Celebrity Biographies
Gus Van Sant
Maverick director with a heterogeneous filmography, Gus Van Sant dominates independent avant-garde cinema (“Elephant”), but also clearly commercial-inspired classical cinema (“Good Will Hunting”). He always makes people talk and on occasions he has shot quite controversial tapes. He declares himself homosexual, but his films do not focus on this topic. He has never been a combative director, nor does he try to sell his films as vindicative of the gay cause, not even when dealing with the political activism of a homosexual in “My name is Harvey Milk.” Few, in fact, are Van Sant’s films on this subject, although his protagonists are always misfits, seeking to make a name for themselves in the world. He is a great specialist in young people and their communication problems.
Gus Greene Van Sant Junior was born on July 24, 1952 in Louisville (Kentucky), although he spent his entire childhood from one place to another, due to his father’s profession, a traveling salesman. From a very young age, Van Sant was interested in painting and also in cinema, since he was shooting autobiographical shorts in Super-8 when he was still going to school. Apparently, he was hesitating between being a filmmaker or a painter, and initially opted for canvases, when he decided to enroll in the Rhode Island School of Design in 1970, where he had as a classmate the Scottish musician David Byrne , founder of Talking Heads. However, in the end he changed his mind, and decided that his thing was the big screen, after receiving an introductory course given by avant-garde directors, such as Jonas Mekas andAndy Warhol .
After spending an apprenticeship in Europe, Van Sant moved to Los Angeles in 1976, determined to make it big in movies. He started as a production assistant with Ken Shapiro, but the experience was not positive, because Van Sant constantly contributed ideas that according to his later statements always fell on deaf ears. Then he decided to spend some time working in an advertising agency, and with the money he managed to save he filmed Mala Noche , his first feature, with an original title in Spanish and filmed in black and white. The homosexual Van Sant addressed the gay theme, as it narrated the adventures of an American who tries to seduce a young Mexican underage. Van Sant then went on to describe fringe people at the Drugstore Cowboy, a harsh portrayal of drug hell, which recreates the personal dramas of four drug addicts who rob pharmacies. The film was the consecration of Van Sant at the international level, and an accolade for Matt Dillon , who demonstrated his versatility at a time when he had been somewhat typecast as a teen idol.
My Private Idaho , a valuable drama about friendship and the effects of lack of family support, had even more impact . “The family marks our look at the world, that’s why I think all my films talk about it,” Van Sant commented at the time. The film shows the harsh reality of two hustlers who sell their bodies on the streets of Portland. The director took advantage of the talent of his two protagonists, the ill-fated River Phoenix – A homosexual suffering from narcolepsy in search of his mother – and a very young Keanu Reeves–a guy who dedicates himself to prostitution as an expression of his rebellion against his father, mayor of the city–. Reeves’ character was loosely based on the protagonist of Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV’. River Phoenix won the Volpi Cup for best actor in Venice, a few years before he overdosed on Sunset Boulevard, as if he were one of those Van Sant fringe characters. He was so affected by his death that he turned his anger on him in the novel ‘Pink’.
Uma Thurman was a woman born with huge thumbs in They Get Depressed Too , a muddled drama about a quirky group of cowgirl women, every bit as fringe as Van Sant’s regular characters. But this adaptation of a Tom Robbins novel falls far short of the level reached by other films by the filmmaker, it was panned by critics and failed at the box office. The director partially recovered his form with All for a Dream , a critique of the morality of winning at any price, in which Nicole Kidman plays an ambitious young woman willing to do anything to become a television reporter. She was accompanied by Matt Dillon, who repeated with Van Sant.
The indomitable Will Hunting was the greatest success of Gus Van Sant, who for the first time triumphed not only on alternative circuits. The director decided to support the young leads, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck , then completely unknown, who brought him a script they had written themselves because they were not offered roles, and for which they were rewarded with an Oscar for best original screenplay. Van Sant managed to combine commerciality with his usual thematic obsessions, as he portrays another conflicting and marginalized character, Will Hunting, who despite his difficult character turns out to be gifted. He tries to change his perspective on life as a widowed psychiatrist, played by Robin Williams ., which also won the Oscar for best secondary.
Van Sant’s film most reviled by moviegoers is Psycho (Psycho) . When commissioned to shoot the remake of the Hitchcock classic, Van Sant made a curious decision. Since the original is an unbeatable masterpiece, he decided that the best option was to copy it shot by shot. It brought color, new actors ( Anne Heche and Vince Vaugh as protagonists) and increased the money that the protagonist steals, due to inflation. But the critics were relentless when it came to insulting a tape, which logically added nothing to the history of cinema.
Undoubtedly, the director’s next drama is much more interesting: Finding Forrester . It is a film very much in the vein of Good Will Hunting , centered on another young man of exceptional intelligence, who in this case is a black boy with a talent for writing. Here, too, his life is completely changed by his relationship with an adult character, a reclusive literary genius, who lives completely isolated, inspired by the figure of JD Salinger , the author of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’. This character was played by an unbeatable Sean Connery .
In 2003, Van Sant won the Palme d’Or, the award for best director, and the National Education System award with Elephant, his return to independent cinema with a clear avant-garde vocation, with young non-professional actors as protagonists. It shows with unusual realism the massacre at the Columbine Institute, caused by two young men armed with assault rifles. The camera follows the murderers and several high school students in the moments before the tragedy. “I took the title from a 1989 film about violence in Northern Ireland. I thought he was referring to the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant,” says Van Sant. “Until I read in some notes by its director, Alan Clarke, that the title responds to a popular saying and refers to how violence is as easy to ignore as having an elephant in the room.” Equally risky as Elephant is Last Days, which narrates the tragedy of a successful singer, inspired by the late Kurt Cobain.
After a brief fragment that narrates a homosexual encounter, in the collective film Paris, je t’aime , Van Sant returned to the theme of adolescent solitary confinement in Paranoid Park, about a teenage skateboarder who accidentally kills a railway security guard. But he doesn’t even dare to tell anyone. “Adolescence is a formative stage, fundamental in our development. It is then when we affirm ourselves as people, we learn to love, to recognize ourselves. It is a moment in my life that I remember fondly. And there is a special beauty in the young. In them, fear, hopelessness, etc. embodies ”, Van Sant said when asked about this theme, which recurs in his filmography. Next, he decided to film the true story of America’s first openly gay politician. In My name is Harvey Milk it has a great cast headed by Sean Penn, who embodies the leading politician, a key figure in homosexual claims in the United States.