Exclusive: Gus Van Sant Sheds Light on MilkEdward Douglas
November 21, 2008
Gus Van Sant is certainly one of the more fascinating filmmakers of the last few decades, especially having directed the popular Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting. He made a couple more high-profile films and then ultimately turned his back on Hollywood to focus more on experimental indie fare like 2003's Elephant, a haunting reenactment of the Columbine High School shootings.
After more than ten years, Van Sant's name is once again being bandied about amongst awards prognosticators for his new movie Milk, a stirring biopic starring Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, a 40-year-old gay man who moves to San Francisco and starts a grassroots movement among the gay residents of Castro Street. Harvey, a strong supporter of equal rights regardless of sexuality, is soon running for political office, trying to become the supervisor for District 5, and eventually becoming the first openly gay man to be voted into a public office.
Obviously, Sean Penn's performance, one that's likely to get him another Oscar nomination, is a big selling point for the movie, but Van Sant's ability to create a riveting film out of Dustin Lance Black's script will certainly get him renewed attention as a director. The ensemble cast includes James Franco and Diego Luna as two of Harvey's lovers during the eight years of his political career covered in the movie, while Josh Brolin plays Harvey's main political rival Dan White, whose professional jealousy contributed to Milk's untimely death in 1978.
ComingSoon.net got on the phone with Van Sant while he was doing the L.A. junket for the movie a few weeks back. As we learned, Van Sant is not exactly the most talkative filmmaker we've spoken to, generally getting less responsive as the interview progressed, so who knows what was going on at the other end of the phone line?
ComingSoon.net: Recently, you seem to have been going more towards the indie and experimental route. Was it just the material that got you back doing more a studio movie?
Gus Van Sant: Well, there wasn't anything in particular. I always wanted to make a film about Harvey, and this script just sort of appeared, and the script itself presented somewhat of a style, just by the way it was written, that didn't suggest... a lot of the films like "Gerry," "Elephant," "Last Days" and "Paranoid Park" were written in a certain way to be filmed in the way they were filmed. This was a pretty traditional 100-page script, like 120 scenes, and just by the virtue of the number of scenes, you start to have a pacing that's more convention.
CS: You did have your actors doing quite a lot of improv on some of your other films so was there room to do any of that here?
Van Sant: Yeah, we could have improv-ed and we did, a teeny bit, but I think the period and the political nature of the dialogue was confining in a way that the type of improv that would be occurring was hard to keep it within the period, unless you had a pretty good knowledge of the period politics. We did have daily papers that pertained to the day, but in the end, we were just lucky to get the stuff filmed that we needed to present the screenplay. We didn't really go off into areas like that so much on this film.
CS: I assume Dustin did a lot of the legwork and research on the script beforehand, so did you do any research on Harvey Milk yourself or go back to the '84 documentary? What was your process when you came on board?
Van Sant: Well, I'd been involved in a project in 1993 that was Oliver Stone directing and he decided not to direct it. That's really where I heard about the project, through Rob Epstein, who had made "The Times of Harvey Milk." At that time, then yeah, there was a lot of study and I lived with Cleve Jones, and I met some of the people that were the real characters and lived close enough to the Castro to sort of soak up its energy. It was '93, so it was a lot different than it is now. It's actually changed in those ten years quite a bit, the Castro itself, in the last fifteen years. There are condos, there's families, a lot of straight people. It's not the same. Even in '93, it had a little bit more of a connection to '78. I mean, it was devastated by the AIDS epidemic, but the research I did was all the way through the last ten or so years.
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