackerman. We screened Jeanne Dielman as a preparation, but when we were in the desert – it was 128F, it was really, really hot, and Harris didn't really know what was up. We had the forming of a concept somewhere in the middle just by me saying, "Just get it together" and laughing around. So we kind of told him, "We can make it up and you can help, so just deal with it." It was hard, because there wasn't really any idea going on except us and what we made up. Chris, on the other hand, is very, very comfortable with anything like that. That's his playground. So both those films are very different, but very interesting.
Q6: Gus, when I was researching your work, your books and music, I was surprised by your modesty and humility. One of the actors in Paranoid Park described you as "very shy".
GVS: In Paranoid Park? Which kid was that?
G6a: I don't know, but I think it was the main kid.
GVS: There were times when all the kids were together, I was very frightened of them. They were real skateboarders and some of them were actually quite good. And also, when we were in Paranoid Park itself, I was definitely afraid of all of them. Those people were intense, they just barely allowed us to shoot there. They were all about skating, and what we were doing was just silly. But yeah, I guess I'm pretty shy.
Q7: I wanted to ask you about Elephant. I know there's some relationship between your Elephant and Alan Clarke's Elephant.
GVS: It's kind of a cool relationship. Originally it was solely about the Columbine high-school killings, and when that happened, there was just so much press that I thought it might be interesting to try and do a television movie. So I started to talk to people in TV stations and I quickly got wise to the fact that these people were actually travelling to Washington to talk to Bill Clinton to try to save their cop programmes. They were trying to pin it on something, so they were not in any place to make a dramatic investigation, like Alan Clarke did with Elephant, about the Columbine massacre. It was like a big emergency, and they were just trying to save what they had. So Diane Keaton, who had been working at HBO, said, "Let's go to Colin Callender," who had worked at the BBC, but was now HBO Films president. So we went and we told him we wanted to do a film about this particular subject. And he said that he couldn't do Columbine but he could do Elephant. I knew that Elephant was an Alan Clarke movie but I had never seen it. At the same time, Harmony Korine had also told me that was his favourite movie and he'd described it to me, so I had this visual picture in my head. And I thought we'll get Harmony to write it, and we'll make this film. Harmony took about a year and a half to not write anything. Then JT Leroy came along, who wrote a script and then turned out to be not a real person. I didn't really like the script, and this was before JT was exposed. So he was still conferring with Diane and working as a producer and convincing them that I didn't want to use a script at all – I'd just made Gerry – and that I still wanted to make the movie if I could have no script, no famous cast members; I had all these requirements. Colin said yes to everything, so I went ahead and made the movie. And because it was always referred to as Elephant, and I did eventually see Alan Clarke's Elephant, we thought before we actually finished the movie whether to actually call it that. We were mostly inspired by Béla Tarr but Béla Tarr can sometimes look like Alan Clarke, so there are similar situations and motions and also answers to stuff in both Alan Clarke's film and our Elephant, though somewhat by chance. Meanwhile, Danny Boyle, of Slumdog Millionaire fame, had co-directed Elephant and Alan Clarke was dead, so I called Danny Boyle to ask if it was OK for us to call our film Elephant. He felt that it was fine, so that's what we named it.
Q8: In the films that you've written, the characters that you portray are very young but already rundown, tired of life in their 20s, weary, confused, trying to find a home. Is this a case of you writing what you know about, or is there some other interest in this kind of characters?
GVS: When you say it like that, it reminds me of when I was 14 – I felt very rundown; I had a home to go to, but I felt like I was 60 or something, older than I feel now. And I don't know if it's something that happens at 14, or whether it was adolescence or whether I was gay, or closeted gay, or whatever it was, I felt that. I don't know if, when I'm writing stories, if it's got anything to do with that or not. I can't really answer that. In high school, I read Silas Marner and I was very attracted to this character – he was very rundown and he'd just stop, and things would happen around him. And that was adopted into River Phoenix's narcolepsy.
Q9: As an American living in London, it's very interesting to see the way our civil rights as gay people are very different here from the States, and the social attitudes are very different. Watching this, it was like Groundhog Dog. Twenty years ago, we were watching the same story in California, and now we've just lost. So this was incredibly powerful to see the victory and it was interesting to hear how this, as James said, was erased from the history books. What do you think of the effect of this film on history and the fact that this is such a timely movie right now? This has been so large in the States and will make people think twice about how they voted on Proposition 8.
DLB: I hope you're right about how people voted, but it's also very common that people don't know who Harvey Milk is. We've really lost that history, and that's unfortunate because gay and lesbian kids don't grow up with the sense that they have forefathers and foremothers, and they really do. Not just Harvey Milk. The problem, as I see it, and I saw it unfolding as I was writing the script and when we were shooting, is that not just the people who might vote against gay rights need to see this movie, but that the gay community really, really needed to see this movie. I wish it had come out a year earlier, in a way, so that the gay community could look to a time when it was far more homophobic but we were winning these fights. And it was because Harvey Milk had come up with this strategy of coming out, of being upfront, outreach, education and shaking the hand of the guy or woman who might vote against you on election day, and that was really lost. If you're in California, and even in the civil rights fight for the past decade, you do not see a single gay or lesbian person in the ads. In the pro-gay ads, you don't hear the word "gay" or "lesbian" in the ads. You don't even see the word "marriage" in the yard signs or the literature. So it's become very closeted, very shy and very apologetic. And I think it's time for the gay and lesbian community to look back at their history, to look back at this time and see that the only way we're ever going to win our rights is by coming out again, by being vocal again and demanding full and equal rights, not just state by state but federally. I believe that's the only way that's ever going to happen. And to see that this was possible 30 years ago exactly, and it should be possible again today. It's like that old saying, "If you don't know your history, you're doomed to repeat it." And that is what's happening. So hopefully this is one piece of that history so we can start moving forward again in the United States.
BH: I think you should probably run for office. I'm so pleased that you've been able to join us, so please join me in thanking Gus van Sant, James Franco and Dustin Lance Black.